India’s Governance Deficit: A Contrarian View

On the eve of independence in 1947, India was seen as the country of the future. Seventy-five years later, it still is. Undoubtedly, the country has made remarkable progress on multiple socioeconomic and human development indicators, and despite the odds has remained a functioning democracy. Yet when compared with its former developing-world peers, the People’s Republic of China and the economies of East and Southeast Asia, India’s progress has been modest. Or, less charitably, India is a story of underperformance, underachievement, and missed opportunities with often tragic consequences. This explains why many who know the country remain cautious, if not pessimistic, about the exuberant claims that India will maintain its position as one of the world’s fastest-growing economies and jump-start the stagnant global economy.

For example, in a recent article, “Why India Can’t Replace China,” published in Foreign Affairs, Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman challenge the prevailing optimism about the booming Indian economy soon replacing China as the preferred destination of global capital and manufacturing.¹ “Without a doubt,” the authors note, “India could be on the cusp of a historic boom—if it manages to increase private invest­ment, including by attracting large numbers of global firms from China. But will New Delhi be able to seize this opportunity? The answer is not obvious.” To the contrary, they argue that structural problems “deep in India’s economic framework: its emphasis on self-reliance and the defects in its policymaking process” remain largely unaddressed. Hence, without the necessary “radical policy changes,” India will not be able to “revive domestic investment, much less convince large numbers of global businesses to move their production there. An important lesson for policymakers is that there is no inevitability, no straight line of causation, from the decline of China to the rise of India.”

Certainly, Subramanian and Felman provide a compelling narrative on the problems plaguing the Indian economy, as well as the reforms needed to overcome its many bottlenecks and boost rapid and sustained growth. Yet the problems the authors identify are all well understood, and the proposed solutions enjoy strong support among elite circles, including powerful politicians, policymakers, and business leaders. The more important question is why, after some three decades since the introduction of market reforms, successive administrations, including the Modi government—which has won back-to-back majorities in parliament and whose signature economic goal is to make India a global manufacturing and business hub—have failed to adopt the recommended measures and achieve these goals.

The problem is fundamentally political. This statement does not, however, refer to the usual explanations of poor governance due to weak institutions, lack of political accountability, misuse of power, rampant corruption, casteism, and communal or religious conflict, among others. Rather, these are symptoms of a deeper malaise. The root problem lies in the paradoxical nature of India’s democratic system. Even though the proliferation of political parties, regular elections, and peaceful transfers of power have been institutionalized, liberal goals such as equal rights for all citizens, protection of individual rights and liberty, and equality before the law have always remained superficial. This, contrary to conventional wisdom, is not so much because India is burdened with poverty, illiteracy, and religious, caste, and other parochial divisions that make it inhospitable to liberalism. Instead, this failure owes its beginnings and subsequent entrenchment to the decisions made by the country’s westernized liberal political elites to maintain power in the context of democratic politics. These decisions only exacerbated social divisions, undermined the already fragile legal, bureaucratic, and admin­istrative capacities of the weak postcolonial state, and failed to promote civic participation and other forms of associational activity. India’s political system, inherited from the colonial era, was never up to the challenges facing a modern nation-state, especially a state governing a large heterogeneous society.

Even if most Indians do not always recognize it, they have an ambiguous relationship with their country’s liberal democratic form of government. Since independence, the “idea of India” has meant a plu­ralistic, secular, tolerant, and inclusive democratic republic undergirded by the rule of law, individual rights, and equal representation. But the fact that the everyday practice of Indian democracy is so blatantly inconsistent with these ideals is not lost on anyone. India’s democratic state—a weak political, administrative, and legal arrangement—has provided tenuous order and sovereignty over its territory, but it has failed to effectively address the fundamental economic challenges facing the country or to articulate a normative vision as to what constitutes the “nation.” Thus, although Indians certainly value “democracy” in the abstract, they also have very low trust or confidence in the ability of their democracy to address daily concerns. In reality, connections to those with power and money, and support of their kin, caste, and co­religionists, are key to successfully navigating the treacherous labyrinth that is India’s bureaucratic and judicial system.

Unable to transcend myriad parochial attachments, the Indian state has failed to forge a durable common national identity, and in the process has failed to inspire national pride and the feelings of patriotism and nationalism that come with it. In an era when the world is organized into nation-states, such allegiance to national identity and purpose can serve as a powerful cohesive force to promote social unity, state capacity, and economic development. The experience of the United States, Japan, and China, among others, underscores the importance of patriotism and nationalism to social, economic, and political development.²

Imagined Communities

The Indian constitution and the parliamentary democracy it established were not organic to society but imposed from the top—a fortuitous gift bestowed by the western-educated (mostly Hindu) elites and the departing British rulers during the negotiated transfer of power.³ The constitution (the longest in the world, with significant portions lifted verbatim from the U.S. Constitution) is a classically liberal document couched in universalist and egalitarian rhetoric. Yet it is in an alien language (English), which the vast majority of Indians cannot read, write, or speak. It also omits traditional, indigenous ideas and practices of governance, particularly of the roughly 80 percent Hindu majority who are inheritors of a civilization that predates ancient Greece and the Phoenicians.

