The Downgrading of India’s Democracy

India’s democracy is in peril. Not only has its ranking in several democracy indices fallen in recent years, but increasingly analysts are using terms like “autocracy” and “authoritarian” to describe the Indian government, leadership, and political system.

In 2022, for the second year in a row, India was categorized as an “electoral autocracy” by the Sweden-based V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute and listed among the top 10 autocratizing countries in the world. “Anti-pluralist parties are driving the autocratization” in India, the 2022 V-Dem report says.

Of 179 countries assessed in the 2022 report, India stands 93rd on the V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index (LDI) and 100th in the Electoral Democracy Index. Several of its neighbors, including Bhutan (65), Nepal (71), and Sri Lanka (88) fared better than India on the LDI.

Incidentally, India played an important role in the democratization of Bhutan and Nepal. It supported the pro-democracy movement in Nepal and is said to have urged the Bhutanese monarchy to democratize the country. But it is now lagging far behind its smaller neighbors.

India is performing poorly on other democracy indices too. The U.S.-based Freedom House described India as a “partly free democracy” in its Freedom in the World 2022 report and gave it a”Global Freedom Score’” of 66 out of 100 – the same as Malawi and Bolivia. India’s score and ranking would have been far worse had Kashmir been assessed as part of India; the report assesses Indian Kashmir separately and gave it a score of 27, describing it as “not free.”

When India emerged independent from colonial rule in 1947 and declared itself a democratic republic in its 1950 Constitution, many western scholars were skeptical of India’s democratic aspirations. They predicted that India, like several other post-colonial countries in Asia and Africa, would descend into authoritarian rule. How, they asked, could a country with such extreme poverty and illiteracy, and with a deeply-entrenched millennia old hierarchical social structure emerge a democracy?

India proved them wrong. Its founding fathers provided it with a good foundation. All citizens were equal in the eyes of the law, the constitution said, arming them with a slew of fundamental rights. It also provided for adult universal franchise; thus Indian citizens irrespective of gender, caste, religion, literacy or ownership of property got the right to vote – something so-called advanced democracies had struggled with for decades, if not centuries.

India disproved the skeptics when it went on to successfully hold several elections at the national, state, and local levels. Elections witnessed peaceful transfers of power between rival political parties and coalitions for decades.

A wake-up call came in 1975 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a political emergency in the country to secure her grip over power. Fundamental rights including the right to speech were suspended. But for this 18 month period in 1975-77, when India deviated from the democratic path, it remained a democracy, more or less. India’s democracy stood out especially in comparison to neighbors like Pakistan and Bangladesh, which were under direct or indirect military rule for most of their post-independence years.

There were concerns, of course. How participatory or representative was India’s democracy? How free and fair were its elections when they were being conducted amid the heavy presence of police and paramilitary forces, especially in the country’s conflict zones? Many of India’s legislators over the years have been charged, even convicted for serious crimes. How effective were they as lawmakers?

Its flaws notwithstanding, India’s democracy was in fairly good shape – chaotic and noisy, perhaps, but vibrant, ably steered by the Indian Constitution, and supported by an independent judiciary, a feisty media, and a robust civil society.

That has changed under the Narendra Modi government as India rapidly slides into authoritarian rule.

While the decline of democracy began in previous decades, it is with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) coming to power under Modi in 2014 and returning with an even larger mandate in 2019 that the decline has been precipitous.

Under Modi, India’s institutions have corroded. Parliament has become a veritable rubber-stamp body, as several laws have been enacted in recent years without debate or discussion. Institutions like the judiciary and the Election Commission are packed with loyalists and much of the mass media have become cheerleaders of Modi and his government’s policies.

Restrictions on freedom of speech have increased, as has intolerance of dissenting opinions and criticism, which is increasingly equated with being “anti-national” or unpatriotic. If in the past it was mainly journalists in India’s conflict zones who came under government pressure when they gave voice to dissident opinion, now journalists in the Indian “mainland” are being targeted and slapped with sedition charges for critiquing the Modi government. Even stand-up comedians are being hounded for what they say.

Fueling the Modi government’s authoritarianism is its aggressive pursuit of Hindutva. A political ideology based on Hindu supremacism, Hindutva is exclusivist and discriminatory in its outlook and therefore anti-democratic. Its goal is to make India a Hindu state. Under Modi, religious minorities, especially Muslims, are being systematically stripped of their constitutional rights and targeted, often violently. The Modi government hasn’t reined in Hindutva vigilante groups and lynch mobs that beat up and kill Muslims for simply pursuing their way of life.

India has shown itself to be adept at conducting elections. Neither the massive size of its electorate – 900 million people were registered to vote in the 2019 general election – nor the complexity of the geographic terrain – election officials travel on the backs of elephants in heavily forested areas and trek across glaciers to set up polling stations – has weakened the resolve of the Election Commission to ensure that people can exercise their franchise. Indeed, India has exported its expertise in holding elections to other countries. India helped Afghanistan hold elections and trained its officials. But elections, alone, do not make a country a democracy.

India’s democracy used to be a powerful source of soft power. That power is now rapidly fading.