Is India an Autocracy?

Last October, Indian authorities revived legal proceedings against the novelist and activist Arundhati Roy. In a case first registered against her in 2010, Roy stood accused of “provocative speech” that aroused “enmity between different groups” for having said that Kashmir was not an “integral” part of India. The charge carries a maximum sentence of seven years and kept her from traveling to Germany to deliver the opening address at the 2023 Munich Literature Festival.

The assault on expression, and on virtually every other mainstay of democracy, has become commonplace under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, and it is the backdrop against which Indians have begun voting to elect their next Parliament and prime minister. Of the nearly 1 billion eligible voters, perhaps more than 600 million will cast their votes over a six-week-long process. Modi, who heads the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is widely expected to win a third term as prime minister in his bitter contest against a motley alliance of opposition parties, the Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance (INDIA).

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The spectacle of hundreds of millions of Indians—many suffering severe material deprivation—performing their civic duty arouses both hope and wonder, often winning India the title of “world’s largest democracy.” But Indian democracy did not just begin to degrade under Modi: It has been eroding since the first years of independence. Modi has put that process on steroids and today presides over an autocracy in all but name.

For decades, the Indian state has used coercive legal powers to suppress dissent and constitutional mechanisms to delegitimize votes. The judiciary has largely acquiesced, money has gushed into Indian politics, and Hindu nationalism has cast a dark shadow of division. What are treated now as anomalies have been the trajectory all along.

Nonetheless, world leaders, including President Joe Biden, often describe India as a vibrant democracy. Even more nuanced analyses hold that Indian democracy will withstand the current crisis because Indians respect diversity and pluralism, the country’s democratic institutions are strong, and recovery is inevitable.

This romantic view of an inherently democratic India is a fairy tale. According to the Swedish think tank V-Dem, India was never a liberal democracy, and today it is sliding ever more decisively toward autocracy. Even under its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s impressive electoral apparatus did not guarantee equality before the law or ensure essential liberties to citizens. Subsequent leaders, rather than plugging the cracks in India’s constitutional foundation, expanded them, not least by using the state’s coercive power to circumvent democratic processes for personal or partisan advantage. Fraying democratic norms rendered free speech, dissent, and judicial independence casualties from the start.

The constitution that independent India adopted in 1950 defined the country as a democratic republic committed to justice, equality, and fraternity for its people. But the democratic conception of the state suffered its first blow when the constitution was just 18 months old. Nehru, frustrated that Indian courts were upholding the free-speech rights of his critics, amended the constitution in June 1951 to make seditious speech a punishable offense. Only one person was actually convicted of sedition before Nehru’s prime ministership ended with his death. But several suffered for extended periods after lower courts found them guilty and before higher ones reversed the verdicts. That long legal limbo had a chilling effect on speech.

The Indian constitution had other undemocratic features that Nehru deployed. It evinced a preoccupation with integrity and security, and emphasized the union, rather than autonomy, of the states it federated. If India’s central government deemed a state’s politics to be dysfunctional, it could place the state under a kind of federal receivership called President’s Rule, essentially disenfranchising the state’s electorate. Nehru imposed President’s Rule eight times during his tenure. The constitution had other significant gaps: It didn’t furnish social and economic equality to women, for example. Nehru tried to pass a bill that would override traditional Hindu patrimonial practices, but even in the postindependence glow of national unity, organized Hindu forces asserted their identity and political power. They stymied Nehru’s legislative efforts in 1951 and then the implementation of the laws that did pass later.

Nehru, for all his faults, valued tolerance and fairness. The same could scarcely be said of his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who followed soon after as prime minister and initiated a steep decline from such democratic norms as existed under Nehru. In 1967, she responded to a peasant protest in Naxalbari, West Bengal, by passing the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which allowed the police to arrest and hold people without trial, bail, or explanation. This legislation would become an instrument of repression for decades to come. She also placed West Bengal under President’s Rule, and her chosen governor used the police and armed forces to wipe out a generation of idealistic students who supported the peasants. In fact, Gandhi imposed President’s Rule nearly 30 times from 1966 to 1975, when she declared an internal emergency and assumed dictatorial powers. Gandhi called for elections in early 1977, hoping to legitimize her autocratic rule. But when a frustrated Indian populace threw her out, the University of Chicago political scientists Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph—echoing a commonly held view—happily concluded, “Democracy has acquired a mass base in India.”