The founders of modern India, the vast majority of whom were upper-caste Hindus, were all beneficiaries of English education. Mahat­ma Gandhi, his saintly garb and orchestrated eccentricities notwithstanding, and India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, a self-proclaimed internationalist and Fabian socialist who preferred his English name, Joe, were both British-trained barristers. To these “nationalist elites,” Hindu India, steeped in anachronistic religious and cultural superstition and burdened with enduring hierarchies of caste and custom, seemed trapped in the Dark Ages. Gandhi, in his usual rhetorical manner, more charitably referred to India’s “open wounds” in arguing that the Hindu order needed fundamental reforms. Meanwhile, both said little about the transgressions of the subcontinent’s Muslims, who made up some 20 percent of the population.

These early nationalist elites were masters in developing distinctive, albeit fictional, narratives—what Benedict Anderson has called “found­ing myths and traditions”—which suited their political ambitions and their liberal, often idealistic, worldview.⁴ Gandhi and Nehru promoted a version of the subcontinent’s past which privileged religious tolerance, sociocultural accommodation and assimilation, and pluralistic religious syncretism, while devaluing the more authentic folk traditions based on the vicissitudes of kith, creed, and caste. These “little traditions” featured recurrent partitions and pathological conflicts between Hindus and Muslims, including the desecration and destruction of thousands of Hindu temples coupled with mass conversion (or death for the unrepentant infidels) during centuries of Islamic domination of the subcontinent. In short, over a thousand years of punitive domination of the Hindu majority—some eight centuries under forces of the caliphate and two centuries under exploitative British colonialism—made the social cleavages, the lack of social trust, and the recurring Manichaean conflicts between the saved and the damned real, volatile, and often non-negotiable. Yet the temperamental and idealistic Nehru, who became independent India’s first prime minister, in his Discovery of India, went to great lengths to gloss over, if not deny, these fault lines.⁵ In spite of the Muslim League’s decades-long seditious demand for a “two-nation solution,” and the eventual creation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Nehru painted a picture of an astonishingly genteel and pastoral distant past where many religions and communities lived in relative harmony with each other. He exuded confidence that the prevailing misunderstandings and animosities could be effectively resolved through dialogue and consensual agreement reached after an open and reasoned exchange of ideas.

Instead of even attempting to come to terms with Indian society’s divergent and traumatic collective memories—an essential first step to bridge the divide between communities—the westernized elites, as the rulers of independent India, chose to whitewash, if not altogether deny, any discrepancies with their vision.⁶ In their ideological certitude, they were convinced that a modern liberal democratic state would sweep away the detritus of a traditional and “illiberal” past.

To neutralize these parochial passions and impulses, the constitution of India and the prodigious corpus of “progressive” legislation which followed have ostensibly attempted to enshrine individual rights. The constitution explicitly recognizes that individual rights are universal rights, which the “sovereign, socialist, secular, and democratic republic of India” is sworn to protect by applying the laws equally to one and all. Yet history tells us that the gap between noble intentions and actual outcomes is often tragic and large. India’s top-down liberal democratic state, with tenuous roots in society, consistently pushed in directions which were decidedly illiberal amid the exigencies of electoral politics. The state’s internal contradictions not only contained the seeds of its own unraveling, but also served to entrench the very ascriptive and parochial identities it had promised to moderate, if not eradicate.

Liberal-Secular Politics and Illiberal Outcomes

Even as the new ruling elite designated themselves “secular nationalists,” their actions belied their claims. If, in the West, secular and liberal has meant a sharp distinction between the church and the state (with religion being a private or individual matter), in India it meant asymmetrical secularism—on one hand, the state explicitly favoring the Muslim minority and, on the other, discriminating against the Hindu majority. To the westernized ruling elites, such “tolerance” may have signaled their quintessentially liberal-bourgeois worldview and credentials, or perhaps even their own Hindu self-loathing. Regardless, the compulsions of electoral politics made the ruling elites pander to religious minority “vote banks.” The outcome of such a blatantly self-serving policy was that it served to intensify resentment and conflict as the majority of Hindus saw secularism as unfairly benefiting Muslims.

