COVID-19 Update: NED is continuing to operate during this worldwide health emergency, and to make grants in support of democracy. However, our office is closed to the public and all in-person events and meetings have been postponed, cancelled or are occurring virtually.
This essay argues that a number of the policies that the current, ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government in India is pursuing threaten to rend the very fabric of India’s democracy. Its policies toward press freedoms, civil liberties, and judicial independence are all profoundly inimical to the functioning of a democratic state. Unless these policies are checked or reversed the future of India’s democracy may well be imperiled.
About the Author
Šumit Gangulyis a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he directs the Huntington Program on Strengthening US-India Relations and is also Distinguished Professor of Political Science and the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations Emeritus at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author (with William Thompson) of Ascending India and Its State Capacity (2017) and the coeditor (with Eswaran Sridharan) of The Oxford Handbook of Indian Politics (2014).
Authoritarian regimes are not lawless. Rather, autocrats take to the courtroom not only to enforce their will but to justify their rule. So how do they appeal to reason? How…
India’s Constitution has long seemed stable, but the rise of an ethnic, absolute, and opaque state is changing the constitutional order in momentous and disturbing ways.
