No undo button

Recently: What do Middle Eastern states want with European football clubs? Sarath K. Ganji on autocratic governments’ ambitious move into the global game.

Today: India’s election commission strikes more people off the voter lists than live in Japan, with students marching in Delhi and Bengaluru. … &c.

Feature: Is the West cracking up? Georgios Varouxakis on why a feud over who speaks for democratic civilization shows its staying power. (Open-access, in partnership with the Marlborough House Foundation—see our editor’s note here.)

+ New music from Justin Strauss …

Developments

The staff gate

On Wednesday in New Delhi, police stopped opposition MPs marching to Jantar Mantar, the capital’s designated protest site, and put Rahul Gandhi, the opposition leader in parliament’s lower house, in a police vehicle. It was his second detention in two days. On Tuesday, he and his sister, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, had walked through an open staff gate at All India Radio’s headquarters, near the Election Commission, and sat under a banyan tree for more than six hours. “I am comfortable here,” Gandhi says. The MPs want the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, to resign. His commission has struck more than 130 million names off India’s voter rolls since last year—more people than live in Japan.

Eligible after all

On Thursday, thousands marched in Bengaluru, in the south, behind the Cockroach movement, a youth campaign that began online in May. The commission says it’s clearing out duplicate and ineligible entries; the opposition says the cuts fall hardest on its voters. Two of the commission’s three members formally objected at least 14 times to how it ran the revision, the Indian Express reported last month. Who are the 130 million? In February, officials in the coastal state of Goa ruled 97 deleted voters eligible, and found the commission’s central database had no way to put them back. “The call … was theirs,” says Goa’s chief electoral officer, Sanjay Goel. As of last month, the 97 were still off the roll.

‘Emptied of democratic content’

Here in The Signal, our contributing editor Omair Ahmad has looked at how Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP, holds on to power. The party, he says, has “installed loyalists across the top of the state bureaucracy, whether in law enforcement, election administration, or the courts.” Parliament and the courts are still there, Ahmad says, but they no longer hold the government to account: “India has a democratic form, emptied of democratic content.” And “the core of democracy is a people’s ability to vote out a badly performing government. But in India, the BJP has made that almost impossible.” … See “Ruler of all India.”

Struck off

In 1951, as India readied the rolls for its first general election, 176 million adults were eligible to vote, and about 85 percent of them couldn’t read. Across the north, many women wouldn’t give officials their own names, and asked to go on the rolls as “A’s mother or B’s wife.” Sukumar Sen, India’s first chief election commissioner, ordered their names written in, calling the custom a “curious senseless relic of the past.” Some 2.8 million women “had finally to be struck off the list.” Sen thought the outcry a “good thing,” since by the next election the women could come back under their own names.

Meanwhile

A Russian glide bomb hits two minibuses in Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine, killing at least 33. … The Pentagon reportedly tells U.S. Central Command to get ready to resume major combat against Iran. … Eritrean troops cross into Ethiopia’s Tigray region and come under Ethiopian drone fire, a conflict monitor says. … María del Carmen Abascal, 87, whose eviction set off Spain’s housing protests, dies hours before she was due to sign a new lease on her flat of 70-plus years. … The U.S. reportedly opens direct talks with Burma’s military-backed government, after years of shunning it, over scam centers and rare earths. … & In central Turkey, archaeologists bring a Hittite royal archive to 184 tablets, among them word of an infant princess’s death 3,400 years ago.

Thoughts? concierge@thesgnl.com.

Feature

‘Fighting shadows’

Is the West cracking up? Georgios Varouxakis on why a feud over who speaks for democratic civilization shows its staying power.

As Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it at a recent press conference, Russia isn’t so much in conflict with Ukraine as at war with the West—the “masters” of Kyiv. Ukraine’s government, he told the BBC, is little more than “a Nazi regime backed by the West to wage war on the Russian Federation.” President Vladimir Putin has long cast Russia as standing against what he calls the “collective West.”

In Beijing, meanwhile, Party officials have been repeating the phrase “the East is rising and the West is declining” ever since Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping used it at a plenary session of the Central Committee back in 2020. Putin and Xi both run autocracies, and the West they describe is the birthplace of democracy and still its heart.

The West, though, has no shortage of would-be champions. The U.S. National Security Strategy claims that Europe faces the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” of its “Western identity.” This September, the U.S. State Department began moving money out of human rights promotion and into projects that back “Western civilizational norms.” The threat to the West, in other words, is coming from inside the West itself, from European governments lacking in “civilizational self-confidence.”

So how fractured is it, really?

… courtesy of the Marlborough House Foundation.

Music

‘Restart (Joe Goddard Remix)’

Justin Strauss has been DJing in New York since 1980, when he started at the Mudd Club …