"On Indian Democracy"

by Salil Tripathi : Mekong Review (May 2024).

"In this year of elections—when voters in more than sixty countries have, or will, cast votes
to change national, regional and local governments—the biggest in terms of scale and size is
the one in India. Beginning in mid-April, this exercise will take a month-and-a-half, with the
final outcome known in early June. With nearly a billion people voting across the sub-
continent, Indian elections are a logistical marvel, requiring mobilisation of immense
resources and a vast bureaucracy.

Journalists from around the world turn up to watch the democratic process in action. Tired
clichés about India being “the world’s largest democracy” will sprout like bamboo shoots.
There will be stories of superhuman efforts to bring a ballot box to a remote area to service
a handful of voters. There will be allegations of malpractice, celebrities running for office,
political parties changing alliance partners, leaders throwing tantrums and opinion polls
that contradict one another. Cheap availability of data and the ubiquity of inexpensive
mobile phones will make rumours fly faster than ever. There are legitimate concerns that
deep fakes will be deployed, fake news will proliferate and hate speech will get transmitted
at lightning speed. There will be violence, too.

Why this election is more consequential than the seventeen previous ones is that the nature
of Indian society and democracy has changed quite fundamentally in the ten years since
Narendra Modi led the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power. From
independence in 1947 to 1977, the Congress Party, which led India’s freedom movement,
ruled uninterrupted. But prime minister Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency in 1975 and
lost to a hastily put together opposition coalition in the 1977 elections. This coalition
disintegrated in 1979 and Gandhi won again in 1980. After her assassination in 1984, her
son Rajiv won an unprecedented majority. He lost in 1989 and, for thirty years, a series of
coalition governments ruled India in a period marked by tumultuous changes: the collapse
of the Soviet Union and decline of the Indian economy forced India to reorientate its
political stance and economic policies. As India moved away from non-alignment in its
foreign policy and from socialism in its economic policy, there was restiveness with the
third pillar of the country’s Nehruvian ethos: secularism. In the late 1980s, the BJP
embarked on a movement to ‘liberate’ a sixteenth century mosque in Ayodhya, North India;
in 1992, the mosque was razed, fundamentally altering Indian secular order; and early this
year, Modi oversaw the opening of a grand temple at the site where the mosque once stood.
In the decade that Modi has ruled, he has shifted India’s master narrative: from being a
liberal, secular democracy to an authoritarian, quasi-religious state. The country has
become economically more powerful but income inequality has widened significantly.
Swanky malls and gleaming highways cut through the countryside while nearly half of
India’s young people are without jobs. India has more billionaires than ever, yet nearly 80
per cent of Indians need subsidised, rationed food to survive.

Modi’s success rests on his profound understanding of a changing India: the power base is
shifting from the old, English-speaking elite of the old major cities to smaller, brassy, noisy
cities, where a generation of voters has grown up with no living memory of the stalwarts of
the freedom movement and less awareness of the circumstances that forced India to make
the choices it did in the 1950s and 1960s. These voters weren’t born when the Ayodhya
mosque was destroyed and many are too young to have detailed knowledge of the pogrom
in Gujarat in 2002, in which, by official count, more than 1,000 people were killed, the vast
majority of them Muslim.
Modi and his supporters have run an efficient propaganda machine of memes, videos,
catchy slogans and billboards. His face is everywhere: on cooking gas, on Covid-19
vaccination certificates and in advertisements praising Indian athletes when they win
medals. The renovated cricket stadium in Ahmedabad, now the world’s largest, is named
after Modi.

Such megalomania is cringeworthy but distracts from his grim democratic record. Religious
minorities, women and Dalits (as the groups once referred to as “untouchables” are known)
have seen a significant erosion of their rights. Many global indices that measure
democracies rate India poorly. The country was previously described as an “electoral
autocracy”, but the liberal democracy index compiled by Sweden’s V-Dem Institute now
calls India “one of the worst autocracies”. More drastic has been the fall in the index that
Reporters Without Borders provides, on which India ranks 161 of 180 countries for press
freedom. Foreign academics find it hard to get visas to visit India for research; some foreign
journalists’ visas are extended only for short periods.

