Democracy Disfigured: India's Political Devolution

On May 28, 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the new Indian Parliament, a triangle-shaped edifice of concrete and stone, in a grand ceremony suffused with religious symbolism. The swarm of television cameras stayed transfixed on Modi as he performed a lengthy puja, a Hindu worship ritual, surrounded by a bevy of priests. Then, amid the chanting of Vedic mantras, Modi carried a gold-plated scepter, associated with an ancient Hindu kingdom, through the corridors of Parliament, before installing it above the chair of the speaker.

Nearly the entire opposition boycotted the consecration of the new Lok Sabha, or House of the People, dubbing it Modi’s “coronation.”

It was a familiar made-for-television spectacle, emblematic both of Modi’s leadership style as well as the state of Indian democracy.

The opposition’s boycott was prompted not just by the nakedly partisan tenor of the event but also a range of proximate grievances. These included the disqualification of several opposition leaders from the Lok Sabha and the bulldozing of controversial laws without debate.

“When the soul of democracy has been sucked out from the parliament, we find no value in a new building,” the joint opposition statement read.

Over the last decade, Modi has persistently trimmed the autonomy of every institution of representative democracy in India, subordinating them to a direct form of representation embodied in his personalistic leadership. The Modi government has zealously followed a distinctly autocratic checklist: arresting political opponents, including sitting chief ministers; weaponizing investigative and tax agencies; curbing dissent through sedition and anti-terror laws; cracking down on independent media and civil society organizations; and demonizing minorities.

Not even his own political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has been spared from Modi’s scythe. Once known for its collegial leadership and well-defined organizational structure, the party has now been reduced to a corporate-style electoral machine yoked to the writ of its domineering leader. The inauguration of the new Parliament thus marked the ultimate distillation of Modi’s claim to embody popular sovereignty – a spectacle conveying the dissolution of a parliamentary system built on the notion of “we the people” in favor of a plebiscitary leader calling out “me the people.” 

Since the start of Modi’s second term in 2019, a range of prestigious watchdog organizations began downgrading the status of India’s democracy. In 2021, Freedom House demoted the country to “partly free” status for the first time since the Emergency era (1975-77), which saw the formal suspension of elections along with most civil rights. The V-Dem Institute of Sweden has similarly characterized India as an “electoral autocracy”– a country that holds elections but lacks essential democratic safeguards. V-Dem’s latest report ranks India at 100 out of 179 countries for Liberal Democracy, suggesting that democracy had receded in the South-Central Asian region to the “level of 1975,” a decline “largely driven by India.”

Few post-colonial countries come close to India’s exceptional record of near unbroken democratic governance, barring two short years of Emergency rule. The story of democracy taking root in a desperately poor and largely illiterate country casts a heady spell. Furthermore, building the space for democratic representation in a country of continental span, containing the equivalent of all of the population of Africa, along with all of the ethnic and linguistic diversity of Europe, is quite an achievement in itself.

In his address to the Indian Parliament in 2010, then-U.S. President Barack Obama heaped fulsome praise on every facet of India’s package of democratic institutions : its “free and fair elections,” its “independent judiciary and the rule of law,” and its “thriving free press and vibrant civil society.” He described the country’s all-round progress as a “model to the world.”

Fast forward to 2023, and former President Obama was fielding interview questions on how to deal with the “autocratic… illiberal democrat” Indian prime minister. Obama replied that he would caution Modi to respect the rights of ethnic minorities in India, or risk the “strong possibility” of India “pulling apart” in the coming future.

How to understand the fall of Indian democracy from a model case to a cautionary tale, within the span of a decade? What has made the country’s seasoned electorate and its longstanding democratic institutions so vulnerable to the designs of a determined autocrat?

A short answer would be the “crisis of representation” that had plagued India’s democracy for at least a decade preceding Modi’s rise to power.  Yet, for an adequate diagnosis of this crisis, one needs to chart the longer arc of the country’s peculiar democratic evolution, in order to gauge the strengths and frailties embedded within the Indian democratic model.

Limited Democracy

The classic, and still influential, account of how India came to be a democracy was provided by American political scientist Barrington Moore in 1966. According to Moore’s thesis, two initial structural conditions favored the establishment of democracy in the country. One, the political weakening of the landed aristocracy on account of its collaboration with British Raj. And two, relatedly, the blocking of an alliance between the landed aristocracy and the commercial elite, in opposition to the peasants and workers, which had stifled democracy in other post-colonial countries (including neighboring Pakistan). Democracy survived, per Moore, because it provided legitimacy to ruling elites and regulated the process whereby they jostled for power.

