Election in Modi’s India: Endangered Democracy
Dr Börje Ljunggren is former Swedish Ambassador to Vietnam (1994-97) and China (2002-06)
On 19 April, India begins its parliamentary elections. With nearly a billion voters it’s described as the world’s largest democratic exercise, yet is also deeply unsettling. Modi’s win could signal the end of a pluralistic India that has been embraced by the West as an ally against an authoritarian China. The election process is more protracted than ever, lasting for six weeks, which greatly benefits Modi’s party with its exceedingly well-stocked campaign coffers.
I visited India for the first time over fifty years ago: an India described by Gunnar Myrdal in his Asian Drama (1968), prior to the Green Revolution, as doomed to ever deeper poverty. I have since returned there often in my different roles in Swedish development cooperation and diplomacy. However, when I recently spent a month in India, it had been ten years since my last visit. Now I was confronted with Modi’s India!
Our media is dominated by images of India’s economic growth, and India is changing. Striking is how the middle class has grown. Over 900 million people now have internet access, and the country is the world’s second-largest online market, fuelled by the introduction of online banking and welfare payments. The country’s infrastructure has undergone huge improvements. Twenty cities now have a modern subway system. But at the same time poverty has deepened for vulnerable groups. Widening disparities and growing regional differences are also striking features of Modi’s India. Life-expectancy is a significant indicator. India’s average life expectancy stands at 70.4 years, several years lower than neighbouring Bangladesh (73.8 years) and it is particularly low in Modi’s stronghold in northern India. Uttar Pradesh, for example, with its more than 200 million inhabitants has a life expectancy of only 66 years. This is compared to an expectancy of over 72 years in southern India’s Tamil Nadu, a bastion of anti-Modi resistance governed by a regional party. None of India’s successful southern states are governed by the BJP. These significant socio-economic disparities have led Modi to postpone the country’s already delayed census until after the election. Arguably, environmental progress is the most serious aspect of what has not be tackled during Modi’s tenure. This is illustrated by India’s ranking 178th out of 180 countries in terms of air quality in 2023 according to Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index.
Another image is that of India as an emerging power and India is indeed on its way to becoming not only the dominant power in South Asia but also an increasingly assertive global power. “A nationalist outlook will naturally produce a nationalist diplomacy, and it is something that the world will need to get used to,” Indian Foreign Minister Subramanyam Jaishankar argued in a recently released book. Foreign policy also becomes identity driven. Modi, following the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat where he as chief minister remained passive, was long denied a visa to the USA. Today however, he is welcomed as an indispensable friend at a time when both the US and Europe see China as a dominating threat. At the same time, India retains its traditionally close ties to Russia, as illustrated by India’s stance on Ukraine.
India is changing. This picture of a changing India must not obscure the profound identity change that Modi is determined to bring about. After his ten years in power, we are already facing a dramatically different India. The prominent Indian historian Ramachandra Guha, author of India after Gandhi (2007), notes in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs that Modi’s influence goes deeper than what he has achieved materially. His supporters “proudly boast that India has rediscovered and reaffirmed its Hindu nationalist roots, leading to a decolonization of the imagination – a truer independence than Mahatma Gandhi’s freedom movement ever achieved.” Modi’s government “actively works to intensify both religious and regional conflicts, in ways that will strain the country’s social fabric”.
India has nearly 200 million Muslims who today see their citizenship being diminished. The construction of a Hindu temple in Ayodhya, at the site where a mosque was demolished by a Hindu mob in 1992, is hard to misinterpret. The temple was inaugurated in early 2024 by Modi, who declared that the temple “symbolised a new era for India”, a more authentic India. Religion and politics are i increasingly amalgamated.
