Many Indians Don’t Trust Their Elections Anymore

On March 21, a little less than a month before India’s national elections, the main opposition party, Congress, held a press conference to announce that its campaign was paralyzed. The government had earlier frozen the party’s bank accounts in connection with an alleged tax violation from the 1990s. Now the party was struggling to support its parliamentary candidates, and its ground organization had sputtered to a halt.

Later that evening, fewer than 10 miles away, cops and paramilitaries surrounded the official bungalow of Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi province and a member of another opposition party, seeking his arrest on corruption charges. His supporters began a spontaneous protest, and amid the frenzy, Kejriwal became the first sitting chief minister to be arrested in India’s history.  

The events of March 21 are part of a pattern that has cast doubt on the legitimacy of India’s election. According to this year’s report by Freedom House, a bipartisan think tank that evaluates democracies across the world, Modi’s government “has selectively pursued anti-corruption investigations against opposition politicians while overlooking allegations against political allies.” Many of those politicians have then been cleared of the charges if they joined Modi’s party: Of 25 opposition leaders probed for corruption, 23 saw their charges dropped when they switched parties. These and other worrying developments are striking in a country that has long prided itself as the biggest and most unlikely modern democratic success story.

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India conducted its first election during the winter of 1951–2, a mammoth exercise that took five months to complete. For a nation that was overwhelmingly illiterate, poor, and racked by social divisions, the decision to adopt the universal adult franchise at one stroke was extraordinarily ambitious. Just preparing the country’s first electoral roll, enlisting 173 million voters, was a staggering undertaking—one actually completed before the constitution was even enacted in 1950. “Indians became voters before they were citizens,” the scholar Ornit Shani has written.

Indian elections have taken place, largely uninterrupted, ever since. Not only is this record rare among postcolonial nations; it is somewhat of a paradox within the context of India itself. Low indices for human development and shoddy public services testify to the country’s inefficiency on many counts, and yet, India has tended to organize the world’s largest elections with relative ease.  

The country’s election commission is largely responsible for this success. The constitutional body has overseen 17 national elections and hundreds of provincial elections in states as large as European nations; today it caters to nearly 1 billion voters and marshals nearly 15 million workers to conduct a national election. The commission is led by a three-person panel whose chief, like a high-ranking judge, can be removed only if Parliament impeaches them. At least since the 1990s, chief election commissioners have been independent and powerful figures who inspire fear in politicians and their parties.

Narendra Modi has managed to undermine all that during his decade as prime minister. In December, his government passed a law amending the selection process for choosing election commissioners such that the executive branch would have the most say over the process. That he chose to interfere is little wonder. Independent election commissioners had posed an obstacle to Modi almost from the beginning of his political career.

When Modi was chief minister of the western state of Gujarat in 2002, a spasm of religious violence killed more than 1,000 people there, mostly Muslims. Modi dissolved the provincial assembly and called for elections six months ahead of schedule, likely hoping to capitalize on the climate of religious polarization that gripped the province. But J. M. Lyngdoh, then the chief election commissioner, visited Gujarat and concluded that local insecurity called for deferring elections until the winter. Modi responded by impugning Lyngdoh’s motivations and mocking his Christian identity.

By 2019, Modi had mostly taken care of this problem: He was ensconced as prime minister, and had rendered the election commission all but toothless, having filled the body with handpicked former bureaucrats closely allied with the Hindu right.

For decades, a stringent code of conduct governed elections in India, and transgressions could result in public censure, bans from campaigning, and, in extreme cases, the disqualification of candidates. And yet, in 2019, the commission heard five complaints against Modi for violating the election code—by seeking votes in the name of the military, for example, and appealing to the electorate on religious grounds. It somehow contrived to clear Modi in all five cases.

