The 75th anniversary of Indian Independence is a landmark event in the history of our democracy. India had long been an important exception to the notion that democracy can only take root in rich countries. Defying the odds, India introduced a full-fledged democracy in a multi-religious, hierarchical society traumatized by Partition and the horrendous violence surrounding it. It is one of the few countries in the post-colonial world that took up the challenge of building an inclusive democracy in a diverse, multilingual and multi-religious society. As the largest democracy in the non-western world, India is a success story.  It did better than most countries in establishing a democracy based on equal rights despite a very high level of illiteracy and preponderance of poor people. Establishing democracy in a society characterized by extreme social inequality and caste hierarchy was a bold experiment, perhaps, the most significant in a post-colonial society of multiple faiths, languages and regional cultures.

Historically, India’s democracy worked well precisely because no single culture or language or identity was central to its identity or unity. India’s stunning linguistic, cultural and religious diversity has been supported by a political structure that emphasizes equal rights for all, and protects liberties of religion and speech. It protects equal citizenship and pluralism more comprehensively than do the Constitutions and institutions of most countries. But India has changed politically, socially and economically. The very idea of a democracy based on equal rights irrespective of caste, class or faith is changing under the pressure of majoritarian politics and implementation of policies that privilege majoritarian sensibilities and interests above civil rights.

Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) was the first party to win a parliamentary majority since 1984, ending a quarter century of national coalition governments at the Centre. The victory in 2014 general elections was the first time that an avowedly majoritarian political party won an absolute majority in India. After assuming power, it decisively shifted the direction of Indian politics to the Right. Its re-election in 2019 reinforced the right-wing trajectory India had embarked upon in 2014. This government is more ideologically driven than previous governments. Dominated by ideas of ethnic nationalism, it wants to remake India into a majoritarian nation-state. The backdrop of this dramatic change was the weaknesses of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government which was caught in a web of corruption scandals involving the allocation of contracts to favored business groups that galvanized the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement led by the Gandhian activist Anna Hazare and ideological differences within its leadership which provided an opening to the Right.[i] A sense of paralysis fueled by an aggressive media campaign against it, gripped the government which eventually led to its downfall.

This paper tries to make sense of the trajectory of India’s democracy after the rise of the BJP as a dominant force in Indian politics. The three principal areas of concern emerging from its rise to power are: the consolidation of a majoritarian brand of politics; the decline of institutional autonomy; the shrinking space for free speech and dissent. Each of these issues significant in its own right when taken together constitutes a major risk to our democracy. The key issue is the concerted attempt to establish a majoritarian narrative and minimize opportunities for the Opposition by polarizing society on communal lines, on the one hand, and seeking to control dissent, on the other. The sharp rise in polarization is endangering democracy and reinforcing majoritarianism. Right-wing politicians have exploited and exacerbated long-simmering divisions for their own purposes—in the process undermining the prospects for political consensus and effective governance. It is no secret that this government is averse to criticism and intolerant of critical thought. The criminalization of dissent, the portrayal of public protests as anti-national, and the numerous sedition cases filed against protesters are worrying signs of intolerance.[ii] The growth of these processes has to be seen in the context of the rise of majoritarian and authoritarian politics, whose emergence in conjunction with each other, the paper argues, is responsible for stifling dissent which has adversely affected our democracy.

Consolidation of Majoritarian Politics

Since its re-election in 2019, the BJP has pushed its political agenda with greater vigour. The party’s top leadership interpreted the back-to-back victories as popular consent for its political project to establish majoritarian state driven largely by the interests of a religious majority. This project has worked via a process of consolidation of majoritarian dominance through authoritarian means. This has served to polarize the electorate which has allowed a politics of division and fear to hold sway.[iii] That vision has driven a public discourse in which minorities are openly vilified and has encouraged tolerance of extralegal violence against them and their exclusion from the public sphere including hurting their employment and livelihood prospects.

