New Delhi: The impact of the Modi government on India’s democracy is a question that has elicited two divergent responses from a set of scholars invited by the US-based Journal of Democracy to offer an analysis of the situation.
The journal — a publication on the theory and practice of democracy, founded in 1990 — has released a series of articles based on the question “Is India still a democracy?”, where five scholars weigh in on the state of democracy under the Narendra Modi-led BJP government.
While some scholars agreed that democracy has suffered since Modi became Prime Minister in 2014, others argued that it wouldn’t be right to blame him and the BJP alone. However, all are united “in believing that India’s political condition warrants concern”.
The series, part of the July issue, has been edited by journal co-editors William J. Dobson (American journalist) and Tarek Masoud (professor of democracy and governance at Harvard University).
The contributing scholars are Maya Tudor, a professor of politics and public policy at Oxford University, historian Tripurdaman Singh, Rahul Verma, a professor of political science at Ashoka University, Yale professor Vineeta Yadav, and Sumit Ganguly, distinguished professor of political science at Indiana University.
In their introduction, Dobson and Masoud point out how, apart from the 1975 Emergency, India’s democratic record has been better than expected from a country “with its low level of socioeconomic development and its high degree of ethnolinguistic diversity.”
However, since the “ethnonationalist” BJP and Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, they have “engaged in what is by some accounts a wholesale dismantling of the democratic institutions, norms, and practices that made India such a miracle”, they say.
The editors also refer to the 2021 Freedom House Index report that categorised India as ‘Partly Free’, downgraded from ‘Free’.
They say that the state of India’s democracy is important not just to its citizens, but also to democratic movements worldwide.
The five essays in the series approach democracy through different lenses, looking at the history of the Indian State alongside recent political developments involving the BJP.
Maya Tudor’s essay, ‘Why India’s Democracy is Dying’, takes a comprehensive approach to the definition of democracy itself.
She talks about the need to look beyond elections to define democracies, suggesting that civil liberties, government autonomy, and “genuine political competition” are also important.
She argues that, if these aspects are considered, Indian democracy has indeed downgraded, also pointing to what she describes as “outright intimidation” of media, use of the colonial-era sedition law to “silence its critics”, an “increasingly quiescent judiciary”, and “growing lack of accountability of the executive to Parliament”. However, she also argues that a robust Opposition party with organisational roots can help improve the situation.
Rahul Verma and Tripurdaman Singh’s essays argue that reports of India’s “democratic backsliding” do not take into account the history of the State.
Singh, who is an Ambizione Fellow at the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, makes the unique point that India has an “inevitable authoritarianism interspersed with democracy”.
He bats for Indian democracy to not be compared with the West, since its political and constitutional structures have authoritarianism “embedded” in them. He points to three things: political coalitions in the past, the history of crime and politics in states such as Uttar Pradesh, and the “unstructured” nature of civic liberties in India.
The Journal of Democracy is part of the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a “nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world”.
According to the NED website, it makes more than 2,000 grants to “support the projects of non-governmental groups abroad who are working for democratic goals in more than 100 countries”. It is largely funded by the US Congress.
Speaking about the Journal of Democracy series on India, Ashutosh Varshney, who is the Sol Goldman professor of political science at Brown University, told ThePrint that “the problem isn’t whether Congress or other governments have abused their power before”.
“It is the degree of abuse — the degree to which restrictions are made, minorities are attacked, and freedom of expression is curtailed right now,” he said.
“…The issue of democratic backsliding is quantitative, not binary. It’s not a yes or no, it is measured on a scale.”
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‘Problems didn’t start with Modi’
Rahul Verma’s essay, ‘The Exaggerated Death of Indian Democracy’, says that indices and democracy watchdogs lack the appropriate context to analyse Indian democracy.
There has been an evolution of the political system, and some would argue polarising politics has increased, according to Verma. But, he says, so has voter turnout, and citizens have also expressed satisfaction with democracy.
Therefore, the framework to look at Indian democracy needs to change. “…Problems did not begin with the rise of the BJP under Modi, nor are the party and prime minister solely responsible for the current morass,” he says.
Verma also argues that “claims of Indian democracy’s death” are completely exaggerated. Though there are causes for concern, what we are witnessing right now are just features of a dominant-party system that India has recently shifted to, he says.
Vineeta Yadav points at politicians and other political elites for the steady decline of Indian democracy, a phenomenon she claims started even before 2014. She agrees with the alarm bells sounded by critics with regard to the BJP’s rule, but Yadav also points out that elites in India “have a long history of misusing democratic institutions and violating norms”.
Like Verma and Singh, she chooses to look at the present political situation from a broader historical lens.
Sumit Ganguly, however, takes a stronger position in his paper titled ‘Modi’s Undeclared Emergency’. He argues that the present BJP government’s policies are threatening to “rend the very fabric of India’s democracy”.
Focusing specifically on the second term of the BJP government, which began in 2019, Ganguly argues that the government has launched a “steady attack on civil liberties, personal rights and free speech”. Ganguly refers to the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975, to compare the present-day situation in terms of the “suspension of democratic norms and procedures”.
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
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