For the first quarter-century after independence, the political system was largely the preserve of influential men who knew other influential men. The reigning Congress party, the torchbearer of the independence struggle, formed the backbone of the administrative state. Meanwhile, the fledgling opposition parties, both Left and Right, remained content with pushing their agenda by allying with sympathetic Congress factions, rather than taking any outright anti-establishment line.

In all state and national elections between 1952-1977, the ruling party (usually the Congress) returned to power 80 percent of the time, as the psephologist Prannoy Roy has documented. At the central level, the Congress was displaced only in 1977, after the Emergency. A similar level of high incumbency prevailed for local MLAs and MPs. This phase, typified by an osmotic relationship between a dominant party and the apparatuses of the state, along with a consensual relationship between ruling party and the opposition, has been characterized as the “Congress system.”

We can also term it a phase of “limited democracy.”

Political theorist Nadia Urbinati defined a representative democracy “as a government by means of opinion.” In this conception, democracies are not just defined by voting, by a system of decision-making legitimated by electoral mandates. Equally important is what Urbinati called the “extra-institutional domain of political judgments and opinions in their multifaceted expressions.” Autonomous platforms for mobilizing political opinion (such as civil society institutions and political parties) are essential not just for ensuring  accountability – checking the power of ruling governments. They are also essential for political mobilization – the contestation of government policies and articulation of alternative political projects.  

There were few independent means for mobilizing political opinion during the Congress-dominated era. The Congress could depend on local notables and administrative patronage to connect the electorate and turn out voting blocs. Meanwhile, the obvious avenue for opposition parties, the print media, was then at a fairly anemic stage. The reach of newspapers and magazines did not penetrate deeply in a society where the literacy rate was as low as 18 percent in 1951 and trudged up only to 34 percent by 1971.

“You have the numbers, we have the arguments,” then-opposition MP Atal Bihari Vajpayee once remarked defiantly to the formidable Congress treasury benches. But, as he well knew, arguments by themselves do not win elections.

The exercise of democratic power, at this time, rested with three nested circles of power-brokers. At the district level were the landed elites, usually from higher castes, who held sway over the local administration. At the state level, various factions of Congress state units jostled for power, presided over by a clique of respected veterans. To be sure, this was not a closed system. There were, indeed, some channels of upward mobility for rising political elites of agrarian castes, who were courted by rival factions of the Congress state units. In this sense, it conformed to Pareto’s conception of elitist democracy, characterized by a limited “circulation of elites.”

Meanwhile, a considerable degree of autonomy was accorded to state units to chart their own provincial agenda, and cultivate a distinct social base. The national Congress party resembled a confederation of discrete state units, and any “national agenda,” insofar as it existed, had to accommodate the concerns of state units. The impression of this phase of Indian polity as a Nehruvian era of planned socialism is quite mistaken. Indeed, the central state often had to dilute its commitment to redistributive policies like land reforms, entrusting state governments to formulate and execute their own programs. 

Party Democracy

In his book “The Future of Democracy,” Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio wrote that the “natural state” of a democratic system lies in “the process of ‘becoming’, or transformation.” It was in the next-quarter century, roughly from the mid-1970s to the end of the 20th century, that Indian democracy became itself, by opening up to the forces of transformative change.

The winds of change had begun moving much earlier, and opposition parties had already come to power in quite a few states, especially after 1967. These challenger parties included fairly radical forces such as the Communist Party (CPI-M) in Kerala, or the (formerly separatist) Tamil nationalists of the DMK in Tamil Nadu. Yet the Congress hegemony only began to unravel after the post-Emergency election of 1977, when it was humbled by a confederation of opposition forces. Subsequently, it lost hold of a succession of strongholds such as Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, and Bihar.

This phase has been characterized as the Congress-opposition system, which saw frequent alternations in government, particularly at the state level. Between 1977 to 2002, per the calculations of Roy, the frequency with which any government was voted back to power dropped dramatically in this period, from over 80 percent, to only 29 percent. In other words, over 70 percent of incumbent governments were voted out of power.