Five years later, Modi is leading an even more incendiary and divisive campaign, and the commission appears to be comatose. On April 6, Modi described the Congress party’s manifesto as reflecting the mentality of the Muslim League, the separatist organization that led to the creation of Pakistan and is widely reviled in India, even though the manifesto made no reference to religion. Then, in an election rally on April 21, Modi told voters that the Congress party intended to seize their private wealth and distribute it among India’s 200 million Muslims, whom he characterized as infiltrators producing more than their share of children.

Modi’s speech almost certainly violated not only the election code but also Indian laws against hate speech and inciting religious discord. Perhaps even Modi realized he had gone too far: The transcripts of the speech uploaded to the prime minister’s website did not include the most offensive passages. Even so, his remarks caused an uproar in India. Political parties and more than 20,000 private citizens complained to the election commission, seeking its intervention. If the electoral body did not act, Sagarika Ghose, an opposition legislator wrote on X, “then let’s please wind up the Election Commission and forget about the Model Code of Conduct.”

The commission responded timidly, with a notice not to Modi but to the president of his Bharatiya Janata Party. In the past, the commission directly censured political leaders for their violations; today its reluctance to confront the prime minister surprises no one. Commissioners know that standing up to Modi can exact a heavy price. In 2019, Ashok Lavasa, one of the three election commissioners, recorded a formal dissent from the decision to exonerate the prime minister on the five complaints. Lavasa’s phone was placed on a surveillance list, while his family endured months of harassment, including tax raids and investigations into his son’s business. In 2020, Lavasa resigned. He had been due to take over as chief election commissioner the following year.

I reached out to several former election commissioners for comment for this story. Two spoke with me off the record, kept deferring the date for a formal interview, and eventually stopped taking calls or responding to texts. One, Om Prakash Rawat, who was chief election commissioner in 2018, dismissed concerns about the commission’s independence as media fictions and suggested that Western democracies had perpetuated them in order to undermine India. Rawat told me that he did not think Modi and his party had violated the election code in 2019 or in the present election. Modi’s speech branding the Congress manifesto as reflecting the mentality of the Muslim League was merely politics as usual, he said.

As the election season has worn on and the commission has kept quiet, Modi has doubled down on his rhetoric, describing the Muslim electorate as “jihadi votes,” and the BJP has put out animated videos portraying Muslims as crafty and predatory animals.                          

Arvind Kejriwal, the Delhi chief minister, was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate, a federal agency that investigates financial crimes. Since Modi came to power in 2014, the number of investigations the directorate has conducted against political leaders has more than quadrupled, to 121. Of the leaders under investigation, 115 of them—95 percent—belonged to opposition parties.

Kejriwal is the leader of the Aam Aadmi Party, an upstart populist outfit that has quickly risen to take charge of two northern provinces. A rousing orator, Kejriwal was known for his sarcastic and often humorous speeches critical of Modi. In the short term, arresting him served the BJP by eliminating a charismatic opposition politician from the campaign trail. In the long term, it dealt a blow to a rival who could one day become a national challenger.

Kejriwal was technically the first chief minister to be arrested in India’s history, but effectively, he was the second. In January, Hemant Soren, the chief minister of the eastern state of Jharkhand, had resigned a few hours before he was arrested by the directorate. Like Kejriwal, Soren had a commanding presence in a region where the BJP was markedly weak.

Few institutions have survived the democratic subversion of the Modi years. Soren and Kejriwal approached the courts, but an enfeebled judiciary is still vacillating on whether to grant them bail. Much of the mainstream news media purvey Hindu-nationalist propaganda, depicting Modi as the personification of the nation and his opponents as corrupt actors intent on destabilizing India. A recent analysis of six prominent networks from February through April, the months leading up to the election, found that 52 percent of their prime-time coverage attacked opposition parties; another 27 percent praised Modi and his government.

Under Modi, India has slipped 43 places down the World Press Freedom Index; it now ranks a dismal 159 out of 180 nations. Since 2021, Freedom House has categorized India as only “partly free” in its annual reports. That same year, the V-Dem Institute, an independent research organization based in Sweden, also reclassified India, observing that “the world’s largest democracy has turned into an electoral autocracy.”

