This essay recently published in the Journal of Democracy argues that India’s democracy is in serious trouble. The Journal simultaneously published another article entitled “The Exaggerated Death of Indian Democracy” which presents the counter view. Excerpts from both articles are posted on this website.

[Excerpts of article published on the Journal of Democracy website on July 2023]

Why India’s Democracy Is Dying

[By Maya Tudor]

No country is a better exemplar of our global democratic recession than India. Most unlikely at its founding, India’s democracy confounded legions of naysayers by growing more stable over its first seven decades. India’s democratic deepening happened in formal ways, through the consolidation of civilian rule over the military as well as decades of vibrant multiparty competition, and informal ways, through the strengthening of norms around Electoral Commission independence and the increasing participation of women and other social groups in formal political life.

India has also witnessed two significant democratic declines: the 21-month period from June 1975 to March 1977 known as the Emergency and a contemporary decline beginning with Narendra Modi’s election in 2014. During Modi’s tenure, key democratic institutions have remained formally in place while the norms and practices underpinning democracy have substantially deteriorated. This informal democratic decline in contemporary India stands in stark contrast to the Emergency, when Indira Gandhi formally eliminated nearly all democratic institutions—banning elections, arresting political opposition, eviscerating civil liberties, muzzling independent media, and passing three constitutional amendments that undermined the power of the country’s courts.

Yet democracy watchdogs agree that today India resides somewhere in a nether region between full democracy and full autocracy. While democracy-watching organizations categorize democracies differently, they all classify India today as a “hybrid regime”—that is, neither a full democracy nor a full autocracy. And this is new. In 2021, Freedom House dropped India’s rating from Free to Partly Free (the only remaining category is Not Free). That same year, the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project relegated India to the status of “electoral autocracy” on its scale of closed autocracy, electoral autocracy, electoral democracy, or liberal democracy. And the Economist Intelligence Unit moved India into the “flawed democracy” category on its scale of full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime, and authoritarian regime. …

Unsurprisingly, the Indian government has reacted with accusations of Western bias, calling India’s democratic downgrade “misleading, incorrect and misplaced.”

Stable Rights and Declining Liberties

India’s democracy was never very high-quality. The formal exercise of autonomous, competitive elections with a broad range of civil liberties—while it did translate into a mass poverty-alleviation program and the world’s largest affirmative-action program—always had plenty of shortcomings. But democracy also had a built-in autocorrect feature, which allowed incumbents to be turned out of power. That autocorrect feature is endangered today in mostly informal ways. In terms of Freedom House’s political-rights score (encompassing the pillars of elections, competition, and autonomy), India’s average for the nine years before Modi came to power was the same as for the nine years since 2014. Incumbent turnover remains electorally possible but improbable because the Modi government has substantially eroded the de facto protection of civil liberties and executive constraints—the fourth and fifth pillars of democracy. It is the drop in India’s civil-liberties rating that accounts for its contemporary democratic decline.

The legal right to dissent, historically only erratically protected in Indian courts, remains legally in place while the practical possibility of vocal dissent free from overwhelming harassment has virtually disappeared. To be sure, India’s media, while generally vibrant and free, were sometimes censored before Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government came to power in 2014. But today, while the media remain legally free to dissent, widespread harassment of independent journalism and concentrating ownership structures have meant that journalists and individuals practice a high degree of self-censorship. Checks on executive power, while formally in place, are rapidly falling away.

…

Over the last decade, Indian media have radically circumscribed their criticism of government due to outright intimidation and structural changes. Since 2014, India has fallen to 161st out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, ranking below Afghanistan, Belarus, Hong Kong, Libya, Pakistan, and Turkey. According to the organization, Indian journalists sometimes receive death threats and are frequent targets of social-media hate campaigns driven by troll farms affiliated with the government. Major media networks do not feel free to criticize the Modi government. One study analyzing prime-time television debates on the channel Times Now over three months in 2020 found not a single episode in which a debate criticized the Modi government in any form. A separate study of RepublicTV from 2017 through 2020 found coverage to be “consistently biased in favour of the Modi government and its policies.” Modi himself has limited his interactions with the media, holding not a single press conference in the last nine years. …

While the sheer number of news organizations in India would seem to indicate a thriving media, scrutiny of the functional ownership structure indicates otherwise. The independent Media Ownership Monitor finds in India “a significant trend toward concentration and ultimately control of content and public opinion.” Mukesh Ambani, a businessman with close ties to Modi, directly controls media outlets followed by at least 800 million Indians. Another close Modi associate, Gautam Adani, acquired India’s last major independent television network, NDTV, in December 2022. According to analysts, Adani’s acquisition of NDTV “marks the endgame for independent media in India, leaving the country’s biggest television news channels in the hands of billionaires who have strong ties to the Indian government.” While there are a handful of smaller, determined sources of independent news left, they have faced tax raids and lawsuits for their reporting since 2013.

…

The growing lack of executive accountability to Parliament is exacerbated by an increasingly quiescent judiciary. The Supreme Court is the custodian of India’s constitution and through it, of civil liberties. During the two decades before 2014, the independence of the Supreme Court was seen to grow mightily, earning it the moniker of the “most powerful apex court in the world.” This has notably changed, with the central government controversially transferring independent-minded justices and minimizing norms that checked executive power. Such moves prompted the four most senior members of India’s Supreme Court to hold an unprecedented press conference in 2018, warning that the chief justice’s unusual assigning of cases could be a sign of political interference. …

Can Indian Democracy Be Saved?

Democracy in India, as elsewhere in the world, is not today dying through a military coup or the dramatic, coordinated mass arrests of opponents. Instead, autocrats have learned to talk democratically and walk autocratically, maintaining a legal façade of democracy while harassing opposition and shrinking space for loyal dissent. While India’s formal institutions of democracy are also under pressure—Modi’s most prominent political rivals have recently been disqualified from running in elections—it is primarily the inability of the ordinary citizen to read critical appraisals of government policy, to speak and assemble freely without fear of harassment as well as the absence of substantive checks on executive power that have transitioned India into a hybrid regime.

Although India’s democratic slide is real, it is not irreversible. While hybrid regimes are often stable, elections remain real moments of accountability, so long as the ballots remain secret and elections fairly monitored. Even wholly autocratic regimes with thoroughly honed policies of surveillance are subject to moments of effective protest because the very structures of autocratic power also prevent such regimes from gaining an accurate understanding of citizens’ concerns—what democracies do best. Recent protests against China’s zero-covid strategy, Iran’s morality police, and India’s farm laws have all highlighted the enduring possibilities of mass dissent.

Going forward, India’s surest route to democratic revival lies in the emergence of a genuine opposition party with well-developed organizational roots. The Indian National Congress was once such a party, but its grassroots linkages disappeared in 1969 when Indira Gandhi split the party and cut off grassroots-party infrastructure in her bid to centralize power. Congress’s success in the recent state assembly elections in Karnataka, the southern state that is home to India’s Silicon Valley, underlines the BJP’s ongoing electoral vulnerability and likely owes something to Rahul Gandhi’s grassroots campaign, Bharat Jodo Yatra. On a smaller scale, the Aam Aadmi Party is a promising political force that has managed to move beyond its Delhi base. But both parties face a long battle to enduringly develop beyond their charismatic leaders. And as ever, power must be well organized beyond individuals before it can be effectively used. Set against the BJP, whose organizational roots have been growing for nearly a century, this will be a tall order. But not an impossible one.

[Maya Tudor is associate professor of politics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan (2013) and Varieties of Nationalism: Communities, Narratives, Identities (with Harris Mylonas, 2023).]