THE embattled prime minister of Israel has sworn to strip the citizenship of two Jewish filmmakers whose celebrated documentary has exposed the targeted genocide of Palestinian civilians carried out with impunity by the IDF. Journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor have won standing ovations in the West for their film NAZA. The rule, Benjamin Netanyahu said, would apply to anyone who insults Israel’s military.
Meanwhile, the fascism-hugging president of the US is busy doing what he can to try to strip those of citizenship and voting rights who are least likely to vote for his party. If he doesn’t win the midterms, he could be impeached. India’s ruling party, struggling to mask its old inspiration from the Nazis, has devised its own methods of stripping the citizenship rights of millions. According to a slew of reports, the BJP government is leaning on its chosen three-member election commission to deregister millions with a view to contriving state victories for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party. Bertolt Brecht’s satirical call to elect another people since the people had lost the confidence of the government has become ominously and palpably real.
Coordinated moves by the three countries are linked by a quirk of fate in a post-Cold War bond. The rogue measures are not going unchallenged. A groundswell of protests primarily by students and unemployed youth is spreading across India against what reports have identified as the plundering of democracy in the country.
New York’s Zohran Mamdani, Israel’s filmmakers and India’s Cockroach Janta Party are leading the pushback. The Indian protesters are directly accusing Modi’s handpicked three-member election commission of effectively changing poll verdicts, most recently in Bihar and West Bengal, by manipulating electoral rolls and surrendering the election commission’s neutral platform to the ruling party. The subversion is part of a global fraying of the lipstick on the pig, the ideological sleight of hand that was used to paint bourgeois democracies as enticing options against communist hardships. The moment the Soviet Union collapsed, however, the West’s definition of democracy itself took on a new life. It would henceforth be ‘free-market democracy’. Now that veneer, too, has blown away to herald raw plunder, assassinations, kidnappings and what leftist analysts have called ‘AI feudalism’.
As the lipstick fades, big-power global rivalries deepen with unabashed candour. The West sought to keep up the pretence of supporting democracy, even though the fangs were out against elected and independent-minded leaders — for instance, in Iran in 1953 or Chile in 1973. Drooling at the promise of the American century, a clutch of former allies of the USSR were reduced to rubble. Yevgeny Primakov was the head of the KGB’s foreign intelligence unit when the USSR collapsed. He became Russia’s foreign minister and subsequently rose to become prime minister. Primakov moved to staunch the Russian haemorrhage caused by the chasm between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. The Russia-India-China (RIC) grouping was his brainchild, but he was already late since the US-Israel-India group was installed more swiftly. For Indian ideologues, who were regarded as Western catspaws during the Cold War, the alignment with Israel under the false pretence of democratic camaraderie was a windfall. The BJP gained most from the turn of events, though the Congress had its own pro-West ideologues licking their chops.
As the lipstick fades, big-power global rivalries deepen with unabashed candour.
As capitalism struggled to breathe sans the Red Terror as its ruse, the fangs could barely be hidden. During the Cold War (roughly 1945-1991), capitalist democracies — particularly in Western Europe and North America — faced a powerful ideological rival in global communism. To prove that capitalism was the superior system for the working class, many Western nations built robust welfare states. They invested heavily in public healthcare and education, strong labour unions and worker protections, high progressive taxation to fund social safety nets, and affordable housing and infrastructure. Most analysts have concluded that the systemic threat of communism acted as a ‘regulatory check’ on raw capitalism, forcing it to present a more compassionate, egalitarian face to prevent domestic socialist revolutions. Once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, critics and economists argue, this pressure disappeared. With no competing global model, a more aggressive, unregulated version of capitalism led by neoliberalism gained dominant global traction.
Whether it involves winning elections by waging brutal wars or carrying out genocide, or stripping voters of their rights, the trigger is capitalism’s inability to leave its fate to the voting masses. While democracy promises power to the many, its mechanisms can be co-opted by the few to maintain control. Some regimes maintain the outward appearance of democracy — such as holding regular elections — while systematically eroding democratic institutions from within. This dynamic is often referred to as a ‘hybrid regime’ or ‘competitive authoritarianism’.
Ruling elites use legal frameworks, regulatory bodies, and gerrymandering to tilt the playing field in their favour, making it incredibly difficult for opposition forces to compete fairly. It’s evident in India, as in the US or Israel — the post-Cold War ‘democratic allies’ — that campaign financing, lobbying, and the influence of wealthy donors mean that policy decisions really reflect the interests of economic elites rather than those of the average voter. All three countries have used religion to manufacture consent. This is beginning to create a disconnect in which citizens feel their vote carries no real weight in policy outcomes.
The Jantar Mantar protests in Delhi are a clear aspect of this churning. The protesters are well aware that elites consolidate control over media landscapes or leverage algorithms and disinformation to shape public perception. By controlling the narrative, they can manufacture consent or distract the public from systemic issues. Donald Trump’s threat from the UN platform to murder 91 million Iranians, and the Indian election commission’s removal of 130m names from electoral rolls in the last nine months, are shared responses to their fraying economies’ growing need to dump democratic pretence all over again.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, September 29th, 2026
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