One institution that is standing firm is India's Supreme Court, although it too has faced challenges.
When
Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Urjit
Patel abruptly resigned on Monday, it stunned many people in
government and business circles.
Patel's
decision, which came after months of bad blood between India's
central bank and the government, is the latest sign that the ruling
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra
Modi, is increasingly demanding that it get its way in the
country's premier institutions.
From
the RBI, the government demanded a reduction in lending curbs and a
share of its surplus reserves.
Patel
was appointed by Modi, but he resisted the demand. With him gone, and
his replacement being a loyal ex-government bureaucrat, Modi is now
expected to get most of what he wanted.
Other
institutions know what it's like. Those who have been in the Hindu
nationalist government's crosshairs include India's equivalent of
America's FBI, its statistics authority, the civil service, the state
media, and even Modi's own cabinet.
Sources
in all of those areas have told Reuters they face political
interference and a drive for centralised decision-making from a
government under pressure to deliver results before a general
election due by May next year. The BJP's defeats in some key state
elections this week will pile on additional pressure.
The
prime minister's office did not respond to a Reuters request for
comment on the subject. The government's main spokesman declined to
comment.
Modi
has not held a news conference during his time as prime minister and
interviews are few and far between. He prefers to use Twitter to
communicate and has a monthly radio broadcast to the nation.
Some
political analysts and government officials label him as
authoritarian. They say such autocracy is a dangerous game in India
given the complex ethnic, religious and caste divisions among its 1.3
billion people.
"You
can't govern like you do in China," said Mohan Guruswamy,
founder of the Centre for Policy Alternatives think-tank and a former
finance ministry official.
"You
have to constantly build consensus. Even the British consulted
people, and the Mughals co-opted local kings into their army,"
he said, referring to rulers in India before independence.
Others
see the RBI
merely as the latest battleground in a broader culture war between
right-wing Hindu nationalists allied with the BJP, and a liberal
intelligentsia that still dominates India's legal system, academia
and English language media.
"The
right feels like these institutions are rigged by the left,"
said Harsh Pant, a political scientist at the New Delhi-based
Observer Research Foundation.
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