India's Faltering Democracy

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottown, PEI] Guardian

Sharing borders with six countries and spanning a geography that extends from Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the world’s largest democracy and second most populous country.

But last March, Freedom House, a nonpartisan democracy advocacy organization, downgraded India from “free” to “partly free” in its annual Freedom in the World report. The assessment was in response to a steep decline in the country’s democratic and secular values.

The U.S. State Department’s human rights report on India, also released in March, cited “unlawful and arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings perpetrated by police,” and “restrictions on freedom of expression and the press,” involving the use of criminal libel laws to police social media.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned New Delhi not to backslide on human rights, amid mounting criticism that the Indian government is cracking down on dissent and discriminating against its Muslim population.

“Both of our democracies are works in progress,” Blinken said in his visit to India in late July. “At a time of rising global threats to democracy and international freedoms -- we talk about a democratic recession – it’s vital that we two world-leading democracies continue to stand together in support of these ideals.”

Following his first election triumph in 2014, many hoped Prime Minister Narendra Modi would become a populist reformer, focused on rapid economic development. Instead, critics describe a staunchly Hindu nationalist regime that has unsettled India’s minorities, not least its Muslims.

Every single one of India’s democratic and independent institutions, from the Election Commission to the judiciary to the media, has come under attack. Secularism, enshrined in its constitution after independence in 1947, looks a spent force.

Author and lawyer Suchitra Vijayan, the founder and the executive director of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organization, spent seven years travelling India’s 14,500-kilometre land borders to explore how its various peoples are faring.

In her newly published Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India, she concludes that what has emerged is “an authoritarian India, deeply antagonistic to secularism, political dissent, and pluralism.”

The Indian state, she asserts, has always used excessive and extrajudicial violence on communities that resist, whether it’s the borderlands, peripheries, or mainland.

She was told that in many Muslim ruins and lesser-known shrines vandals place images and idols of Hindu gods and goddesses in them. Vijayan sees this as an attempt to exclude Muslims, India’s largest minority, from a shared history, and thereby to present the fiction that because India is a majority Hindu state it should be a Hindu-first state. “When we exclude them from our history, we can quietly exclude them from this land,” she writes.

Muslim Bangladeshis illegally crossing the border into India has become an increasingly fraught political issue. The two countries share a 4,096-kilometre border. The line runs through five Indian states: West Bengal, Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya and Mizoram. The Indian Border Security Force has identified half of the border as vulnerable to crossings either due to the lack of fencing or bodies of water.

Prime Minister Modi’s popularity should not be underestimated, however. In 2019 his populist campaign led to a massive majority in India’s 17th general election, decimating the opposition parties.

Emphasizing his plebeian background, Modi reiterated that his family belonged to a “most backward caste,” and in order to appeal to the poor, he projected himself as a potential victim of the former Congress Party rulers. He also stoked anti-Muslim feeling among the Hindu-majority electorate.

In their analysis of the election, published in the journal Contemporary South Asia last year, political scientists Christophe Jaffrelot and Gilles Verniers asserted that “The 2019 election campaign may remain in history as the moment when India transitioned from national-populism to political authoritarianism.”

Jaffrelot, a French academic at the Paris Institute of Political Studies known as Sciences Po, has now followed up with Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy. It relates how Modi’s government has moved India toward an ethnic democracy that equates the majoritarian community with the nation and relegates Muslims and Christians to second-class citizens.

At the moment, a return to an earlier era of liberal secularism, embodied by leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru or even Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, looks highly improbable.