Things moved fast from 2019 as the government moved swiftly to reshape India’s secular republic to match its vision of India as a Hindu-centric powerhouse. The breathtaking advance of majoritarian politics was apparent in three major developments. The government pushed through a series of laws in quick succession which had a direct impact on the constitutional concept of equal treatment. The government began with the abrogation of Article 370 and 35A of the Constitution removing the special status accorded to Jammu & Kashmir. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act  passed in 2019 seeks to fast-track citizenship to non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh by creating an exemption from the ‘illegal migrants’ category for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians, but does not offer the same exemption to refugees and immigrants who happen to be Muslim.[iv] It provoked major protests across the country which lasted for three months until the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic put a stop to it.[v] But for the ruling party, CAA was the culmination of a long overdue project that envisioned India to be the natural abode for all Hindus.[vi] It runs contrary to the inclusive idea of India which had enshrined equal citizenship with no religious distinctions.[vii]

 The third significant development related to the Supreme Court’s verdict which pronounced that the disputed land in Ayodhya would go to a government-monitored trust to build a Ram temple, and Muslims would receive a separate five-acre plot of land in the city to build a mosque. The Court verdict ensured that a temple would be built on the land where the Babri mosque once stood, which by the court’s own admission was illegally demolished. The greater significance of the judgment lies in the tacit endorsement of majoritarian politics by the highest court.[viii] Assigning to the central government the task of setting up a religious trust to build a temple implies that it was the government’s duty to cater to such interests. The Court ruling was a huge victory for the ruling party, which had made the construction of the Ram temple a focal point of its political campaign. Political analysts take the view that this would not have been possible without the indulgence of the Supreme Court.[ix] 

Notes and References

[i] On UPA see Zoya Hasan, Congress After Indira: Policy, Power Political Change, 1984-2009, OUP: , New Delhi, 2012; Ideology and Organization in Indian Politics: Crisis and the Growing Polarisation of the Congress Party, 2009-19, OUP:, New Delhi, 2022.

[ii] Meenakshi Ganguly, ‘Dissent Is ‘Anti-National’ in Modi’s India, Human Rights Watch, 13 Dec 2019. https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/12/13/dissent-anti-national-modis-india

[iii] On Hindu nationalism see Christophe Jaffrelot, Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, Princeton University Press, Princeton: 2021; Angana P. Chatterji, Thomas Blom Hansen, and Christophe Jaffrelot (eds.), Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India, London: Hurst & Co, 2019; Amrita Basu, Violent Conjunctures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 2016; Achin Vanaik, Hindutva Rising : Secular Claims, Communal Realities, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2017; Duncan McDonnel and Luis Carbera, ‘The right-wing populism of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party. (and why comparativists should care), 2019. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13510347.2018.1551885

[iv] On CAA see Apurva Vishwanath and Kabir Firaque, ‘Explained: What is Citizenship Amendment Act’, Indian Express, 25 Dec 2019; Niraja Gopal Jayal, ‘Faith-Based Citizenship’,  India Forum, 1 Nov 2019, https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/faith-criterion-citizenship; Sanjib Baruah, ‘Assam, Northeast India and the “unfinished business” of Partition’, Frontline, 11 Dec 2019; Suhrith Parthasarathy, ‘Why the CAA Violates the Constitution’, India Forum, 17 Jan 2020. https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/why-caa-violates-constitution; Jagdish Lalli, ‘Communalisation of Citizenship Law: Viewing the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 Through the Prism of the Indian Constitution’, University of Oxford Human Rights Hub Journal, vol. 3(1) 2020 https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/U-of-OxHRH-J-Communalisation-of-Citizenship-1.pdf 

[v] T.K. Rajalaksmi, ‘Countrywide CAA & NRC protests: Secular unity’, Frontline, 17 Jan 2020. https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/article30431601.ece. Accessed 10 Mar. 2021.

[vi] Mihir Desai, ‘CAA–NRC–NPR and Its Discontents’, Economic and Political Weekly’ 14 Feb 2020, Vol. 55, Issue No. 7.

[vii] Suhrith Parthasarathy, ‘Why the CAA Violates the Constitution’, India Forum, 17 Jan 2020. https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/why-caa-violates-constitution, Accessed 14 June 2023;

Gautam Bhatia, ‘Citizenship and the Constitution’, SSRN. Accessed 22 Sept. 2020. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID3565551_code2212312.pdf?abstractid=3565551&mirid=1

[viii]‘Peace and Justice: On Ayodhya Verdict’, Editorial, The Hindu, 11 Nov 2019.

[ix] Sanjay Hegde and Pranjal Kishore, ‘The Ayodhya Verdict Can Shake the Very Foundations of India,’ Quartz India, 8 Feb 2018.  https://qz.com/india/1199361/babri-masjid-ayodhya-dispute-the-supreme-court-verdict-can-shake-the-very-foundations-of-india/.