Indian democracy has always been intertwined with authoritarianism — Modi govt is the norm

Ironically, it was during the coalition era that there was a cementing and overt manifestation of authoritarianism in India’s political structure

File photo of Narendra Modi | Commons

The period between 1989 and 2014, referred to rather euphemistically as the coalition era, generally seems to form the backdrop against which arguments for India’s democratic deficit—or its drift into electoral autocracy are made. This, I contend, skews perceptions about the nature of democracy and political power in India, providing a powerful rhetorical tool to direct attention to the post-2014 period but saying little about why the coalition era proved especially profitable for the extraparliamentary aspects of democracy.

The post–Rajiv Gandhi era in Indian politics, beginning in 1989, brought economic liberalization, the shattering of Congress hegemony, the rising assertiveness of OBC (Other Backward Classes) groups, and escalating communal tension. OBC demands and determination combined with the implementation in 1990 of the Mandal Commission re-
port (1980) brought about a deepening of the representative character of India’s legislative institutions (and bureaucratic institutions, to a certain extent), as the proportion of OBC legislators almost doubled. This demonstrated the capacity of mobilized social groups (but importantly, not individuals) to resist and renegotiate power relations within India’s
democratic structures. Concurrently, first V.P. Singh’s Janata Dal and then new caste-based and region-based parties smashed Congress’s dominance, especially in the crucial northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, resulting in splintered mandates at the national level and leading to the need for multiparty coalitions as no single party could muster a legislative majority.

By their very nature, coalitions prevented concentration of power and provided for a wider dispersal of executive authority. This diluted government control, creating space for a variety of institutions to exert degrees of independence—the courts, but especially, bodies such as the Election Commission and the Comptroller and Auditor General. Inevitably, a greater degree of liberalism and a wider domain of civic action ensued. Globalization brought a dash of added glamor. It is little wonder that when plotted on a graph, India’s democracy indices peak in the late 1990s and the 2000s at the height of the coalition era. These peaks, however, had rather prosaic underlying causes.

In the states, where mandates were not splintered, things were very different. There, with concentration of power made even more acute by the Tenth Schedule, and thus largely secured against backbench rebellion and intraparty conflict, chief ministers—especially those from regional parties who also doubled as party bosses—quickly transformed
themselves into “supreme leaders” and pioneered a “Chief Minister model of governance.” Personalization of authority, capture of state institutions, symbiotic relationships with the bureaucracy, political violence, intimidation of opponents and dissenters, the malicious use of First Information Reports (the first reports of possible crimes, written by police) and false cases, and widespread surveillance were key parts of this model, which was replicated across multiple states.

This indeed became the de facto, tried-and-tested model for running a government—first fashioned in the states, and then implemented in the center once a legislative majority was mustered in 2014. That Narendra Modi was a chief minister who ran his state on this model for more than a decade is not insignificant. I am unaware (perhaps because I am a historian and not a political scientist) of major theoretical explorations of this phenomenon, but as the journalist Rama Lakshmi once wrote: “If you have covered Indian states long enough, you would know that this is how several chief ministers govern—like regional satraps and chieftains . . . . Many in the Delhi commentariat chose to look the other way because a lot of this was happening during haloed coalition years in the centre.”

At this point, I am not even going into the criminality, corruption, and gangsterism that became a regular feature of politics in states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar; the political violence and thuggery in places like West Bengal and Kerala; or the state-sanctioned use of extrajudicial violence in Punjab, Kashmir, Bombay, and the like. I am only pointing
out the cementing and overt manifestation of authoritarianism in India’s political structure during the coalition era. While the dispersal of power allowed institutions to exert a degree of independence in Delhi, unprecedented concentration of executive authority caused supposedly independent institutions to completely collapse or surrender in the states. Thus the coalition era, in that sense, was a mixed blessing as far as the quality of Indian democracy went. So, what indeed does all this imply?

A Singular Experience

In his book India’s Founding Moment, the political theorist Madhav Khosla argues that India’s constitutional experience was singular, its founding the response to a unique and exceptional set of questions. The peculiar and specific historical conditions of the constitution’s creation, both domestically and globally, Khosla wrote, “should encourage us to see it as the paradigmatic democratic experience of the twentieth century.” To do so, however, requires accepting that the normative foundations, and therefore the political and constitutional structure, of Indian democracy are distinct.