Civil society organisations that support marginalised groups find it impossible to raise
funding from foreign sources. Domestic contributions to rights-respecting NGOs are also
drying up, since potential donors fear that they will get raided for tax audits. The
Enforcement Directorate, which investigates financial crimes, has become the handmaiden
of the state, deployed to investigate (and harass) dissidents, critics and human rights
defenders. The cases take forever to investigate—the process is the punishment.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the continued detention of more than a dozen human
rights defenders and activists in what has come to be known as the Bhima Koregaon case.
Reportedly, evidence was planted on the hard drives of human rights defenders using
sophisticated software, to implicate them in plots to assassinate leaders or spread chaos.
Civil rights activists were arrested for allegedly being sympathisers of leftist ideologies and
conspiring to undermine, if not overthrow, the state. Years have passed, but the charges, in
most instances, have not been framed or filed. One of the detainees has died and a few have
been granted bail after years in captivity. The majority remain in jail. The crackdown on
dissent is serious and sustained. Laws of sedition are invoked to intimidate critics and a few
journalists, such as Gauri Lankesh, have been murdered.

The independence of the judiciary in India has also come under scrutiny. The appointment
of judges to higher courts has been marred by allegations of government interference,
leading to concerns about the politicisation of the judiciary. D.Y. Chandrachud, the Supreme
Court chief justice, makes eloquent public speeches defending liberal values, but from the
bench, with a few exceptions, the judiciary has deferred to the government.

Minority rights have weakened severely. In many instances Muslims aren’t able to build
mosques; their existing mosques are sometimes destroyed on charges of encroachment of
public property; Muslims aren’t allowed in many cities to pray in public. There have been
dozens of instances of Muslims being lynched and killed, ostensibly because of spurious
charges that they were transporting cattle to kill cows. (Many BJP-ruled states have banned
cow slaughter.) Sale of property across religions has been halted in one BJP-ruled state for
three months. Fundamentalist Hindus want to ‘reclaim’ more mosques, claiming they have
been built on land Hindus consider holy. Churches too have come under attack. The
Citizenship Amendment Act provides a path to citizenship for non-Muslim immigrants from
neighbouring countries and has been widely criticised as discriminatory and in violation of
India’s secular principles. The rise of Hindu nationalist rhetoric and the proliferation of hate
speech targeting minorities have fuelled apprehensions about the erosion of secularism and
inclusivity in Indian society.

The government has also centralised many powers, seeking a significant portion of tax
revenue from states and, if the state is an opposition-ruled one, paying back what the state
is due slowly. India’s federal structure—which grants significant autonomy to states—is
integral to its democratic framework, but the relationship between the central government
and state governments has faced strain. The imposition of centrally mandated policies
without adequate consultation has been met with resistance from regional leaders. The use
of executive orders and ordinances to bypass parliamentary scrutiny has been criticised as
undermining democratic norms. The lack of meaningful dialogue with opposition parties on
key policy decisions has raised questions about the government’s commitment to inclusive
governance.

The decline of democracy in India under Modi’s leadership is multi-layered and a fractured
opposition doesn’t help. With leaders of various parties vying to become prime minister, the
impression persists that the opposition is not serious about challenging Modi. And yet, Modi
is taking nothing for granted.

Modi’s supporters claim he will win at least 400 seats (out of 547), which would grant him
the kind of majority with which he can amend the constitution. Despite these optimistic
projections, the government recently arrested the chief minister of Delhi and has become
even more shrill in its criticism of the opposition, as if concerned that all the extravagant
claims of achievement—such as hosting the G20 summit, landing a module on the moon’s
south pole and maintaining a crisp growth rate—are not impressive enough for voters. The
ruthless use of laws to crack down on dissidents can only mean two things: either the
government is in panic and India might revert to a different kind of governance if the BJP’s
majority is reduced significantly, or what we are seeing is merely a preview—the movie
itself will be louder and brasher and not a pretty sight. A less democratic India is certainly
bad for Indians, but also a great loss to the world.

Addressing these challenges will require a concerted effort to reaffirm the principles of
pluralism, inclusivity and institutional integrity. It will require a commitment to upholding
constitutional values, strengthening democratic institutions and fostering a culture of
dialogue and tolerance. In other words, we would need to rediscover the India of Mohandas
Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore. Only such efforts could restore and
revitalise Indian democracy."

[Salil Tripathi is a writer based in New York. Author of four works of non-fiction, he is on
the board of PEN International. He was born in India.]