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Prologue

Everyone’s experience with democracy is different.

I grew up in the Indian-controlled part of the disputed region of Kashmir. India’s vaunted democracy seemed to stop short of the mountains circling my hometown as the government eroded the region’s autonomous status, empowered mimic men, and ruthlessly crushed dissent. The infamously rigged 1987 elections and a legacy of arresting and torturing activists from the opposition led to rebellion in the winter of 1989–90. A brutal cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency, which has claimed more than 70,000 lives since, turned Kashmir into the most militarized zone in the world. Indian soldiers were given immunity from prosecution even if they killed unarmed, innocent Kashmiri civilians. In a recent flareup in July 2016, Indian troops fired pellet guns at the eyes of Kashmiri protesters and blinded or partially blinded around 700 teenagers and young men. Not a single man who fired those guns will be prosecuted in a court of law.

The cliché about India is that it is “the world’s largest democracy.” Numerical strength seems to magically imbue the country with liberal traditions and equality for its populace. By frequently repeating the description, secular and religious nationalists overlook gross inequalities between rich and poor, mistreatment of ethnic and religious minorities, segregation in cities, everyday violence against lower castes, brutal campaigns of pacification in Kashmir, and rebellions in northeastern states near the China, Bangladesh, and Myanmar borders.

The periphery might be ignored but it has a way of intruding upon the center. A nation’s illiberal practices on its borders do not remain isolated there. Using militant nationalism to beat up on peripheral populations often paves way for the rise of authoritarian figures in the center. The obliteration of Grozny contributed to the reign of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. Putin’s return to the Kremlin as president in May 2012 and his subsequent decimation of oppositional forces is one of the more striking markers of the rise of illiberal regimes led by strongmen in the post-Cold War world.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West expected an international order of liberal democracy and free markets to be the dominant paradigm for the world, but this did not materialize. There might be fewer traditional dictatorships across the globe in the twenty-first century, but the world is increasingly dominated by governments that are both democratic and authoritarian on the same afternoon. This is the age of hybrid regimes.

The political scientist Javier Corrales, while describing Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, has defined a hybrid regime as “one in which the executive branch concentrates powers to the detriment of nonstate and opposition actors.” At the heart of this crisis is the rise of “illiberal democracy,” in Fareed Zakaria’s famous phrase. “Across the globe, democratically elected regimes, often ones that have been reelected or reaffirmed through referenda, are routinely ignoring constitutional limits on their power and denying their citizens of basic rights,” Zakaria wrote in a classic 1997 essay in Foreign Affairs.

The importance of civil liberties and protections from the tyranny of the majority are the two great promises of liberal democracy. Those two values are in recession in the current political moment. And an increasing number of illiberal democracies are unabashedly being led by undemocratic, aggressive strongmen. Popular electoral support for leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, India’s Narendra Modi, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Hungary’s Victor Orbán, Chad’s Idriss Déby, Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko, Cambodia’s Hun Sen, and Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong, just to name a few, has created a new class of elected autocrats who have pushed back liberal democratic practices. These strongmen have won electoral mandates from voters motivated by religious and ethnic nationalism, economic anxieties, and disillusionment with earlier weak, inefficient, or corrupt elites.

The modern strongmen share a certain set of qualities. They embrace militant nationalism, exude an aura of personal menace and strength, persecute political opponents, and seek to control media coverage. They have little patience for criticism and despise civil society. They have a certain love for efficiency and disregard for cumbersome democratic processes.

Strongmen are revisionists who share a preference for rewriting school textbooks, retelling tales of ancient glories, and reviving old wounds. They are united by their promises to make their countries great again. And they master the art of converting the fears and insecurities of citizens into electoral support. They position themselves as saviors on white horses, big-chested men who alone can rescue their nations from peril. “Illiberal democracy is a growth industry,” Zakaria wrote in 1997. His prophetic words have an even greater ring of truth at the moment.

In June 2016, the Philippines elected a brash populist named Rodrigo Duterte as its new president. Duterte, who is known as “Duterte Harry”—a pun on “Dirty Harry”—has a history of association with vigilantes and brags about using brute force to control crime and drugs. Once a great heroine of the struggle for democracy, Nobel Laureate Aung San Su Kyi, whose party won the national elections in Myanmar, has turned into a sad apologist for majoritarian politics and genocidal violence against the Rohingya minority. Apart from its failure to prevent the murders of secular bloggers, the government in nearby Bangladesh has increasingly taken an authoritarian path and turned onto its political opponents. Paul Kagame’s post-genocide regime in Rwanda, which has been hailed for order and progress by the West, has ruthlessly destroyed freedom of expression and silenced critical voices. As the great philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin said, “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”

The illiberal tide and the rise of the strongmen exact a terrible human toll. At the end of these academic categories lie individuals and families whose lives are shaped, twisted, and often destroyed. I knew that well from my experience of reporting in India over the years. Through reading and through conversations with friends over time I found strong echoes of the Indian story in Turkey. These are two large democracies, which grew out of the collapse of empires, and which were led by charismatic founding fathers inclined toward varying degrees of European modernity. They are also multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies where religion and secularism are among the dominant faultlines. Both countries have been waging war against ethnic groups on their borders which sought independence or autonomy. India and Turkey are being ruled by strongmen who are business-friendly politicians, men from humble origins, who came of age in traditions of controversial religious politics. Narendra Damodardas Modi and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also share a love of public speaking, refer to themselves in the third person, and have used hologram technology to speak to multiple audiences across their countries.

I spent a year and a half traveling across India and Turkey. This book isn’t merely the story of these powerful politicians but also the story of the men and women they victimized, who showed courage and endured great suffering in their love for true democratic traditions.