This era was the heyday of party democracy, characterized by extensive party-led mobilizations of constituencies on the promise of radical inclusion. As the political scientist Philip Oldenburg has explained, these mobilizations culminated in the decentering of Indian political system. This meant the re-orientation of political competition from the national to the state level, brought on by regional parties, and the “deepening of democracy,” caused by “backward-caste” parties. The vise-like grip of privileged upper caste elites on the political system, particularly in the laggard region of North India, had been finally prised open by political forces representing the country’s historically marginalized caste groups. These forces took power in several northern Indian states in the 1980s and ‘90s, a transition that was described by the political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot as a “silent revolution.”

Between 1977 and 2004 the Effective Number of Parliamentary Parties (ENPP) – a measure representing the degree to which the seats in Parliament are controlled by a few parties or dispersed among many – jumped from 2.6 to a peak of 6.5, a level comparable to the most fragmented parliaments in the world. For the first time, the Indian Parliament, heretofore the genteel preserve of Brahminical and Anglophile elite culture, began to reflect the vernacular idiom of politics, including the politics of noisy protests..

What explains such a dramatic democratizing shift? One part of the explanation is that the Congress system had simply exhausted itself, resulting in a “crisis of representation.” In a 1971 Lokniti NES survey, only 48 percent of respondents felt that their vote had any impact on how the country was governed. Further, just 27 percent of them rated their representatives highly.

The reasons are not hard to guess. Despite the Congress party’s rhetoric of “socialism,” both poverty and inequality remained rampant. By the time of the Emergency, 57 percent of rural households were either landless or held less than 2.5 acres all told – in total holding merely 7 percent of all cultivable land. On the flip side, 12 percent of households owned 60 percent of the country's cultivable land. In urban areas, the capital-intensive model of planned development had generated scarce formal employment, which meant few channels of upward mobility for the vast majority.

But a second part of the explanation is the opening up of the means of mobilizing political opinion, to return to Urbinati’s condition for a genuine representative democracy. As the political scientist Robin Jeffrey wrote in his 2000 book “India’s Newspaper Revolution,” a “revolution in Indian-language newspapers began in the late 1970s.” By 1996, per Jeffrey, newspaper access had jumped fourfold in a generation. While this revolution was “little noticed by India’s English-speaking elite,” it quietly transformed the way the majority of the non-elite, vernacular-speaking populations related to democracy. Through access to the world of newspapers, people became more conscious of their democratic rights as well as more familiar with the systems of governance.

Meanwhile, the functioning of state institutions became more subject to the sanction of popular opinion and dissent. To give one small example, Jeffrey cited a policeman complaining to him that villagers no longer tolerated police beatings because newspapers had made them aware of their rights. Thus, newspapers had, as Jeffrey noted, opened up the potential for “new forms of political democracy.”

In this mobilization of political opinion, an equally important role was played by political parties. Regional parties benefited, of course, from the expansion of vernacular newspapers, whose owners they courted for favorable coverage of their party programs. But the enormous generative role that challenger parties have historically performed in India is often  underappreciated.

One can turn here to the political scientist Pradeep Chhibber’s framing of Indian democracy as a “democracy without associations.” Unlike European social democrats or Christian democrats, Indian political parties had little option of mobilizing cleavages that had been previously germinated within civil-society institutions (such as trade unions or Church institutions). Hence, political parties had to also undertake the task of making constituencies through mobilization. To a much greater extent than their Western counterparts, they had to proactively “define groups, produce interests, and forge identities” rather than merely “respond” to pre-existing identities and interests. 

This facet of challenger parties in India has been sharply explained by the political scientist Andrew Wyatt through the concept of “political entrepreneurship.” In his book analyzing the mechanisms of party system change in Tamil Nadu, Wyatt noted how “entrepreneurial leaders in South India tried to re-model the boundaries of groups that support them.” The political identities that Dravidian parties mobilized, per Wyatt, did not map onto any single line of social difference. Instead, they were political constructions reified by “narratives” propagated by political parties. “Dravidian identity illustrates the way in which political identities can be forged,” Wyatt argued.

One can make the same claim about “OBC identity” or “Bahujan identity” of the so-called “caste-based,” “backward caste,” and “Dalit” parties of North India. All of these identities reflect vast compounds or agglomerations of disparate caste groups. They were united around the “constituency-making” mobilization of political parties, which inscribed broad-based demands (such as around “reservations” or affirmative action in the public sector), onto coherent political narratives. The political vocabulary of the time revolved around social justice and cultural autonomy.

