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HomeWorld'Homophobic, misogynist and a bigot' — meet Jair Bolsonaro, India’s Republic Day...

‘Homophobic, misogynist and a bigot’ — meet Jair Bolsonaro, India’s Republic Day chief guest

The Modi government has faced criticism for inviting Brazilian President Bolsonaro who has been called a 'far-Right' bigot for his offensive comments.

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New Delhi: When Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro accepted India’s invitation earlier this week to be a chief guest at the upcoming 71st Republic Day, the Narendra Modi government was faced with some acerbic criticism.

While some argued that New Delhi was inviting a “far-Right bigot” for the celebrations, others said the government was repeating a its “mistake” of calling a group of largely Right-wing European parliamentarians to visit Jammu and Kashmir recently.

Critics of the central government’s decision also have a robust set of evidence to back their claims.

In 1999, Bolsonaro had called for the assassination of former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Again, in 2003, he had told a fellow female legislator that he won’t rape her because she “doesn’t deserve it”.

His offensive comments have been steadfast. In 2011, Bolsonaro said he would rather have his son die in an accident than come out as a homosexual. And as recently as 2017, the president had remarked that “a policeman who doesn’t kill isn’t a policeman”.

Such statements have also created an impression that Bolsonaro is part of the global nationalist-populist wave. But to look at him from such as lens is only a reductive exercise.

“The Bolsonaros (Jair and his sons) are above all a Brazilian phenomenon, a product of not only the country’s severe economic, institutional and criminal crises since 2014, but also of its successes in the decade prior,” wrote Brian Winter, editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly.


Also read: Amazon forest is reaching its tipping point, world needs to scale solutions


A magazine article and Bolsonaro’s imprisonment

Bolsonaro joined the military in 1973 and slowly rose up the ranks. One of his commanding officers had earlier described him as having “excessive financial ambition…lacking logic, rationality and balance”.

But the perception that Bolsonaro thinks like a common man on the street did later pay him a lot of political dividends.

Almost a decade after joining the military, he rose to fame in 1986 after writing an article in the country’s prestigious magazine Veja. In the piece, he berated about low military salaries. Bolsonaro was subsequently imprisoned for 15 days but this jail term helped kick-start his political career.

By 1989, he was elected to the city council of Rio and became a congressman (legislator) by 1991. In the next two-decades-and-a-half, Bolsonaro spent his time in political wilderness. His rhetoric, often laced with bigotry and homophobia, earned him the reputation of a radical conservative. But he mattered little in Brazil’s mainstream politics.

In as recently as 2017, when he contested the elections for the post of speaker in Brazil’s lower house, Bolsonaro managed to get only four votes.

The country was, until that time, ruled by Left-wing parties and space for Right-wing ideologues were rather limited. But things quickly changed and he was elected Brazil’s president in January 2019.


Also read: Modi govt’s Kashmir crackdown is damaging India’s image abroad


Brazil after the Petrobras scandal

Like many nations, Brazil too felt the impact of the 2008 global financial crisis and its economy had dramatically slowed down. A few years later, in 2014, the nation was hit by its largest corruption scandal ever, involving the petroleum giant Petrobras.

The scandal shook the very foundations of Brazilian politics when dozens of leaders and high-level businesspersons were indicted. Widespread investigation revealed that Petrobras officials had received millions of dollars in kickbacks from construction companies in exchange for contracts at inflated prices. In turn, some of these funds were siphoned off to politicians who used them to buy votes.

By 2016, most of Brazil’s leading politicians, including its former president Dilma Rousseff, were found guilty of corruption and forced out of politics. When Michael Temer succeeded Rousseff, his government too was riddled with allegations of corruption and quickly lost all legitimacy.

At the same time, the country’s economy was in a complete free-fall. The unemployment rate in Brazil stood at over 12 per cent and its national health care system was collapsing. The country’s per capita income had collapsed by 10 per cent since 2014. It also had to face consistent technical recessions in the past four years.

The crime levels in the country continued to grow as well. Brazil is infamous for having 19 of the 50 most violent cities in the world. There are close to 60,000 homicides in the nation every year.

The rise of Bolsonaro

Bolsonaro had made his presidential bid in such a context — a debilitating economic condition, rising crime levels and a pervading perception that the entire political class was corrupt.

The most significant feature of his 2018 election campaign, therefore, was that he wasn’t corrupt. One of his campaign ads had Bolsonaro standing in front of a Brazilian flag that read: “Hitler, Mussolini…they call him everything but CORRUPT”.

Bolsonaro emerged as the candidate who would maintain law and order — linking corruption with street crimes and promising more jobs for young Brazilians. He talked about increasing gun ownership, giving the police a free-hand to kill suspected criminals and longer sentences for those found guilty.

He also reached out to Brazil’s business community and its foreign investors. He promised to cut the size of its government and unleash the country’s greatest free-market revolution.

President Bolsonaro: Part-reform, part-identity politics

Since getting elected, Bolsonaro’s term, however, has been far from non-controversial.

He had a major diplomatic row with France’s President Emmanuel Macron over the razing Amazon forest fires. Bolsonaro has also unleashed a culture war that is rampant with identity politics.

