Meloni and Modi Smile for the Cameras and Prosecute Critics
Don't fall for the fake populism of #Melodi "Team Melodi"
After #Brangelina and #Bennifer, it’s #Melodi, the platonic power couple of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Meloni used the hashtag in a video she posted on X during the G7 summit she recently hosted. #Melodi unites two media-savvy politicians who have made anti-Muslim hatred, normalizing extremism, and suing critics key to their autocratic agendas.
This is a two-part essay. Here I focus on the two leaders’ weaponizations of the law to harass critics. This weekend I will address their anti-Muslim campaigns, placing them in context of similar anti-Muslim crusades by other authoritarians.
“Team #Melodi,” as Meloni calls it, can seem an unlikely pairing, and there are some big differences between the duo’s political situations, goals, and actions. Meloni has only been in office since late 2022, versus Modi’s decade-long tenure, and her party is still gaining strength in Italy, whereas support for Modi’s BJP party declined in the recent national elections.
Meloni’s support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression also separates her from Modi, who is a Friend of Putin and has consciously avoided a firm commitment to one side or the other. India attended the recent Ukraine peace summit in Geneva, but did not sign the final communiqué.
Yet Meloni is playing a double game. Her pro-democratic stance on most foreign policy issues keeps Italy in good standing with its funders at the European Union, but having a hardline neo-fascist as Prime Minister has given new life to powerful far-right energies in a country that had two decades of Fascism.
Meloni has been tellingly silent regarding public mass demonstrations in which Italians wearing black shirts salute dictator Benito Mussolini, who died in 1945. She is close with Viktor Orban, and her harsh positions on immigration and LGBTQ+ issues are similar to those of foreign autocracies (and to the autocratic GOP).
#Melodi: Lawsuits to Silence Critics
Weaponizing the law to harass critics is an autocratic standard. It’s unsurprising that both members of “Team #Melodi” are currently suing prominent intellectuals for remarks made before they were heads of state. The authoritarian leader’s vindictive personality means that criticisms are never forgotten and revenge is exacted once they have power.
Meloni and others in her government use defamation suits to intimidate and silence public intellectuals. A European Parliament study found that during Meloni’s first year in office, Italy had the most so-called SLAPP cases (lawsuits designed to chill public criticism and reduce negative publicity) of any European country.
Meloni is suing the eminent 81-year-old classicist Luciano Canfora for calling her a “neo-Nazi at heart” six months before she took office. For added intimidation, her lawyer in this venture is the sitting minister of justice, Carlo Nordio. She and fellow far-right leader, League Party head Matteo Salvini, have also pursued the writer Roberto Saviano. He was found guilty of libel and fined €1,000 for calling Meloni and Salvini “bastards” on television in 2020 during a discussion of the far-right politicians’ opposition to humanitarian rescues of migrants in the Mediterranean.
In the meantime, Meloni’s Minister of Agriculture, Francesco Lollobrigida (who is also Meloni’s brother-in-law) sued philosophy professor Donatella Di Cesare of the University of Rome over comments she made comparing his talk of “ethnic replacement” (of White Christians with immigrants) to the way Nazi officials talked. A judge dismissed the suit in May, but it set an example for others –or so the Meloni clan hopes.
This suit, and its outcome, recall Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against CNN for supposedly comparing him to Adolf Hitler by using the term “Big Lie.” My Jan. 25, 2021 CNN op-ed was quoted in the lawsuit, along with statements by CNN journalists Jake Tapper and Chris Cillizza. Here, too, a (Trump-appointed) judge threw out the suit. If Trump returns to the White House, expect a revival and expansion of such activity.
Modi’s record of repression shows us where such attempts to silence critics could lead over time. His governments have used the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) to detain human rights, land rights, and ethnic minority rights activists for years without trial. Between 2016 and 2020, 24,134 individuals have been charged under various sections of UAPA, with only 386 reportedly acquitted. And Modi’s escalating attacks on freedom of the press have led to India’s current ranking of 159 out of 180 on the World Press Freedom scale.
Modi also goes after critics abroad. An in-depth report by Zach Beauchamp found that those living in exile in America who track the Indian government’s human rights abuses can see family members still in India interrogated or employees in India arrested. The goal is to get people to drop their research and activities and self-censor.
These authoritarian practices provide the context for Modi’s prosecution of the famous writer Arundhati Roy for asserting Kashmir’s independence from India in a speech she gave in 2010, four years before Modi came to power.
As Siddarth Varadarajan observes in The India Cable, Roy has been a Modi target since she accused the then-Chief Minister of Gujarat of complicity in the violent response to the 2002 Gujarat riots (Modi was cleared of the charge in a 2012 Supreme Court-ordered investigation). Now she, too, will be prosecuted under UAPA.
But why think of such unpleasant things when #Melodi smiles on the world stage? Whether it’s Meloni showing she’s human by allowing the cameras to capture her phone case printed with messages about how to deal with anxiety, or Modi showing he cares by demonstrating yoga positions in animated videos released on social media (to prepare for International Yoga Day on June 21) these leaders sell themselves as being “just like us.”
Don’t fall for it. The real agenda of #Melodi is to whitewash extremism so that their actions against those who criticize them or don’t fit into their racist ideas of the nation will be accepted as legitimate. That means we must continue to expose the abuses and tactics at work behind the smiles.
You can bet on it, that if tRump comes to power again, he will surely punish those whom he feels have done him wrong. This is what sadistic sociopaths do. It's also what fascists do. These people have zero remorse for killing people; in fact, they enjoy it.
Grotesque faux behavior—cos playing as if they value democracy. Let’s expose them….