This party system era was characterized not just by an exhaustion of the Congress system, but also by the introduction of new modes of democratic representation, brought on expanding access to news-media, along with the generative role played by political parties in mobilizing newer constituencies.

Plebiscitary Democracy

By the early 21st century, the model of party democracy had begun to show signs of exhaustion, too. The challenger parties had successfully transitioned into establishment parties. Their distinctive demands of affirmative action or regional/linguistic autonomy had long been inscribed onto governing institutions. The two main national parties – Congress and the BJP – came to form the nucleus of two broad alliances, the UPA and NDA. Following the market reforms of 1991, the Congress and the BJP started to converge on socio-economic policy. Both offered voters near-identical sets of pro-market economic policies hitched to similar welfare packages. 

The regional parties were no different in this matter. Their leaders benefited from the enormous opportunities for rent-seeking made possible by pro-market reforms and decentralization of administrative power. “Statecraft came to be associated with good management of the economy and stability,” political sociologist Manali Desai wrote in a 2015 book, as parties across the spectrum “professed an agenda of distributive justice,” even as the “consensus on market reforms was left untouched.”

Meanwhile, the profile of party legislators, long detached from movements of mobilization, began to fuse into the figure of a stereotypical “electable” – any local impresario with copious access to money and muscle. A watchdog study of 558 Indian ministers found that across all states, 87 percent of ruling ministers were “crorepatis,” someone whose assets were worth at least one crore, or 10 million rupees, and nearly half had declared criminal cases. Thus, almost all leading policymakers, whatever their ideology, were among the top 1 percent of the country in terms of wealth.

In 2008, the economist Raghuram Rajan (later the chairman of India’s central bank) lamented the growth of a new billionaire class that he compared to the Russian oligarchy, which exploited “proximity to government” for massive rents. “Three factors – land, natural resources, and government contracts or licenses – are the predominant sources of the wealth of our billionaires. And all of these factors come from the government,” he said, adding: “If Russia is an oligarchy, how long can we resist calling India one?”

This influx of money coursed through the political system and changed the “rules of the game” that structured political competition. Political parties, across the board, abandoned their previous function of making constituencies through mobilization of opinion against existing policies or institutional arrangements. Instead, they became wedded to a tacit elite consensus on fundamental political questions and to the protection of established institutions — a shared source of instrumental benefit. In a more sympathetic reading, parties were merely adjusting to the changed realities of astronomical election costs, necessitating “crony-capitalist” bargains. But whatever the rationale, this meant weakening of partisan linkages with determinate social constituencies, and the near implosion of their broader popular legitimacy.

As shown by Lokniti datasets, trust in political parties declined sharply from 60 percent in 1996 to 42 percent in 2020. More damningly, in the latter survey, half of all respondents claimed to distrust political parties. In fact, political parties  were the only institution that generated a negative net-effective trust – the difference between proportion of trust and distrust – of minus 8 percent. In contrast, the offices of the prime minister and chief minister generated enormously higher net-effective trust of 48 percent and 42 percent respectively. The upshot was quite evident: plebiscitary democracy was in, centered on the political rhetoric of “trust” and “action;” party democracy was out.

The declining legitimacy of political parties crystallized into a wider crisis of representation. The mood of popular cynicism around representative institutions was laid bare in a large-scale survey, conducted by Lokniti-CSDS in 2013 – the year the “Modi wave” began its national ascent. Their report was titled “Democracy in India: A Citizen’s perspective,” and was part of a global project.

What was the citizen’s perspective? Less than half of the respondents professed to always prefer democracy. Most were indifferent, with some preferring authoritarian rule. In the companion survey in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the proportion of those who preferred democracy was much higher, exceeding 70 percent. Furthermore, a plurality, 40 percent, of respondents approved of the statement that India should get rid of Parliament and elections and have a strong leader make decisions. A similar plurality felt that decision-making in governance should be the domain of experts, not of Parliament or elections. This was not a one-off. The same survey conducted in 2005 had also turned up very similar numbers, even if the intensity of cynicism ratcheted up a notch.

This yawning representational deficit morphed into popular anger at frequent “big-ticket” corruption scandals. Not surprisingly, the frustration spawned a yearning for a strongman leader who could be “trusted” to take forceful “action” against a corrupt, well-networked elite. The ascendant discourse of plebiscitary democracy first began to make its mark at the state level.

