Earlier this year, Boris Johnson and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi held a virtual summit, at which the UK prime minister hailed a new era of mutual friendship. “The UK and India share many fundamental values,” Johnson claimed. “The UK is one of the oldest democracies. And India is the world’s largest.”
Such Indian courtship is far from unique. Other western nations, not least the US, are also aiming to tap into India’s potentially huge economy while also seeking a natural geopolitical hedge against China.
Yet even as they do, the world’s largest democracy is changing in fundamental ways, raising questions about whether it should even be called a democracy at all. Two new books underline the speed of that shift, giving subtly different but equally pessimistic accounts of the country’s trajectory.
India’s democratic malaise is by now well documented. The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, which tracks data on the health of democracies, recently reclassified the country as an “electoral autocracy”. Other indices tell a similar story of weakening institutions and declining civil liberties.
Following his first election triumph in 2014, many hoped Modi would become a populist reformer, focused on rapid economic development. Instead, liberal critics describe a staunchly Hindu nationalist regime that has unsettled India’s minorities, not least its 200m Muslims. Secularism, enshrined in its constitution after independence in 1947, looks a spent force.
As its title suggests, To Kill a Democracy echoes this view. Rather than just criticising Modi, however, journalist Debasish Roy Chowdhury and political scientist John Keane describe a longer process of decay, often dating as far back as independence itself. “The surveys don’t capture the most concerning trend: the slow motion crumbling of the social foundations of Indian democracy,” they write. “For many decades, the country has been suffering an undeclared social emergency.”
Their list of concerns is long. Three decades after economic liberalisation began in 1991, more than 365m Indians remain stuck in poverty. Food and water scarcity are rife. Air quality has deteriorated. Institutions in areas such as the courts, policing and taxation show few signs of improvement. Caste injustice is still widespread. India’s health system is especially precarious, as the continuing pandemic has shown.
“Two months into the Covid lockdown . . . many of India’s well-hidden secrets tumbled on to its highways,” the authors write, referring to near-biblical scenes of migrants fleeing big cities. “The pestilence hadn’t gutted India’s health system, it merely showed it up for what it was.”
Roy Chowdhury’s and Keane’s is a searing and original polemic, albeit one that suggests India has made little economic or social progress over recent generations — an argument that might make even Modi’s fiercer critics pause. Poverty rates have indeed risen during the pandemic. But, as the authors briefly admit, they had previously fallen by well over 200m in recent decades, an impressive achievement rooted in an admittedly faltering economic record.
Meanwhile, it is true that India’s state apparatus is weak, with worrying signs of decline in institutions such as its parliament and central bank. But there have been improvements in other areas, from energy market regulation to digital identity management.
A more focused account comes via Christophe Jaffrelot, a French academic at Sciences Po and doyen of south Asian scholarship, who aims more squarely at the prime minister himself.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata party has never hidden its aims of building a Hindu rashtra — a government and nation dominated by Hindus. Modi pushed this aim relatively gently in his first term in office, but has since moved forward more forcefully after his second victory in 2019. Jaffrelot suggests the result sees India “transitioning from a de facto Hindu Rashtra to an authoritarian Hindu Raj.”
Modi’s India is a masterpiece of careful research, albeit one requiring a patience for detail, with footnotes alone running to more than 100 pages. Jaffrelot provides in-depth accounts of everything from the rise of vigilante violence against minorities to declines in judicial independence and the financing of electoral corruption. Yet rather than focusing merely on economics, or the religious chauvinism of Modi’s more extreme supporters, the author’s central task is to place caste back at the heart of India’s contemporary story.
Indian history should be divided into three phases, Jaffrelot suggests. First came a long spell of “conservative democracy” led by traditional elites, under its first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the family dynasty that followed. This was challenged in the 1980s during a second phase, in which social reforms gave greater power to lower caste groups, in part via affirmative action schemes.