The conventional view that the party ruling after independence, the Indian National Congress (INC or “Congress”), was a “big-tent party” is mostly a myth—underscoring the disconnect between elite perceptions and on-the-ground reality. Rather, Congress functioned as a top-down party firmly under the control of the westernized elites. To retain power, it relied upon the effective use of the instruments of the state to consolidate the party’s vote banks. In practice, this meant consolidating the support of their upper-caste brethren, which included the rural landed elites, the upwardly mobile English-educated middle classes who ran the vast administrative-bureaucratic apparatus of the state, and the powerful business and commercial classes who were the major beneficiaries of the state’s so-called mixed-economy—as it privileged autarchic protectionism and monopoly control over the economy. It also meant keeping the Hindu voters divided along caste and regional lines, especially pitting the most downtrodden of the lower caste, the so-called untouchables, against the somewhat better-off peasant castes. To win over Muslim support, Congress was complicit in instilling fear among religious minorities by demonizing Hindu na­tionalists—portraying them as fanatical subversives seeking to undermine India’s nascent democracy by imposing an intolerant authoritarian Hindu rashtra. At the same time, however, Congress made surreptitious backroom deals with more doctrinally hardline Islamic clerics, promising them political patronage and generous sinecures in return for them delivering Muslim votes, which could decide the electoral outcome in key constituencies.

This explains why, in 1954, the government of India further expanded the “Haj subsidy,” providing generous funds to Muslim citizens to enable them to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Yet during the same time, Hindu temples were put under direct government control, giving government authorities discretion to use the revenue generated in the temples as they saw fit. Mosques and churches, by contrast, retained full autonomy under Article 30 of the constitution, which granted Muslim and Christian institutions protection. Not surprisingly, in 1980, the major Hindu body, the Ramakrishna Mission, petitioned the Supreme Court to have itself declared a “non-Hindu minority religion” (calling itself Ramkrishnaism) to safeguard its autonomy from government predation.⁷

Most grotesquely illiberal was the government’s decision to uphold the colonial-era Muslim Personal Law (or the Shariat Act of 1937), which allows Muslims to follow their religious law in matters relating to marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Thus, in today’s India, under the Muslim Personal Law, a man can have up to four wives, but a woman can only have one husband at a time. Moreover, as Islam allows for the marriage of a minor who has attained puberty, girls as young as age ten are potentially eligible. Until August 2017, when India’s Supreme Court finally deemed the practice unconstitutional, a Muslim man could exer­cise “triple talaq”—meaning he could unilaterally end his marriage with immediate effect by merely pronouncing the word talaq three times in one sitting and in any form, including via email or text message, without his wife’s agreement.⁸ Only in July 2019 did the Parliament of India declare the practice of “triple talaq” illegal. Nevertheless, Muslim men can still choose to be polygamous, while women do not have conjugal rights, including the right to maintenance and joint custody of children they would be granted in a secular divorce settlement. It is important to note that “triple talaq” has long been banned in many predominantly Muslim countries, including Pakistan. Yet although the Indian constitution has long directed the government to establish a “uniform civil code” which applies equally to all citizens, India’s liberal-democratic state has persistently resisted doing away with “personal laws” for some groups, especially Muslims, given the exigencies of vote bank politics.

Similarly, vote bank politics has also led to egregious decisions which have at times threatened the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the nation. Although the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir joined India following the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947, the Nehru government privileged the state by giving it special constitutional exemptions under the notorious Article 370 of the constitution, because it was the only Muslim-majority region to join India at partition. Not only was Jammu and Kashmir allowed to have its own constitution, a separate flag, and freedom to make laws (except in foreign affairs and defense), the state also enjoyed the right to restrict citizens from other Indian states from attaining permanent residency and ownership of property. Moreover, as Jammu and Kashmir is a border state, with India and Pakistan going to war over it in 1948 (with each controlling different parts of the state after a ceasefire line was agreed), the state soon became a hotbed for Pakistani-sponsored sepa­ratist insurgency against “Indian occupation,” culminating in the reli­gious cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Hindus during the early 1990s, who were forced to flee the state in the face of widespread terrorist attacks. The inaction of the government of Jammu and Kashmir and the implicit support of the Congress-led administration in New Delhi underscored the depth of the religious divide and the power of vote banks in Indian politics—only the violent expulsion of Hindus from the state was believed to secure the demographic make-up of a Muslim-majority region. The much-needed integration of Kashmir with the rest of India finally began in August 2019 when the Modi government revoked Article 370.