The anti-incumbency tide of the previous era receded back as the 2000s saw consecutive re-elections of chief ministers like Shivraj Chauhan of Madhya Pradesh, Raman Singh of Chhattisgarh, Sheila Dixit in Delhi, Naveen Patnaik in Odisha (formerly Orissa), and, of course, Narendra Modi in Gujarat. All of these leaders marketed their core attributes as “honesty” and “strength,” and cultivated a plebiscitary aura. They also shared a knack for concentrating all power in the chief minister office, marginalizing their party units and communicating directly with the “people.” Modi even started a television channel named after himself – “NaMo Gujarat” – to broadcast his developmental initiatives.

The political scientist James Manor wrote in 2015 of Naveen Patnaik’s appeal: “What about corruption? An oft-heard narrative in Odisha provides this answer: ‘a clean Chief Minister who is also a stern disciplinarian has tidied the system up (a) by centralizing and thus depriving subordinates of influence to sell, and (b) by punishing those who are caught profiteering.’” Likewise, Modi sidelined all rivals in the BJP’s Gujarat unit, played up an ascetic image of a loner with no family ties, and publicized all government achievements under his personal brand.

The plebiscitary spirit of democracy was also propelled by the rise of television media, which super-charged the “visual and spectatorial” modes of politics, to the exclusion of the “discursive and participation” oriented modes. The operatic imagery of television favored leaders like Patnaik and Modi who could perform the role of crusader against graft. In this task they were readily obliged by a co-opted local media.

By 2004, more than one-third of respondents in a Lokniti survey claimed to trust television as a source of election news, compared to only 9 percent for newspapers. Hundreds of 24/7 news channels fundamentally reshaped the relationship between the “democratic citizenry” and the “means of mobilization of opinion.” The former turned into a “democratic audience,” or passive consumers of political news, and the latter into professionalized messaging or publicity.

The subsequent expansion of digital media like Facebook and Twitter provided further impetus to the creative use of personalistic imagery and catchy soundbites in election campaigns. The digital head of Modi’s 2014 campaign, Arvind Gupta, a technocrat with a stint in Silicon Valley, evocatively framed the election as India’s “first post-modern election.”

The new media ecosystem tended to collapse the separation between the leader and the message, and privileged the rhetoric of redemptive leadership. The space for extensive “mobilization of opinion” that powered the “constituency-making” drive of party democracy got crushed between the pincer movement of new modes of election finance and media communication. This was the political context where the plebiscitary appeal of Modi took full bloom, first as a three-term chief minister of Gujarat and now as the Indian prime minister.

The Modi Era

The Modi phenomenon cannot be understood in isolation from the wider context of the “crisis of political representation.” Modi’s charismatic hold on the electorate does not derive from any standout qualities of oratory or competence, but from his ability to perform, and thus embody, the plebiscitary spirit of democracy. One can, of course, find parallels to Modi’s plebiscitary appeal in a number of autocratic chief ministers of the last two decades. We can also hark back to the plebiscitary style of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who centralized the polity, curbed dissent, and sought personalistic mandates in 1971 and 1977 elections, the first successfully and the other disastrously.

Yet in some respects Modi represents a singular phenomenon of Indian politics. This is because his plebiscitary leadership is designed to be an embodiment of a well-defined and grander ideological project. As the title of a recent volume on Modi’s India by Thomas Blom Hansen and Srirupa Roy succinctly describe, the object of the project is no less than to re-make the Indian republic into a “Saffron Republic.”

According to the political scientists Sultan Tepe and Ajar Chekirova, the Hindu nationalist regime of Modi shares a common populist-nationalist genus with the regimes of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkiye and Vladimir Putin of Russia. The family resemblance goes beyond the concentration of power within the hands of a populist strongman. As Tepe and Cherikova argue, these leaders also share a parallel political project, powered by three interwoven goals. One, creating a “religiously-imbued” notion of “the people,” the moving spirit of a “religiously-defined nationalism.” Two, forging national unity around a shared historical narrative of “ancient civilizations that were marginalized by antagonistic cultures and countries.” And three, redeeming national prestige through “restoring the pivotal place” of their country on the global stage. 