These days in India, talk often swirls back to the Emergency, India’s previous era of authoritarian rule, in the 1970s under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The 1977 elections that ended the Emergency produced a staggering upset, with Gandhi losing her own parliamentary seat. But the Princeton professor Gyan Prakash, who wrote a book about the Emergency, told me that the analogy to the present moment was misleading. Gandhi freed opposition leaders from prison as elections approached; Modi has been doing the opposite.

“The 1977 elections were held fair and square,” Prakash told me. “One fears that is not going to be the case with 2024.”

In India’s stratified and deeply hierarchical society, elections have long been a great equalizer. During the campaign season, social boundaries between castes and classes seem momentarily to dissolve as passionate political debates break out in tea stalls and on crowded buses and subways. Candidates and parties produce festive road shows on city streets.

But Modi and his Hindu-nationalist juggernaut have quelled these energies. The current election feels sluggish. Most cities and towns have been bathed in the saffron hue of the BJP, and posters of Modi’s visage can be seen everywhere. Participation is correspondingly low; when voting began for more than 100 parliamentary seats on April 19, turnout was down more than three percentage points from five years ago.

Trust in the election commission is declining among voters; even fewer have confidence in the electronic machines used for voting. Making matters worse, this year’s turnout figures from the first round of voting were publicized a full 10 days later than normal, and they were expressed as percentages instead of whole numbers. Indian citizens rely on turnout data to assess the fairness of the vote. Now voters are openly voicing fears of sabotage; despite repeated appeals, the commission has not yet released the full figures.

The weakening of public faith in Indian elections is not surprising or accidental. The Hindu-nationalist movement has always been disdainful of Indian constitutionalism and democracy, seeing its participation in these processes as tactical accommodations on the path to its eventual goal of a centralized, authoritarian government. Commenting on India’s first election back in 1952, Organiser, the preeminent journal of the Hindu right, suggested that the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, “would live to confess the failure of universal adult franchise in India.” Prakash told me that the government’s more recent ploys to throttle the opposition were part of the “BJP’s single-minded and ruthless drive for a one-party state.”

On April 22, a BJP candidate was elected unopposed from the Surat constituency in Gujarat, two weeks before elections were scheduled in the city of 1.8 million voters. The Congress candidate for the parliamentary seat had been rejected on a technicality; when the party put forward an alternative candidate, he was rejected too. Under mysterious circumstances, the remaining eight non-BJP candidates simultaneously withdrew from the race, paving the way for the BJP to win without a vote.

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On the evening of the Surat victory, Jitendra Chauhan, an independent candidate from Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat, alleged in a video posted online that associates of the city’s sitting MP were threatening him, and that he feared he might even be killed if he didn’t withdraw his nomination. (The Gandhinagar MP is Amit Shah, India’s home minister and widely considered the second-most-powerful person in the country. The BJP denies Chauhan’s claims.) Over the following days, 16 candidates, including Chauhan, withdrew; many said they had faced pressure from powerful BJP politicians and even the police. Around the same time, in Indore, a Congress candidate went to the polling office to withdraw his nomination; when he emerged, he had joined the BJP.

Such strong-arm maneuvers offer one among several possible means of securing a one-party future. In January, during a mayoral election in the northern city of Chandigarh, a polling officer belonging to the BJP was caught on camera spoiling opposition ballots. That case resulted in a rare intervention: The election was overturned by India’s supreme court.

Through his decade in power, Modi has plowed the level playing field from which he rose. In 2014, when Modi led his insurgent campaign against the Congress, the media were free to robustly criticize the government, democratic institutions such as the election commission and the courts asserted themselves, and dissent did not carry the threat of prison. Now the very bodies the public once relied on to safeguard the electoral process have seemingly abdicated their constitutional mandate and are helping make Modi’s third bid for prime minister into something resembling a coronation.