Moreover, efforts to reform the asymmetries of power in Hindu society have been conspicuously manipulated for electoral gain. Initially, the authorities created a complicated “affirmative action” system of “reser­vations” or “quotas” in government jobs, education, and related benefits for the most disadvantaged sections of society. These were categorized as “Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes,” estimated at around 25 percent of the population. Because classification as “scheduled” brings tangible benefits, all manner of groups have been clamoring for this designation, usually getting the recognition in exchange for their votes. With this in mind, the “Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Commission” (SEBC, also known as the Mandal Commission), was established by the central government in 1980 to “identify the socially or educationally backward classes” for reservations. The Commission identified, on the basis of caste, social, and economic indicators, 52 percent of India’s population as “Other Backward Classes” (OBC), and recommended granting reservations of 27 percent to OBC in central government jobs and educational institutions. On top of this, several state governments have made Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs eligible for reservations. In early January 2019, the Modi government proposed that 10 percent of government jobs and seats in educational institutions should be reserved for economically backward upper-caste individuals or those who earn less than 800,000 rupees ($11,500) annually and own less than five acres of land. Since all political parties are complicit in vote bank politics, few challenged the government’s decision; predictably, a bill to amend the constitution to allow for this new quota was passed by the lower house of Parliament in forty-eight hours. At present, some 70 percent of the Indian population is entitled to some form of reservation, or benefit from “compensatory discrimination” policies, which are widely seen as flawed—based more on political calculations rather than on belonging to socially disadvantaged groups deserving assistance.

Unsurprisingly, in such an environment, the “deepening of democracy” and the rise of mass politics have resulted in the proliferation of populist and identity-based regional and caste parties. Their rise has marked the end of Congress Party dominance and the transformation of the “grand old party” into a personal fiefdom of the Gandhi family. With India’s parties increasingly revolving around individuals and their personal retinues, rather than programs, and relying more and more on plebiscitary channels to demand benefits or seek redress, civic participation and other forms of associational activity have declined further. This has in turn reduced incentives for accountability and moderation in the exercise of power. From the mid-1970s on, as India entered the era of fragmented, clientelist parties and weak coalition governments, the prac­tice of parliamentary democracy meant the capitulation of the state to an array of narrow interest groups. Unwilling and incapable of exercising legislative authority or to function as a neutral broker above organized interests, the Indian state became merely one political actor among many, while the state’s growing subordination to an array of vote banks further weakened its ability to act in the interests of the society as a whole. More ominously, this period also saw rampant corruption abet­ted by the political class, and key institutions systematically compromised by the most capricious of the illiberal forces. These included Islamic jihadist forces, caste chauvinists, regional separatist groups (such as those wanting to establish an independent Khalistan in Punjab state), and the so-called urban naxals or Maoist radicals and their proxies. This crisis of governance was not lost on foreign investors, who in droves chose to sidestep India and its “market-friendly environment” in favor of China and the asean countries.

The Rise of Modi

Indians, particularly the educated youth and middle classes, became increasingly aware of, and disillusioned by, their country’s lackluster economic performance (especially when compared to their erstwhile peer, the People’s Republic of China). They saw that their globally celebrated political system was only superficially liberal and procedurally democratic. The incongruities between what the “liberals and secular­ists” espoused and the actual outcomes only magnified their skepticism and contempt for the political establishment. With a populace now less quiescent and no longer willing to passively accept the narrative of the self-serving “secular” political class, impatience for change became palpable.

This political vacuum was filled by Narendra Modi, who became the fourteenth prime minister of India in 2014. Modi’s tenure as the chief minister of the state of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014—which saw the state become the envy of the rest in India for its effective administration and double-digit growth rates—was an important factor in propelling Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to a landslide electoral victory. But perhaps it was Modi’s ability to provide a compelling counternarrative against the prevailing conventional wisdom, as well as offering new possibilities for the Indian Republic, that won him and the BJP broad public support. Specifically, Modi candidly confronted the two big questions that all factions of the political class have long talked about but never seriously addressed: the economic—who gets what and why—and the political—who are we and what does our country stand for. Clearly, this resonated with the public and explains why, in the 2019 parliamentary elections, despite weak macroeconomic performance, voter turnout was over 65 percent (the highest since independence), with the vast majority of the more than 600 million voters giving Modi and the BJP an even bigger landslide.⁹

An astute politician and master orator, Modi has been able to expose the hostile caricature of Hinduism portrayed in liberal-left narratives, including the duplicitous politics of favoritism toward particular vote banks, which served to further exacerbate social divides on the basis of religion and caste. In part, the Modi government has been able to do this with its innovative approach to redistributive development. The Modi administration has combined investment in programs that have delivered tangible basic goods and services, such as providing households with access to electricity, clean water, and toilets (significant in a country where open defecation was the norm), including electronic transfer of state benefits directly into recipients’ bank accounts, without discrimination against any community. This has not only served to greatly reduce the risk of immiseration in a society where survival against the precarity of everyday existence is a constant struggle; it has also reassured voters that the BJP’s ideology of Hindutva (“Hindu­ness”) does not imply the creation of a theocratic state or any explicit discrimination against non-Hindus; and it maintains the checks and balances provided under the nation’s liberal constitutional order.