Modi has now moved to a third stage of “ethnic democracy”, meaning a Hindu-dominated system where minorities are second-class citizens. Yet Jaffrelot sees a power grab by the old upper castes — generally urban and middle-class Hindus who also often happen to be drawn from the upper reaches of Hinduism’s traditionally rigid hierarchical order — who dominate the BJP’s representatives in parliament in particular. “Modi’s populism appeared to India’s elites as an antidote to caste politics,” he writes. “In that sense, it was a sort of counter-revolution.”
Although different in focus, the two books come to many common conclusions. Both view India as part of what academics dub a new wave of global “autocratisation” hitting countries from Hungary to the US under Donald Trump. Both cite approvingly How Democracies Die, the 2018 book by Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, which says democracies tend to decline in dribs and drabs, rather than suddenly collapsing in a heap.
India’s place in this wider story clearly carries huge significance. Were New Delhi to shift permanently in a more autocratic direction, taking 1.3bn people with it, global democracy itself would shift back to become a fringe political pursuit.
Inequality is a further common theme. Economic reform also spawned the rise of a new “billionaire Raj” dominated by so-called “Bollygarchs”, as local business oligarchs such as Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani are often known.
Most evidence suggests this trend is continuing, not least via the growing fortunes of men such as Ambani and Adani, both of whom keep rocketing up global tycoon wealth rankings, building vast fortunes in industries from technology to natural resources via a mixture of daring risk-taking and close connections to governing elites. Roy Chowdhury and Keane also stress the parallel rise of what they dub India’s “poligarchs” — meaning politicians who use state power to promote their own considerable business interests.
Finally, both books are united in their bleak outlook. After nearly 300 gloomy pages, Roy Chowdhury and Keane do at least manage a heavily caveated conclusion that lays out brief hopes for readers who dislike India’s new direction. With Modi due to fight another national election by 2024, voters do have time to rebuff the BJP, as they did recently in elections in the state of West Bengal. Covid-19 has dented his government’s popularity too, albeit from a high base.
But a clear-eyed analysis suggests Modi is likely to run and win again. Meanwhile, his eventual successor may be an even more polarising BJP figure, such as Yogi Adityanath, the Hindu monk turned firebrand chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the country’s most populous state.
After all this, it is worth noting that at least two groups are likely to play down the arguments of books such as these. The first are Modi’s many supporters, who see him as a leader capable of ushering India into a new period of national greatness. Certainly the idea that Indian governance is suffering a slow, multi-decade collapse, as argued in To Kill a Democracy, will sit oddly with many of those watching the country’s steady rise into the ranks of top-tier economic and geopolitical powers — a path that looks set to continue on most reasonable assumptions, albeit perhaps at a slower pace than Modi’s admirers might hope.
Many in India also see little to worry about in a future of “ethnic democracy”, pointing to the likes of Israel or Malaysia, whose democratic systems have some kind of state religion that reflects their dominant social group.
Oddly, the second group most likely to play down India’s democratic direction are western democracies themselves, many of whom now view Modi as a critical partner in their common attempts to balance China. Typically western nations find it harder to deal with countries the more autocratic they become. In India’s case the opposite has been true, with ties improving even as the country’s democratic rankings have ebbed.
Much the same is true the other way. India could easily have become more sceptical of the west under a leader like Modi. But its ties to the US and other European countries are now stronger than at any time in living memory — again, because New Delhi sees them as useful friends given its own tussles with Beijing.
All of this suggests a conundrum for those such as Johnson or US President Joe Biden, who have by now almost irreversibly hitched their geopolitical fortunes to Modi and his eventual successors. As India becomes more geopolitically important, so its governance looks set to become ever more complex.
The country’s future political model is far from certain, but a return to an earlier era of liberal secularism, embodied by leaders such as Nehru or even Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, looks highly improbable. Ultimately many of the world’s smaller democracies will hope its largest does enough to avoid losing that title. If not, western leaders will most likely talk loudly about fundamental values and democratic alliances, while quietly averting their eyes when India heads in a different direction.
To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism by Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane OUP, £20, 336 pages
Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy by Christophe Jaffrelot Princeton, £30, 656 pages
James Crabtree is executive director of IISS-Asia and author of ‘The Billionaire Raj’
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