For all the warning signs, India held the line after a decade of backsliding.
October 2024
This essay is part of a package on the elections that mattered most in 2024.
India’s June 2024 election took place after a decade of serious backsliding. Since coming to power in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have engaged in repeated attacks on independent journalists, censored Western media critical of the government, and weaponized law enforcement — targeting nearly 150 opposition politicians for harassment. In September 2020, attacks on Amnesty International forced the organization to halt its work in India. The biggest victims of Modi’s rule have been the country’s 204 million Muslims who have faced significant discrimination and violent attacks since Modi came to power: Hindu vigilantes have harassed small Muslim-owned businesses and lynched Muslims for allegedly trading cows. In BJP-controlled states, authorities have bulldozed hundreds of Muslim-owned houses and businesses.
Such behavior has rightly generated widespread concern. As Maya Tudor recently noted, “no country is a better exemplar of our global democratic recession than India.” In the run-up to the election, Šumit Ganguly suggested that Indian democracy confronted a threat as serious as that of 1975, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency and suspended elections for 21 months. V-Dem and other democracy watchdogs and scholars have argued that India has turned into an “electoral autocracy” like countries such as Belarus, Cameroon, Egypt, Russia, and Venezuela where elections are purely façade. In part because of India, V-Dem now contends that “most people live in autocracies . . . 71% of the world’s population.”
Yet India’s most recent election highlights why it is misleading to say that Indians “live in an autocracy.” According to commonsense definitions, autocracy refers to countries where power is concentrated in a single person and elections are rigged. In India however — despite the “mind-boggling logistics” of administering an election “across glaciers, deserts, jungles, and an ocean” — voting is widely seen as free and fair. The opposition has been allowed to run and campaign openly. Candidates rarely challenge results.
In fact, the 2024 elections demonstrated that India remains a highly competitive electoral regime. In spite of serious government abuse — including the freezing of opposition bank accounts and an attempt to disqualify opposition leader Rahul Gandhi — the 2024 election was unpredictable. Facing discontent over rising unemployment and a backlash among Muslims, the BJP retained power, but lost 63 seats and fell 32 short of a majority. To retain power, the BJP was forced into a coalition with two small regional parties, the Telugu Desam Party of Andhra Pradesh and Janata Dal (United) of Bihar. The opposition coalition, INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance), garnered 40 percent of seats, just 2 percent shy of the ruling coalition’s seat share. Indeed, India under Modi is best characterized not as an “autocracy,” but as a competitive authoritarian regime in which meaningful democratic institutions coexist with serious incumbent abuse. As bad as things are, India’s political system remains more democratic than authoritarian.
Lucan Ahmad Way is Distinguished Professor of Democracy at the University of Toronto, co-director of the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, and co-chair of the Journal of Democracy Editorial Board.
Copyright © 2024 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Sanchit Khanna/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
|
FURTHER READING |
||
The Rise of India’s Second Republic |
Why This Election Is India’s Most ImportantVoters are choosing more than the parties and politicians who will represent them. It is something more basic: The future of India’s secular democracy is on the ballot. |
Why India’s Democracy Is Dying |