Indeed, the Modi administration’s socioeconomic welfare programs (education, income, medicine, irrigation, and addressing public grievances), with a focus on what Modi has called “panch dharma,” irrespec­tive of caste, creed, and other ascriptive factors, has enabled the BJP to make a significant dent in caste-based politics, especially in Hindi-speaking North India.¹⁰ Similarly, these policies have exposed the cynical “pseu­do‑secularism” of parties like Congress, which masks an unofficial policy of Muslim “appeasement.” The redistributive policies, as well as reforms to Muslim personal law such as “triple talaq”—which have dis­pro­portionately benefited Muslims, especially women—have underscored the negative consequences of vote bank politics, which have not only kept Muslims fearful and dependent, but also poor. Hence it is no idle boast that the biggest achievement of the Modi government has been to bring to the mainstream the idea that India’s rich cultural heritage and traditions, especially its emphasis on personal discipline, learning, dharma (duty against injustice), spiritual self-realization, and respect and tolerance of other faiths—all intrinsic in Hindutva—could be utilized to rekindle national pride and strengthen the nation as an “ethical community.”¹¹

Indeed, the Modi administration has also effectively harnessed dharma in world affairs. Dharma, which can be used to channel both the prudent realpolitik of Kautilya (the third-century BC statesman) and Machiavelli, as well as the idealism of Kant and Gandhi, has given India much-needed flexibility in its foreign policies, in contrast to globalist-liberal conceits such as “international cooperation,” Gandhian nonviolence and tolerance, and “faith in dialogue and diplomacy.” In the past, the latter were routinely used in dealing with belligerent and hostile neighbors such as theocratic Pakistan and authoritarian China, which only assured that India saw its territorial integrity repeatedly violated and strategic chunks occupied, along with the tragic deaths of thousands of innocent people who became victims of Pakistan-backed terrorism. These ideological approaches have been replaced with more balanced policies designed to advance the country’s national interest. To his credit, Modi has masterfully weaned India off its intransigent adherence to the Nehruvian policy of “nonalignment,” which preached neutrality during the Cold War and opposition to any formal military alliances, but in practice saw India decisively tilt toward the Soviet Union, eventually signing a military pact, with hugely negative security and economic implications. Clearly Modi, a keen student of Kautilya, appreciates the importance of realpolitik in international affairs. For his government, the preservation of the nation’s territorial integrity and national interests requires prudent exercise of power, including building the country’s hard power to defend against external aggression.

Predictably, Modi’s tenure has been marked by whirlwind visits around the world with his signature bear-hug and rapturous appearances in packed stadiums with global leaders, including American presidents, business leaders, celebrities, and “NRIs” (non-resident Indians). Yet beyond these photo-ops, the prudent realist in Modi not only treats foreign policy as an instrument of national interest, he also understands that before India can assume the exalted role of vishwaguru (or “world teacher”), the nation must first build its domestic strength (both economic and military) and adjust its foreign policy to the new and emerging geopolitical realities. To this end, the Modi administration has sharply increased spending to purchase state-of-the-art military hard­ware from abroad, while at the same time ramping up domestic production to attain self-sufficiency. The $3 billion Vikrant, India’s first domestically built aircraft carrier, will enable New Delhi to project power around the Indian Ocean and beyond, a region which has seen growing Chinese presence. For the 2023–24 fiscal year, defense spending increased by 13 percent from the previous round (totaling some $73 billion) to upgrade air defenses.

To make the country’s borders more secure, Modi’s “Neighborhood First” policy is aimed at building stronger ties with neighbors, while also making it abundantly clear to the two hostile neighbors—China and Pakistan—that India is prepared to defend its territorial integrity and that any violations would incur costs. India’s assertive response to China’s decades-long strategy of “salami slicing,” or occupying bits and pieces of territory along the two countries’ 2,100-mile-long contested border—known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC)—has resulted in several border clashes since 2019, with the Indian army pushing back against Chinese encroachment in a number of strategic locations. In addition to deploying thousands of troops and expanding infrastructure along the LAC, New Delhi has been an active member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD), commonly known as the “Quad”—a strategic security arrangement which includes India, the United States, Japan, and Australia—with the clear objective to balance China. In fact, for all practical purposes, New Delhi has abandoned its rigid nonalignment policy, paving the way for stronger ties with Western powers, as well as Israel, Russia, and asean countries.