“He has repeatedly slammed cultural Marxism, gender ideology and environmental psychoses’ over accelerating deforestation. ‘We are going to get rid of all this crap in Brazil — crap that is corrupt and communist,’ he said last week (August 2019),” noted a feature in The Financial Times.

Bolsonaro has chosen Paulo Guedes — a former student of Milton Freedman, the patron of free-market economics — as the country’s finance minister to spearhead his agenda of transforming Brazil’s economy.

But in spite of massive government-funded welfare programmes, Brazil continues to have a very large and inefficient public sector. It leaves the government with no real fiscal space to make any long-term investments in the nation’s economy.

Last month, Bolsonaro and Guedes succeeded in getting their significant pension-reforms through the country’s legislature. This reform would substantially cut the government’s spending on pensions, giving it some much-needed fiscal space.

Guedes has proposed more reforms that could see the government privatise inefficient public enterprises, rationalise government subsidies and major tax reforms. But without a parliamentary majority, it is hard to get legislative approval for these economic reforms.

Moreover, it would take a long period before the Brazilian economy can reap the benefits from Bolsonaro’s transformative economic agenda. Until then, Bolsonaro has decided to deploy identity politics and keep the pot stirring.


Also read: Brazil’s president wants to deforest the Amazon, and the UN has few options to stop him


 

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14 COMMENTS

  1. You judge a man by the friends he keeps. Bolsonaro and Modi deserve each other. The people of India deserve better than leaders like this. They achieve power by populist means, they read the zeitgeist of the time and use it to their political advantage. They are cunning, devious and dangerous because they pander to disenchantment and manipulate the public. They come project images of themselves as men of the people when all they really care about is their own bank accounts. India has Modi, Brazil and Bolsonaro and the USA has Trump….the list could be longer. As I said, you judge a man by the friends he keeps. Kind attracts kind and so I am not surprised that Bolsonaro is India’s Republic Day guest. Interesting how many Trolls are filling the comments boxes, probably paid for by their political leader.

  2. Stupid article. You dont know what you are talking about. Our president was elected with 57million votes. You are only repeating what you read on the Guardian.

  3. Seriously? U guys are just writing such a unbelievable facts about a president elected for 56 millions of Brazilians.. Bringing news from 20 years ago! He’s never been envolved in any case of corruption in 30 years in the Brazilian congress! That’s unbelievable u guys survive writing these kinds of things!

    • Wtf mate? As a brazilian, you probably live in another country or another planet. Seriously? Is he not involved with corruption with his kids? Omg. Wake up mate. This guy will destroy Brazil.

  4. I know, right! India should have invited a half mullatto, half mestizzo transgender and bisexual single mom with one arm, one leg, and one eye to cross all politically correct boxes! It would be even better if he / she / they (depending upon the pronoun in vogue these days) were on the dole, had dropped out of a gender studies program at a community college in the middle of nowhere too!

    Ban the parade. It is a display of Indian military might. We don’t need no imperialist symbolism here! And, ban the Jana Gana Mana too while you’re at it. the author and his (it’s? Pardon me if I used the wrong pronoun) Comrades would love to sing the Internationale followed by Kumbayya with tears of joy streaming down their faces! Jai ho! Sorry, Lal Salaam…

    PS Posted with my tongue fully ensconced in my cheek. Don’t blame me if it sounds inspirational to the anti Bolsonaro lot!

  5. Reference in the article to Milton Freedman….or Friedman? Is the reference to some guy who is free from all vices and bigotry….all noble from head to ass and feet. The most free, perfect man since srijan…creation?

  6. For god’s sake he is a head of a state, an elected leader, respect the mandate and move on.
    See how can we improve Brazil India ties and stop bothering about Brazil’s internal politics, India has enough on it’s plate.
    Look ahead, look at the future.

    • A criminal is criminal, he does not get absolved of the crime that he committed. Never mind what he is. Brazil’s former President was jailed for his corruption chanrges and he was released from the highest court of Brazil. Guilty must be punished. Modi has committed blunder by inviting such person to the most auspicious occasion of our nation. He must reviews his decision

  7. Those who are giving sermons have no clue how international relations work. Enlightened countries do what is in their best interest, not polemics that sound good but do you no good. Indians should get out of the nehruvian habit of preaching to the world while also begging from it at the same time. You can’t be a beggar and a preacher at the same time.

  8. There was a time during the commodities boom when people said God has a Brazilian passport. President Lula – recently released from prison till his appeal process is over – was one of the most highly regarded leaders on the world stage. Now we have this gentleman. There must be a hundred HoGs who would bring more shobha to the Republic Day parade.

    • Have you heard of such foreign policy truisms: “no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests”, “he may be a sonofabitch but he is OUR son of bitch!”, “realpolitik”, etc?
      Republic Day chief guests are invited to further cooperation and collaboration between the country they are representing and the host country. Not a ramp walk on Rajpath.
      How come when we were hosting China recently no one dared to speak to their HoG of the ongoing brutalisation of Uighurs in Xinjiang (forget Tibet, for leftists Xinjiang may well be on Mars, we discuss nothing about China). Period.

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