[From the April 1940 issue: India’s demand and England’s answer]

That proved wishful thinking. Upon reelection as prime minister in 1980, Gandhi accelerated the erosion of democratic norms. She imposed President’s Rule more than a dozen times in her second stint in power, from 1980 to 1984. She also began pandering to the sentiments of Hindus to win their votes, opening the door to the hard-line Hindu-nationalists who have since become an overpowering force in Indian politics.

Perhaps Gandhi’s most pernicious legacy was the injection of “black” money—unaccounted-for funds, accumulated through tax evasion and illegal market operations—into Indian politics. In 1969, she banned corporate donations to political parties. Soon after, her campaigns became extremely expensive, ushering in an era of “briefcase politics,” in which campaign donations came in briefcases full of cash, mostly filling the coffers of her own Congress Party. Criminals became election financiers, and as big-money (and black-money) politics spread, ideology and public interest gave way to politics for private gain. Legislators in state assemblies frequently “defected,” crossing party lines to bag ministerial positions that generated corrupt earnings.

And yet, for all the damage done to it, many analysts and diplomats still cleaved to the romantic view of Indian democracy. Upon Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, a former U.S. foreign-service officer, writing in Foreign Affairs, described the monarchical-style handover of power to her son, the political neophyte Rajiv, as proof of the “strength of the republic and its democratic constitutional system.”

Rajiv’s stewardship could rightly be seen in an entirely different light. He was the prime minister who let the gale force of Hindu nationalism blast through the door his mother had opened. He commissioned for the state-owned television network, Doordarshan, the much-loved Ramayana epic, which spawned a Rambo-like iconography of Lord Ram as Hindutva’s avenger. And he reignited a contest between Hindus and Muslims over the site of a 16th-century mosque called the Babri Masjid, which had been sealed since 1949 to contain communal passions. Hindu zealots claimed that the structure was built on Lord Ram’s birthplace, and Rajiv opened its gates. Then, in December 1992, Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao’s Congress Party–led government dithered as frenzied Hindu mobs demolished Babri Masjid, triggering bloody riots and further advancing the Hindu-nationalist cause.

The decade from 1989 to 1998 saw a series of coalition governments govern India—a development that the historian Ramachandra Guha has described as “a manifestation of the widening and deepening of democracy” because “different regions and different groups had acquired a greater stake in the system.” Democratic norms were, in fact, degrading at a quickening pace during this period. Big-money politics had bred mercenary politicians, who at the unseemly edge were gangsters providing caste representation, protection, and other services that the state could not supply. Politicians paid little attention to the public good—such as creating more jobs and improving education and health services, especially in the eastern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh—and learned that they could use plausible corruption charges against one another as a weapon.

Hindu nationalism swelled. From 1998 to 2003, the BJP led a coalition government that began aligning school textbooks with a Hindu-nationalist agenda. A Congress-led government from 2004 to 2014 arrested this trend but presided over a steep descent into corruption: During that decade, the share of members of the lower house of Parliament charged with serious crimes—including murder, extortion, and kidnapping—reached 21 percent, up from 12 percent.

[Read: India’s democracy is the world’s problem]

Both the BJP and the Congress Party embraced a model of economic growth driven by the very rich, and both dismissed the injury to the economic interests of the weak and vulnerable, as well as to the environment, as necessary collateral damage. In Chhattisgarh, a Congress Party leader, with the support of the state’s BJP government, sponsored a private vigilante army to protect business interests, which included the exploitation of minerals and the mowing down of pristine forests in the tribal areas. When the supreme court declared the private vigilante army unconstitutional, Indian authorities responded in the manner of Andrew Jackson, who famously waved off the United States’ chief justice with the statement, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

The anti-terrorism and anti-sedition provisions that earlier governments had supplied came in handy when the Congress-led coalition sought to suppress protests and intimidate opponents. The government also introduced and steadily widened the ambit of a new law, ostensibly for the prevention of money laundering, and it used the investigative powers of the state to its own benefit in whitewashing corruption: In 2013, a justice of the supreme court described the Central Bureau of Investigation as a “caged parrot” singing in “its master’s voice.”

India, on the eve of the election that brought Modi to power in May 2014, could thus hardly be described as a robust democracy. Rather, all the instruments for its demolition had already been assembled and politely passed along from one government to the next. In the hands of a populist demagogue such as Modi, the demolition instruments proved to be a wrecking ball.

As a candidate, Modi promised to right India’s feckless economic policy and countervail against the Congress Party’s corruption. These claims were not credible. Worse, as chief minister of Gujarat in 2002, Modi had failed to stop a bloody massacre of Muslims, thereby establishing himself as an avatar of Hindu-nationalist extremism. He couldn’t even get a visa to enter the United States.