Modi has also delivered on his promise to de-hyphenate India from Pakistan—that is, to ensure that the rest of the world no longer sees India’s place in the international system through the prism of the India-Pakistan dispute. To achieve this, Modi broke with past precedent to hold Pakistan accountable for cross-border terrorism. Following a suicide-bomb attack carried out by Jaish-e-Mohammed (a banned terror group based in Pakistan) on February 14, 2019, against an Indian police convoy in Kashmir which killed forty personnel, the Indian air force conducted a “surgical” bombing raid (on February 26) against terrorist training camps based in Pakistan. This unprecedented tit-for-tat retalia­tion (learned allegedly from the Israelis) was the first since the 1971 Indo‑Pakistan War despite a decades-long history of terrorism on Indi­an soil by Pakistan-based terror outfits.¹² This stern action has not only sharply reduced Pakistani-sponsored terror attacks on Indian soil, the Modi administration has also been successful in diplomatically isolating Paki­stan as a state-sponsor of terrorism—with now growing international demands that Pakistan dismantle its terror network.

Building an “ethical community” that can overcome some six decades of Congress Party rule at national and regional levels, which saw the country divided and polarized along ideological and sectarian lines, will take time. To its credit, the Modi government took a principled stance against vote bank politics with the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 2019. The CAA amended the Indian Citizenship Act in order to grant “illegal migrants” from three coun­tries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan), who are Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Parsi, Buddhist, or Christian and who entered India before December 31, 2014, an expedited path to Indian citizenship. Altogether, the CAA only covered 25,447 Hindus, 5,807 Sikhs, 55 Christians, 2 Buddhists, and 2 Parsis who could provide evidence of religious persecution. It is important to note that the CAA did not include Sri Lankan Tamil refugees, the vast majority of whom are Hindus, despite the fact that they faced religious persecution during the Sri Lankan Civil War, nor the Tibetan Buddhist refugees who had fled China. Although the opposition parties, seeing this as another opportunity to appease the Muslim vote bank, mounted nationwide protests, including mob violence and vandalism, causing dozens of deaths, the Modi government did not back down, correctly noting that Muslims were not included as they did not legitimately face religious persecution in these three Islamic countries. Moreover, the government did not wish to further incentivize the already large-scale illegal migration into India of “economic refu­gees” from Bangladesh, including Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Yet India, like many other democracies today, faces two challenges which are intimately linked: providing good governance against the rising tide of populist and extremist demagogues with no intrinsic com­mitment to liberal democracy and strengthening post-pandemic eco­nomic recovery. To date, the Modi government’s record on both has been mixed, if not disappointing. Despite two consecutive majority wins, the autonomy and capacity of the Indian state has not qualitatively improved. Authorities remained silent spectators during the CAA-fueled weeklong Delhi riots (during which fifty-three people died), despite intelligence clearly pointing to Pakistan-sponsored jihadist groups in consort with Marxist “urban naxals” being responsible for arming illegal Muslim Bangladeshi and Rohingya aliens.

The failure to uphold the rule of law in Delhi has only incentivized more protests and lawlessness in the capital and beyond. In September 2020, after India’s Parliament passed the “Farm Bill” to reform the country’s stagnant agricultural sector, a group of farmers unions (some affiliated with the opposition parties) from the states of Punjab and Haryana, with the support of opposition politicians, including externally funded Khalistani separatists, began a campaign demanding that the government withdraw the bill. The opposition Congress Party’s un­bridled animus to the Farm Bill surprised the Modi government—as the three key reform measures in the bill were first proposed by the Congress government in 2010. Predictably, when the government’s “dialogue” with the unions did not go as they demanded, the unions and their supporters did what they had long threatened (and planned) to do: in October 2020, they began to surround the capital by blocking the highway toll plazas and eventually closing all road and rail points of entry into Delhi.

In short order, India’s capital was literally cut off from the rest of the country. When it became clear that the Modi government had no intention of forcibly removing the barricades, frustrated residents petitioned the Supreme Court, pleading for relief from the encirclement. Yet after the protestors made it clear that they would “not listen to any court” until the bills were repealed, the Supreme Court, in a face-saving gesture, simply stayed the implementation of the farm laws pending the report from a committee it had appointed. On January 26, 2021, on the occasion of the nation’s seventy-second Republic Day celebrations, the protestors forcibly entered Delhi’s Red Fort after attacking the police with swords and tractors and severely injuring over three hundred police personnel—who were ordered by Modi’s second in command, Home Minister Amit Shah, not to use any force against the protestors. Even after the protestors desecrated the Red Fort (where, every year on Independence Day, prime ministers hoist the Indian flag and deliver a national address) by raising the separatist Khalistan flag, the Modi government failed to act to restore civil order in the paralyzed capital. Indeed, with all major throughfares into Delhi blocked, fear and panic gripped the city when the second wave of the Covid pandemic hit in May and June of 2021.¹³ Unable to deliver essential medical supplies, especially portable oxygen cylinders and respirators to hospitals, thousands of Delhi residents died—literally gasping for breath while the Delhi government and central authorities engaged in a blame game. Nevertheless, despite the belated Supreme Court order to remove the barricades, the Modi government once again failed to act. After more than a year, the siege of Delhi finally ended after Modi accepted defeat—on November 19, 2021, in a televised address to the nation, the apologetic prime minister announced that his government would repeal the Farm Bill in the December parliamentary session. Not only had the anguished residents of Delhi suffered (and died) in vain, but many of the protestors, including those responsible for violence, still have not been held to account.

