A 50-page pre-publication online paper called Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy by Ashoka University’s assistant professor Sabyasachi Das has been attracting a disproportionate amount of attention from the Indian political class and commentariat. Written on 3 July, posted on 25 July, and revised on 2 August, the paper has triggered reactions sharply divided along party and ideological lines.
The anti-Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) faction has gone to town with the paper, embellishing its claims and puffing its so-called data-driven empiricism. This lot includes the Congress’ most educated and erudite Member of Parliament, Shashi Tharoor. On the other side, BJP’s Nishikant Dubey, a Lok Sabha member from Jharkhand, and—according to the Lok Sabha website—doctor of philosophy in Management Topic Emerging Issue of Rural Poverty in India, appeared on national television rubbishing Das’ claims.
Unfortunately, it is pretty obvious that neither Tharoor nor Dubey has taken the trouble of reading, let alone actually understanding, the long article. This is also true of all those—barring one or two—whom I have heard or read on this topic during the course of my research for this two-part column. I don’t entirely blame them. The paper is not only long but also has some complex, if not convoluted arguments, backed by statistical and other data sets, which are not easy to comprehend.
That is why it is practically impossible to separate its content from its context. The latter, indeed, is little else than the politics triggered by its reception in addition to its own politics, which it cannot escape no matter how much its objective-sounding academic tone and style might try to mask it. In fact, just a cursory look-up of the key phrase in its title, “democratic backsliding” in India, is enough to prove it.
Scores of articles condemning India for its weakening democracy will show up in such a search, with the top news and media outlets of the world having covered or promoted it prominently. These include “the usual suspects”—CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Financial Times, The Hindu, to name a few, and a host of respectable journals such as Foreign Policy and the Journal of Democracy.
In addition, there have been damning downgrades by international agencies: Freedom House lowered India from “free” to “partly free” in its 2021 Democracy under Siege report, accusing the Narendra Modi government of trying to “stifle critics in the media and academia”. V-Dem in its Democracy Report 2021 called India an “electoral autocracy”. The research institute added, “In general, the Modi-led government in India has used laws on sedition, defamation, and counterterrorism to silence critics.” The Economist Intelligence Unit pulled India from 46th place in 2021 down to 53rd in their 2023 Democracy Index, citing, you guessed it, “democratic backsliding”.
Also read: BJP, 2019 polls & ‘vote manipulation’: Why Ashoka professor’s paper has kicked up controversy
India’s white hope
When it comes to some of these international strictures and demotions, the current government’s star defender has been Salvatore Jason Babones, an American-Australian academic. Babones, an associate professor at the University of Sydney, is a quantitative sociologist whose 2018 book, The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts, was well-regarded.
It was not an outright, but back-handed defence of Trumpism, arguing that it was a populist rebellion against the tyranny of “unelected experts”. Babones, who is treated almost like a State guest in India, is feted by ruling party-backed institutions and think tanks as India’s champion. So much for the BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) claims of India being a viswaguru. When India faces criticism from abroad, their go-to saviour is usually a first-world academic who serves as their great white hope against global India bashing.
When it comes to Das’ paper, too, evidently none of the BJP-aligned intellectuals or academics has come up with a satisfactory response. Even Babones calls it “a masterful exhibition of mathematically driven economic reasoning. It is painstaking, careful, and precise. The young professor Das clearly has a bright future ahead of him”. Of course, before concluding, he writes, “Unfortunately for critics of the BJP (but fortunately for Indian democracy), the paper’s conclusions are likely to be entirely wrong”. Babones’ dismissal, however, is rather too superficial in addition to being technically, or shall I say statistically, obtuse. It is not entirely clear if he has had time to read Das’ paper thoroughly enough to critique both its methodology and conclusions.
Also read: 2 things hurting Indian politics today — BJP exceptionalism, Opposition’s attack on Modi
Political fog
What is abundantly clear is that there is no singular yardstick to judge Das’ paper. At the very least, it demands a two-fold approach: We must understand, as I suggested, both its context and its contents. Both, however, are so closely intertwined that it is impossible to disentangle them entirely. To put it simply, there’s no getting away from the political fog that surrounds and fumigates it.
The obvious slanting of the paper’s hypothesis is revealed not in its keywords, “Electoral fraud, precise control, democracy, economics of religion,” but its focus on electoral manipulation against India’s Muslims. In other words, despite its neutral sounding tone, style, and stance, in addition to its complicated methodology and otiose mathematical modelling, the paper’s entire thrust appears to cast doubt on India’s electoral probity and credibility.
What are we left with when the fog clears? Somewhat gasping for breath, if we have survived the choking, the nugget of sense that the paper actually discloses is quite the opposite of what we have been given to expect. Why do I say this? Not only because of a lack of substantial, let alone irrefutable, evidence but even giving the benefit of the doubt to its unconvincing methodology and even more inconclusive findings, what the paper’s findings actually show is that both the scope for and the actual evidence of electoral fraud in the 2019 Lok Sabha election has been next to negligible.
The article is part two of a two-part series.
Makarand R. Paranjape is an author and professor. His Twitter handle is @makrandparanspe. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)