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The Decay of Indian democracy. By Milan Vaishnav. Democratic erosion. Under Modi, the Indian state has repeatedly demonstrated contempt for dissent.
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The Decay of Indian Democracy
https: //www. foreignaffairs. com/articles/india/2021-03-18/decay-indian-democracy
Why India No Longer Ranks Among the Lands of the Free
By Milan Vaishnav
March 18, 2021
Two recent reports on the health of global democracy make for dismal reading about India’s political trajectory. For the first time since the late 1990s, the pro-democracy nonprofit Freedom House downgraded India’s status from “Free” to “Partly Free, ” on account of the country’s weakening protection of civil liberties. A second report by the Varieties of Democracy Institute reported that India no longer qualifies as an “Electoral Democracy, ” relegating it to the ranks of “Electoral Autocracies”—a grouping that includes noted backsliders such as Hungary and Turkey.
India’s drop in the democracy league tables has less to do with the nature of its elections—which are largely free and fair—than with the shrinking democratic space between them. These grim assessments point to several troubling political developments in the country: the consolidation of a Hindu-majoritarian brand of politics, the excessive concentration of power in the hands of the executive, and the clampdown on political dissent and on the media. Much of that change is bound up in the figure of the prime minister, whose electoral appeal rests on his stated ambition to break with politics as usual. But despite numerous controversies, Prime Minister Narendra Modi remains immensely popular. His hold over the public imagination has not waned—and for Indian democracy, the implications are momentous.
DEMOCRATIC EROSION
Many other postcolonial states that won their independence in the twentieth century lapsed into dictatorship or military rule, but India has long trumpeted the abiding virtues of its model of pluralist liberal democracy. That model, which seeks to find unity by embracing India’s unprecedented religious, linguistic, and ethnic diversity, is now under pressure on several fronts. Emboldened by a second consecutive parliamentary majority in 2019, Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have moved in an avowedly majoritarian direction. In the summer of 2019, the government unilaterally nullified the constitutional semi-autonomy of the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir (a move that involved cutting off the Internet and detaining leaders of the political opposition in Kashmir). It passed a law that offers an expedited pathway to citizenship for migrants from neighboring countries provided they don’t practice Islam, suggesting that citizenship and belonging in supposedly secular India can turn on religious identity. And in countless instances, Muslims have been victimized in communal riots or mob lynchings. The steady drumbeat of anti-minority rhetoric from the ruling party and its allies—and the absence of unequivocal condemnation from the authorities—has fueled the belief that such extralegal violence is implicitly condoned.
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Alongside its predilection for majoritarian politics, the government has also centralized power to an extent not seen in India since Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s tenure, more than three decades earlier. This centralization has multiple dimensions. Within the central government, power is increasingly concentrated in the prime minister’s office at the expense of cabinet ministries. The executive has also come to dominate Parliament, while the judiciary has carefully skirted politically inconvenient cases. Outside of New Delhi, the central government has involved itself with greater alacrity in domains constitutionally under the jurisdiction of India’s states. Institutions meant to guarantee accountability have not lived up to their responsibility to check the government. The BJP swept to power in 2014 on the back of widespread anticorruption protests across India in 2012 and 2013. Yet, in office, the BJP has worked to marginalize a new corruption ombudsman and defang an information commission overseeing India’s sweeping right to information law. The country’s top auditor issues fewer reports scrutinizing the central government’s activities. Even the hallowed Election Commission of India—one of the world’s most widely respected electoral agencies—has faced credible accusations of deferring to the government’s whims.
Under Modi, the Indian state has repeatedly demonstrated contempt for dissent.
Democratic erosion is most powerfully visible in the government’s treatment of its opponents. Under Modi, the Indian state has repeatedly demonstrated contempt for dissent and sought to paint vocal critics of the government as “anti-national. ” The federal government and numerous state governments have cracked down on academics, activists, and journalists who challenge the powers that be. A new database by the nonprofit Article14 finds that cases of sedition—a grave offense that officials routinely trot out to silence critics—have soared in recent years, especially in BJP-ruled states. Most recently, authorities controversially arrested a young student climate activist on charges of sharing social media talking points that allegedly provoke disaffection toward the government.
Many of the frailties plaguing India’s democratic institutions are not new. Independent India inherited illiberal laws—from sedition to criminal defamation—from the British colonial-era penal code, and the once dominant Indian National Congress (also known as the Congress party) deployed them with aplomb. In fact, there are few tactics the present government has deployed that its predecessors did not pioneer. What has changed, however, is the political balance of power and the ideological moorings of the ruling party. The prevalence of coalition rule in Indian politics from the late 1980s to 2014 kept some of government’s worst excesses in check, but the reemergence of a dominant political party—in this case, one that is ideologically committed to a more narrowly pitched vision of the nation—has tested the country’s democratic guardrails.
Modi sits at the heart of this transformation. Although his government has not fully delivered on its central promise of getting the Indian economy back on track—a task further complicated by the coronavirus pandemic—he remains incredibly popular. Many leaders struggle with the ordeals of governance but retain tremendous appeal—former U. S. President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro come to mind. But even among this group, Modi is an outlier. According to a Morning Consult weekly survey, since the poll’s inception in 2020, Modi has consistently enjoyed the highest net approval rating—a whopping 52 percent—of any of the 13 world leaders tracked.
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