At their heart lay questions about the realities of India’s condition and its suitability for democracy. And these were answered with significant local innovations to the transplanted
Westminster system to acclimatize it to local soil, which was vastly different from Britain and the white-settler dominions. Allowing the executive to legislate in place of the legislature, in peacetime and without the declaration of an emergency—executive power at legislative expense, unheard of in Westminster—was only one of these local innovations. There were many, collectively transforming India’s Parliament into what Harshan Kumarasingham called an “Eastminster,” a beast very different from Westminster beyond the likeness of superficial institutional forms.

What I am getting at here is this: If we accept the normative singularity (or at least specialness) of India’s democratic experience, and the specificity of its conditions, then it follows that normative comparisons with the older democracies of Western Europe and North America are relatively unproductive. For example, in counting the number of jour-
nalists jailed, what meaningful comparison is really possible between a country with a constitutional commitment to freedom of the press, such as the United States, and a country such as India, where it is legally and constitutionally permissible for a bureaucrat to seize your property on accusations of that you are a gangster? Indian democracy should thus be assessed on its own terms.

On its own terms, the formal practices of Indian democracy remain intact, even if one could argue that its substance is threatened by the bureaucratic authoritarianism underpinning it. By the standards of electoral contestation and voter participation, as Ashutosh Varshney has observed, “India’s democratic vitality has held steady.” In states such as Delhi, Bihar, and West Bengal, smaller and more poorly resourced parties have roundly defeated the BJP. Voter turnouts remain high. No one disputes the validity of results. Space for well-organized civil society action, even in a relatively inhospitable institutional context, remains available, if diminished, as demonstrated by the 2020–21 farmers’ protests.

The informal practices of democracy—civic action and liberal freedoms of expression and association—may well be constrained, but that is, and has been, a feature of Indian democracy and not a bug. An overt manifestation of authoritarianism is embedded in India’s constitutional structure and political culture, where it is threaded tightly with democracy and grounded in history and pragmatism. Crucially, this is accepted by all shades of political opinion. No party or social movement has yet sought to challenge or promised to undo the legal and constitutional architecture on which such authoritarianism is premised—one can only assume that it enjoys a degree of political consensus.

The reign (I use this word deliberately) of Nehru saw bloody battles over territorial sovereignty in Hyderabad, Kashmir, Manipur, and Nagaland; India’s worst anti-Muslim violence in Hyderabad in 1948, which claimed thousands of lives; the constitutional clipping of civil liberties via the First Amendment; and draconian legislation such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. The reign of Indira Gandhi saw the Indian Air Force bombing its own citizens; mass relocation of villagers in Mizoram; the Emergency (1975–77) and rampant anticonstitutionalism; forced sterilization; blood-letting in Punjab; a massacre of Muslims in the Nellie area of Assam; and Operation Steeplechase and brutal anticommunist violence in West Bengal in the early 1970s. Consider what those eras might have looked like if social media, camera phones, 24-hour news cycles, the internet, and mass information flows had existed; if Twitter feeds across the world had been flooded with videos and testimonies from places such as Nagaland in 1956, at the height of the insurgency; Bastar (then part of Madhya Pradesh) in 1966, during the police massacre of tribal people; or Bengal in 1971 during Operation Steeplechase.

The reign of Modi in that sense is less a departure from the norm than a confirmation of it. Despite appearing to deviate from recent history, the BJP government in fact utilizes existing legal tools, building on and solidifying trends and practices that were already prevalent in the states. Modi’s reign has seen, and will see, its share of ostensibly “authoritarian” actions, and one may disagree with their intended social outcomes. But unless the formal structures of democracy struggle or break down, or a political consensus against the concentrations of power that enable such “authoritarian” actions emerges and proclaims as a political goal the liberalization of the constitutional structure, there is little, as yet, to suggest that the broad continuum of Indian democracy is anything but intact. We may have to wait for a new coalition era (or perhaps for the wheels to come off entirely) to know for sure. But until then, Indian democracy remains as it ever was: messy, normatively unique, and intertwined with a large dose of authoritarianism.

A full version of this essay originally appears in the new issue of the Journal of Democracy. This is one of five essays in a special package on the state of Indian democracy.