Nonetheless, many of India’s public intellectuals were sanguine. Antidemocratic forces could be no match for the pluralistic disposition of India’s people and the liberal institutions of its state, some insisted. The political scientist Ashutosh Varshney noted that Modi had eschewed anti-Muslim rhetoric in his campaign—because, Varshney inferred, Indian politics abhorred ideological extremism. Another political scientist, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, asked the BJP’s political opponents to reflect on their own fascist tendencies. The Congress Party, Mehta wrote, “had done its best” to instill fear in citizens and corrode the institutions that protected individual rights; Modi would pull India out of the economic stagnation that Congress had induced.

Anti-Muslim violence spread quickly after Modi came to power. Prominent critics of Hindu nationalism were gunned down on their doorsteps: M. M. Kalburgi in Dharwad, Karnataka, in August 2015, and Gauri Lankesh in Bangalore in July 2017. And India was tumbling in global indicators of democracy. V-Dem has classified India as an electoral autocracy since 2018: The country conducts elections but suppresses individual rights, dissent, and the media so egregiously that it can no longer be considered a democracy in any sense of the word. Even the word “electoral,” though, in V-Dem’s designation, has become dubious since then.

[Samanth Subramanian: Indian democracy is fighting back]

Under Modi’s rule, India has taken a sharp turn toward autocracy, but to get there, the BJP had only to drive a truck through the fissures in the state’s democratic foundations that earlier governments had already widened. The government has seized the coercive powers of the state to fearsome ends, arresting activists and human-rights defenders under various provisions of the law. Successive Washington Post investigations have concluded that at least some of these arrests were based on planted evidence. One of those arrested, a Jesuit priest and human-rights activist, died in prison for want of medical attention when suffering from complications of COVID-19. Income and wealth inequalities have grown, in tandem with extraordinary expenditures even in state election campaigns. Demands for the demolition of more mosques have mounted. Inevitably, to woo Hindu voters, even opposition parties, including the Congress Party, have adopted a softer version of Hindu-nationalist ideology.

The BJP government regularly brings charges against its critics in the media for tax lapses or anti-nationalism, among other pretexts. Reporters Without Borders describes India as one of the most dangerous countries for journalists. In 2023, it ranked India 161 out of 180 countries in press freedom, citing the takeover of media outlets by oligarchs close to Modi and the “horrific” online harassment by Modi’s “army of online supporters.”

Can Indians really be said to vote freely under such circumstances? Even if the answer is yes, the government seems to have found the means to disenfranchise citizens after the fact. In August 2019, the government withdrew the constitutional provision that gave Kashmir special autonomy. It also downgraded Kashmir from a state to a territory, placing it under the direct control of the central government without consulting the people of Kashmir. Because the supreme court has refused to reverse this move, future central governments might similarly downgrade other states.

The chief ministers of Uttarakhand and Delhi are both in jail, awaiting trial on money-laundering charges, and the government has frozen the bank accounts of the Congress Party on allegations of tax evasion. Many opposition-party members who face criminal charges join the BJP, effectively giving the ruling party greater political power in exchange for the dismissal of the charges against them. A recent supreme-court directive requiring transparency in a segment of campaign financing revealed signs of extensive corruption primarily benefitting BJP politicians but also opposition leaders in charge of state governments.

Nevertheless, after Prime Minister Modi’s visit to the United States last June and his address to a joint session of the Congress, the White House’s joint U.S.-India statement read: “The United States and India reaffirm and embrace their shared values of freedom, democracy, human rights, inclusion, pluralism, and equal opportunities for all citizens.” In January, Secretary of State Antony Blinken referred to India as the “world’s largest democracy” and a vital partner, a position that the State Department continues to hold.

Such statements are at odds with the Indian reality. Over the seven decades since independence, Indian democracy has betrayed its people, leaving the majority without dignified jobs, foundational education, public health, or clean air and water. Alongside that betrayal, the death by a thousand cuts of democratic norms raises the troubling question: Is India now an autocracy?

If Modi wins this election, his victory will surely strengthen autocratic tendencies in India. But in the unlikely event that he loses, the erosion of democracy will merely have paused. Democracy is a fragile construct. When deviation from democratic norms persists for as long as it has in Indian politics, deviance becomes the norm. Reversing it becomes a monumental task. Especially if a winning opposition coalition fails to improve the quality of Indian lives, an electorally resurgent Modi and his Hindutva supporters could potentially seal democracy’s fate.