Modi’s weakness has emboldened the normally deferential chief ministers and regional satraps—with some now acting with impunity knowing that Modi does not have the confidence to use Article 356 of the Indian constitution to dismiss state governments which fail to perform their duties in accordance with the provisions of the constitution. Since independence, Article 356 has been used (and misused) over a hundred times, and it has served to keep regional and identity-based political parties and power brokers in line, and the fractious Indian union together. Yet the Modi administration once again shirked its con­stitutional responsibilities when, following the May 2021 West Bengal Legislative Assembly election, which declared that the incumbent Trinamool Congress (TMC) government would be returning to power, the party embarked on a monthlong reign of terror against its political opponents. Even after the Calcutta High Court ordered an investigation, which found conclusive evidence of gang rape, religious-cleansing, and murder, particularly of poor rural women mostly from the low-caste dalit community, the Modi administration failed to hold the TMC government accountable.

Unwilling to act, the Modi administration has eagerly outsourced matters related to governance, especially domestic law and order, to the courts. This has served to further empower an ineffective and corrupt judiciary—with negative implications for national governance. As is well known, the system of checks and balances in democracies is designed to ensure that no single branch of government can engage in the unconstrained exercise of power. As James Madison, an author of the Federalist Papers, noted, such a balance is necessary to guard against tyranny. Although India’s constitution provides for the separation of powers between the three branches of government, in practice, the judiciary increasingly escapes the checks and balances of other branches.

Since 1993, the judges of India’s High and Supreme Courts have been selected by their colleagues through the so-called collegium system.¹⁴ Under this system, the chief justice of India and his four senior-most colleagues have the sole authority to make recommendations for ap­pointments of Supreme and High Court judges. The minister of law only has the power to forward the justices’ recommendations to the prime minister, who in turn only has the authority to advise the president to appoint the chosen.¹⁵

The collegium system lacks transparency and accountability, and nepotism and corruption in judicial appointments are quite rampant—the current chief justice of India, D. Y. Chandrachud, is the son of India’s longest-serving chief justice, Y. V. Chandrachud. In India, where an estimated fifty million cases (some decades old) are still pending, with over seventy thousand cases languishing in the Supreme Court and over six million in the High Courts, justice that is forever pending is justice denied. Unfortunately, the Modi government’s lack of political will, in spite of its legislative majority, has allowed the Supreme Court to expand its jurisdiction into what are clearly political matters. For its part, the court’s excessive judicial activism coupled with its pronounced “progressive” bias (reflected in the suo moto cases, which judges take on their own accord) has long prevented it from functioning as a neutral arbiter. In turn, this has only further tarnished the court’s reputation as an elitist entity out of touch with the mores and values of the wider society. Public confidence in the judiciary as the guardian of the consti­tution and dispenser of justice has commensurately declined. In 2015, the Modi government tried to reform the collegium system through a new law that would give both the prime minister and the justice minister greater say in the appointment of judges and address the endemic corruption and inefficiencies in the judicial system. The Supreme Court struck down the law, dismissing it as unconstitutional. Since then, the Modi government has shown little backbone to reform the judiciary, despite its promise to put in place robust regulatory mechanisms to address the problems of judicial corruption and misconduct, which have long plagued India’s legal system.

Saving India’s Democracy

In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt note that “sometimes democracy dies with a bang. . . . But more often, democracies die slowly. In plain sight, at the hands of elected officials . . . who use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”¹⁶ The four key warning signs of democratic backsliding include (1) the rejection of or weak commitment, in words or action, to the democratic rules of the game; (2) the denial of the legitimacy of political opponents; (3) toleration or encouragement of violence; and (4) a willingness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including the media.

The world’s largest democracy, however, illustrates that democracies can die—or be reduced to a hollow nominal democracy—even if some of these warning signs are absent. As noted, in the case of India, this hollowing out began at the time of independence in 1947, when the gap between the procedural and the substantive aspects of demo­cracy was allowed to widen because of the exigencies of vote bank politics. India under Modi has not only failed to address this widening gap, but also shows that democracies can die under a weak and indecisive chief executive. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the country’s growing crisis of governance—reflected in the political gridlock, dysfunction, deterioration of law and order, and low-intensity conflict—is not because of the actions of Modi, who is often portrayed as a charismatic populist-authoritarian demagogue committed to transforming India into a Hindu rashtra. Rather, hiding behind the carefully cultivated public persona of a strong and decisive leader, Modi is in fact overly cautious and indecisive, if not an unduly risk-averse chief executive. This explains why, despite two consecutive majority wins (2014 and 2019), the ability of the Modi administration to provide good governance and strengthen the legal and administrative capacity of the state has not qualitatively improved. This is alarming, as the greatest threat to India’s democracy comes not from rival countries, but from the centrifugal forces within.