The latter elements were on display during India’s recent “four-day war” with neighboring Pakistan. Much like Putin and Erdogan, Modi has staked out India’s prerogative, as an emerging “great power,” of undertaking military action deep into neighboring countries, should they pursue policies that threaten its security interests. The political rhetoric accompanying the military strikes has also been overlaid with a contemptuous rejection of the “weakness” and “inaction” of past governments. This strident militaristic posture chimes well with a muscular nationalism at home, all encased within a providential historical narrative.

In this grand narrative, as often repeated by Modi, his administration has effected a radical break from “1,000 years of slavery” (i.e. Muslim and British rule) as well as the “slave mentality” of earlier post-independence governments, and has begun laying the path to a “golden” future encompassing the “next thousand years.”

While Modi might fashion himself as the embodiment of the Saffron Republic, the ideas animating the project derive from the ideological parent of the BJP, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS). In this sense, Modi represents more of a “viceroy” of this Saffron Republic than its “monarch.” A former RSS pracharak (publicist), Modi has systematically implemented the RSS’ longstanding agenda, much of which had been unacceptable to the political mainstream before his rule. These include the construction of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, the revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status, and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The latter, ostensibly meant to incorporate “refugees” from neighboring countries, seeks to define citizenship on the basis of religious origin, and is widely seen as discriminatory against Muslims. Even though the bill sparked months-long protests, it was passed in the Parliament with the support of quite a few non-BJP parties.

Even as other political formations have abandoned the democratic task of “mobilization of opinion,” Modi’s allies in the RSS have pursued it with characteristic vigor. They have utilized their newfound access to state power to induct sympathetic ideologues in government universities, media organizations, cultural bodies, and professional associations. This is, of course, in addition to the wide network of RSS affiliates that spans the entire gamut of civil society from students, farmers, intellectuals, and labor.

With the help of media allies and RSS affiliates, Modi has made the idea of a “Saffron Republic” acceptable in popular imagination. While the ideology of Hindu nationalism had been gaining ground for two decades preceding the Modi government, the transmission of Hindutva ideology has intensified under his watch. Modi’s plebiscitary appeal has catalyzed BJP’s expansion among non-traditional constituencies, such as backward castes, and the electorates of Eastern and Southern India. His tenure has also seen a normalization of the idea of employing state resources for the building of temples and the glorification of Hindu heritage and festivals, all in the name of the (Hindu) public good. Alongside, he has presided over a pernicious mainstreaming of hate speech, violence, and discrimination targeted at minorities. In the words of the writer Aakar Patel, Modi has transformed public culture in such a way that the word “secular” has become “a term of abuse.”

The Saffron Republic, of course, does not mark a break from the crony capitalism of the past decades. But similar to most things under the Modi regime, it has become more centralized. As the financial journalist James Crabtree, author of the book “The Billionaire Raj,” recently commented: “Indian crony capitalism has become less chaotic and more organized under Modi.” A former chief economic adviser to the Modi government, Arvind Subramanian, has charged the government with fomenting a “2 A variant” of “stigmatized capitalism.” The two As, the industrial houses of the Adanis and the Ambanis, have seen their fortunes multiply manifold owing to favorable access, even as other businessmen suffer the costs of an uneven playing field and erratic policymaking. Dubbing Gautam Adani as “Modi’s Rockefeller,” the Financial Times detailed a spree of crony deals, such as the transfer of six privatized airports turning Adani “overnight” into  “one of the country’s biggest private airport operators.”

The cozy relationships with big tycoons provide Modi with formidable spending power in elections. The 2024 elections, costing $16 billion, termed the “most expensive polls in the world,” saw the BJP comfortably outspend all rivals even as the Congress complained of its funds being frozen by tax authorities. The ties with tycoons also ensure favorable coverage on media networks owned by them. “Night after night presenters praise the government and the prime minister, heap scorn upon the opposition, disparage minorities and foreigners,” the Economist recently wrote of Indian television. “TV news exists to support India – in the form of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – and to destroy its enemies.”

Before such a thorough reconfiguration of Indian democracy, few Indian leaders would have thought of parading with a foreign dignitary, to the applause of a crowd of a hundred thousand people, atop of a chariot fashioned out of a golf cart, in a cricket stadium named after himself. But that is indeed what Modi did two years ago with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on the grounds of the Narendra Modi stadium in Ahmedabad.

Once a model for all developing nations, the face of India’s democracy lies disfigured beyond recognition.