In an interview with Karan Thapar for The Wire, India’s former Vice President Hamid Ansari criticised remarks made by newly elected BJP MLA Ritesh Tiwari in West Bengal, who had said he would not work for his Muslim constituents because, according to him, they had not voted for him.Responding to Tiwari’s statement, Ansari said: “We pretend to be a democracy, we pretend to swear by a Constitution.” If this was the ideology of the ruling party, he added, then India could be heading in the same direction as countries in Europe and elsewhere where democracy deviated and faltered, and the countries transformed into other forms of rule and governance.Although Ansari did not explicitly name any country, he appeared to be alluding to Hitler’s Germany during the 1930s.