Can Backsliding Pose More Danger than Breakdown? India in Historical Perspective

• In Event: The New Illiberalism? 21st Century Technologies of Repression and Retrenchment

Abstract

Since 2014, India has been governed by a powerful new leader, Narendra Modi, and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). His growing political dominance poses a complex threat to the world’s largest democracy. On the one hand, since his rise India has witnessed its highest turnout since independence. Several dimensions of electoral contestation have deepened over the last decade. On the other hand, however, the new prime minister has pursued a populist, plebiscitary and presidential style of rule. His government has subverted the autonomy of many public institutions, cracked down on the media and civil society, and infused a militant Hindu vision in the public sphere that has spurred greater violence towards religious minorities. These developments have led major comparative indices of democracy in recent years to characterize India as a “partly free” (Freedom House) “electoral autocracy” (V-Dem).

Many of these developments remind observers of the rule of Indira Gandhi, which eventually led to the suspension of democracy during the Emergency (1975-1977). How did these two political leaders seek to exercise power vis-a-vis efforts to mobilize political resistance? What are the broader implications of such comparative analysis for how we understand the sources, conditions and trajectory of democratic breakdown vis-a-vis democratic backsliding? Can processes of backsliding ever pose a greater threat to democracy than its breakdown? In general, the establishment of an authoritarian regime is an inherently worse outcome. Processes of democratic backsliding can be reversed in principle. They may never culminate in breakdown. Yet the mounting challenges posed to contemporary Indian democracy, I contend, are greater than its suspension four decades ago.

Three major factors distinguish the context of the Emergency in the 1970s from the so-called ‘undeclared emergency’ today. First, while both Indira and Modi concentrated executive power, undermined public institutions and restricted civil society, the organizational, financial and media power of the contemporary BJP is far greater than Congress during the 1970s. Second, many social movements and state-level opposition parties emerged in the 1970s, expanding civil society and producing greater electoral fragmentation in the party system in the 1980s. These processes of devolution and fragmentation have been sharply reversed during the Modi era, removing important checks on power. Third, the strident nationalist project espoused by Modi bears a family resemblance to the ideological rhetoric of Indira. Yet the commitment of the former is deeper, and its growing hegemony in civil society far stronger, compared to the cynical instrumental motivations of the latter. In short, the processes of backsliding witnessed in India over the last decade have legitimized aggressive ethnonational majoritarianism, while maintaining regular electoral contestation. Taken together, these developments have weakened the prospects of counter-mobilization in the world’s largest democracy, which its breakdown in the 1970s had strengthened.

Author

• Sanjay Ruparelia, Toronto Metropolitan University