India is the best country to use as an example of our current democratic crisis. India’s democracy surprised hordes of skeptics when it was initially established by becoming more stable during the course of its first seven decades. The consolidation of civilian rule over the military and years of vigorous multiparty competition were formal steps in India’s democratic deepening. Informal steps included the strengthening of standards governing the independence of the Electoral Commission and the rising involvement of women and other social groups in formal political life.
India has also had two notable democratic declines: the Emergency, a 21-month period from June 1975 to March 1977, and a more recent slide that started with the election of Narendra Modi in 2014. Key democratic institutions have technically continued to exist during Modi’s leadership, but the values and practices that support democracy have significantly eroded. This informal democratic decline in modern India contrasts sharply with the Emergency, during which Indira Gandhi formally abolished nearly all democratic institutions by prohibiting elections, detaining political opponents, savagely restricting civil liberties, stifling independent media, and passing three constitutional amendments that reduced the country’s courts’ authority.
However, democracy watchdogs concur that India currently occupies a grey area between total democracy and total despotism. Although groups that monitor democracies label them differently, all of them classify India’s current government as a “hybrid regime”—that is, neither a full democracy nor a full dictatorship. And it’s brand-new. India’s status was downgraded by Freedom House in 2021 from Free to Partly Free (the only category that remains is Not Free). On its scale of closed autocracy, electoral autocracy, electoral democracy, or liberal democracy, the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project demoted India to the category of “electoral autocracy” in the same year. India was also placed in the “flawed democracy” category on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s spectrum of fully democratic, flawed democratic, hybrid democratic, and authoritarian democratic regimes. India’s democratic status was downgraded.
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What’s a name worth?
It is first required to define democracy in order to assess India’s democratic degradation, both for the sake of conceptual clarity in the decision-making process and because democracy inherently implies moral legitimacy. In Abraham Lincoln’s words, “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” democracy is a notion that embodies a form of government. The criteria we can use to evaluate the state of India’s democracy are made clearer by a clear understanding of the non-normative features of democracy that operationalize this concept.
Declining freedoms and Increasing Rights
India never had a very good democracy. While it did result in the largest affirmative action program and a widespread program to alleviate poverty, the formal practice of independent, competitive elections with a wide spectrum of civil liberties has always had several drawbacks. Democracy, however, also had an autocorrect mechanism that made it possible to remove incumbents from office. Today, that autocorrect function is in risk in a number of informal ways. India’s average score for political rights, which takes into account the three pillars of elections, competition, and autonomy, was the same for the nine years prior to Modi becoming office and for the nine years following 2014. Because the Modi administration has significantly reduced the de facto protection of incumbents, incumbent change is still electorally feasible but unlikely.
Is it possible to save Indian democracy?
As in other parts of the world, democracy is not currently being put to death by a military takeover or dramatic, planned mass arrests of opponents. Instead, autocrats have mastered the art of talking democratically while acting autocratically. This allows them to retain a legal façade of democracy while persecuting the opposition and reducing room for devoted dissent. While Modi’s most prominent political rivals have recently been disqualified from running for office, India’s formal institutions of democracy are also under pressure. However, it is primarily the common citizen’s inability to read critical analyses of government policy, speak and gather freely without fear of harassment, as well as the absence of meaningful checks on executive power that have turned India into a hybrid regime.