Modi’s inaction in upholding the nation’s law and order is also puzzling. Those who know him best often attribute the prime minister’s hesitation to his essential benevolence and asceticism, including his personal ambition to overcome the caricature of the populist strongman via the politics of compromise and conciliation. To the cynics, it is all an attempt to maintain his extremely favorable ratings as the most popular head of government in the world, remain in the good books of Western democracies, particularly the United States, and hopefully win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Regardless, Modi’s reluctance to act is troubling—with ordinary citizens paying an intolerable price to satisfy the indecision and the vanity of their prime minister. Unlike his recent predecessors who led coalition governments, subjected to the constraints inherent to that parliamentary arrangement, Modi leads a majority government and enjoys broad popular support. His approval ratings have been consistently over 70 percent during the past several years, and reached an unprecedented 78 percent in February 2023. Such widespread support, including the adulation of the Modi bhakts (devoted supporters), is primarily the result of the Modi government’s expansive social welfare and redistributive policies. For the first time since independence, these programs have actually reached the intended beneficiaries, India’s teeming underclasses. This should give the prime minister tremendous latitude to cajole and bargain with the various stakeholders to enhance governmental effectiveness. Furthermore, unlike in the United States, where political polarization is a mass phenomenon, polarization in India is generally limited to political elites. The fact that these elites are able to exert a disproportionate influence on the political system, including routinely disrupting, if not sabotaging, governmental operations and deliberately obstructing the legislative process, is because of the Modi administration’s reticence, indeed refusal, to hold those responsible accountable.

Indian politics seems trapped in a “doom loop.”¹⁷ Toxic partisanship stems from one well-organized and ideologically coherent nationwide party (the BJP) facing an uncompetitive personalist party with a shrink­ing base (Congress) and regional and identity-based parties which con­test elections over identity or vote bank issues. This makes reaching compromises exceedingly difficult. To the opposition, Modi (and the BJP) are not mere political opponents but existential enemies that must be destroyed. Nevertheless, Modi’s penchant for political compromise and consensus, and stubborn unwillingness to use the powers at his disposal to check and moderate zero-sum politics, has only served to further corrode the country’s already fragile political order.

Almost a century ago, Karl Loewenstein, frustrated by the inability of democracy to contain fascism, urged democracies to adopt “militant tactics” to save themselves from the anti-democratic forces both within and outside.¹⁸ The “militant democracy” which Lowenstein advocated would allow constitutional democracies to protect civil and political freedoms, and maintain law and order, by preemptively restricting such freedoms to prevent the undermining of liberal democratic institutions. Although many Western liberals are inclined to see Modi as an authoritarian strongman, his unwillingness to adopt robust measures to pre­serve law and order and strengthen state institutions against an array of illiberal and antidemocratic forces committed to its destruction may be the greatest threat to the survival of India’s democracy and any genuine liberalism.

The Country of the Future

Although Indian authorities are quick to boast that the country has made significant gains in reducing poverty (and they are correct), it is also important to note that an estimated 364 million Indians still continue to live in conditions of deprivation. On the other hand, the Chinese state’s ability to combine the country’s high growth rates with job creation and redistribution has enabled China, according to official World Bank figures, to reduce the percentage of “extremely poor people” from 88.3 percent in 1981 to only 0.7 percent by 2015.¹⁹ In other words, the number of poor people in China fell from 878 million to less than ten million within two decades.

Decades ago, Samuel Huntington cautioned that “the differences between democracy and dictatorship” are far less important than the divide between those states which can provide order and those which cannot. This in a nutshell explains the unforgivable failure of India to achieve the economic success, national political consolidation, and the global prestige and respect that come from the ability to project hard power.

India has fallen far behind China, even though, at the time of Indian independence (1947) and the PRC’s formation (1949), they faced similar levels of economic backwardness. India lags in almost every key measure of national prosperity and geopolitical power fundamentally because of its inability to provide order and stability, and to resolve the disconnect between India’s liberal national ideals and its complicated social reality. To date, the Modi government’s inability or unwillingness to provide effective law and order is the main reason why India has failed both to encourage domestic entrepreneurs to invest in their own coun­try and to advance the government’s ambitious agenda of atmanirbhar (economic self-reliance), or to attract foreign business and capital to invest in an economy with huge potential.

Thus India might still appear to be the country of the future, but that future, as usual, seems likely to remain unrealized for some time.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VII, Number 3 (Fall 2023): 100–18.

Notes