This is how the landscape looks ahead of the country’s upcoming elections which are very likely to give Modi and his BJP alliance a continued clear majority, not in terms of votes, but with India’s first-past-the-post system in terms of seats in the Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament). The Hinduization of India, Hindutva, will deepen. Modi is in the process of deconstructing the secular India that won its independence in 1947, under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Today, the focus is on identity not issues. India’s entire political culture is shifting toward what scholars are calling “ethnic democracy”, “majority democracy”, “toxic majoritarianism” and “competitive authoritarianism”, all pointing in the same worrisome direction. The formal architecture of democracy is maintained but its institutions are systematically weakened.
Illustrative is how India’s ranking in our most recognised democracy indices has changed. The increasingly respected, Gothenburg-based V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) designates India in its latest ranking as an “electoral autocracy” and places India as the 104th out of 180 countries. In its latest ranking (2023), Reporters Without Borders ranked India 161st out of 180 despite once being known for the quality of its independent press. However, India is far from being a monolithic authoritarian state and critical media outlets such as Hindustan Times and the brave online newspaper The Wire still exist, albeit shrinking. Foreign correspondents on the ground as well as freelance journalists increasingly refrain from investigating and reporting on topics they would like to cover. In early 2023, police raided the BBC offices in New Delhi and Mumbai after the BBC aired a two-part documentary called India: The Modi Question about Modi’s actions during the deadly riots in Gujarat in 2002. Compounding this trend is the fact that most mainstream media outlets are now owned by wealthy businessmen close to Modi.
Who then is Modi, the man who today almost totally dominates India’s political life and continues to reshape its history? Unlike the previously predominant Congress Party, currently led by Rahul Gandhi the fourth generation of the Nehru-Gandhi (Indira) family, Modi is a self-made man from a low caste background. As a teenager, he joined the RSS – Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu-nationalist paramilitary organization to which he has remained loyal. With great skill, he has cultivated a personality cult and rallied significant portions of financial capital, through the oligarchs, behind him. People vote for him rather than for the BJP. Power has been centralised and the country’s federal structures weakened, only serving to undermine the federal compact.
Characteristic of Modi is his disdain for the opposition and its legitimacy. The opposition, of course, also bears significant responsibility for this development. What has become of the Congress Party, which for decades was the ruling party? Today it holds barely ten percent of the seats in the Lok Sabha and its figurehead, Rahul Gandhi, who reluctantly entered politics following the assassinations of his father Rajiv Gandhi and his grandmother Indira Gandhi, struggles to convince voters. Hope is pinned to the opposition’s efforts to unite ahead of the impending election, an endeavour that at best can be described as growing but still insufficient. The tension between Modi’s highly successful brand of Hindu populism and democracy will grow and ultimately further divide the country.
Nobel laureate and Harvard professor Amartya Sen is one of Modi’s most vocal critics. Sen has dedicated his entire life to advocating for a different India based on diversity and inclusivity. Modi’s “cementing of Hindu rule” and “an atmosphere of intolerance” run counter to everything Sen has fought for in his efforts to expand people’s “real freedom.” Sen generally refrains from signing petitions but in late March he made an exception when, in a separate statement marked by his profound disappointment with societal developments, he joined criticism of the increasingly widespread occurrence of politically driven detentions without trial. “We should very much hope that the judicial system of India will have the good sense to eliminate barbarities of this kind.”
Behind Modi’s façade of triumph and power lies, Ramachandra Guha notes, “a more fundamental truth: that the most important source of India’s survival as a democratic country, and its recent economic successes, has been the country’s political, economic, and cultural pluralism, precisely the qualities that the Prime Minister and his party are now attempting to erase.”
The opinions expressed are those of the contributor, not of the RSAA.
Read more from Dr Ljunggren
Vietnam: Navigating a Rapidly Changing Economy, Society, and Political Order
This book, undertaken by scholars from Vietnam, North America, and Europe, focuses on how the country’s governance shapes its politics, economy, social development, and relations with the outside world, as well as on the reforms required if Vietnam is to become a sustainable and modern high-income nation in the coming decades.
