Democratic Defense

Much ink has been spilled on the erosion of democracy in India, but the country’s most recent elections demonstrate such erosion has not gone unchecked. During the last decade, Indians across sectors of society have repeatedly stood up to a repressive state in an effort to defend democracy. In this pivotal year, during which at least 4 billion people will be casting their vote in some form of election, the actions of ordinary Indians have much to show the world about how democracies may yet survive authoritarian onslaughts. 

Indians voted in a seven-phase election over the spring and summer of 2024 to elect members of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament. Led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was widely projected by a series of exit polls to win an overwhelming majority in the elections and return to power for a third term with a crushing majority. The results, declared on June 4, shocked the government and its supporters. The BJP was stripped of its parliamentary majority. Although it managed to form the government, it only did so in coalition with other parties. 

The results culminated a decade of discontent. From student protests against the government’s growing authoritarianism to collective action that supplied oxygen masks to those in need during the devastating pandemic, and entertainers poking fun at the majoritarian obsession with protecting Hindus in a country where they are an overwhelming majority, opposition to the BJP has been widespread and diverse. The election results affirmed that, while Narendra Modi remains widely popular, Indian voters sought to rein in the excessive authoritarianism he tended to practice and project. 

A breakdown of the election results suggests that a simple economic narrative is inadequate in explaining voters’ reversal. Though Modi’s government did exacerbate already worsening inequalities, some of the hardest hit regions maintained support for his party, while some of the country’s wealthiest withdrew it. This, however, does not mean that Modi’s decline is entirely separable from India’s political economy. A long-term view of India’s post-independence governments illuminates the delicate balance of economic interests that have long underpinned its democratic institutions—a balance which the Modi government’s authoritarian measures have attempted to undermine. While rising inequality alone may not explain the results, the repression that underlies India’s present economic model just may. 

Unpacking the vote

The BJP’s electoral reversal appears puzzling to observers impressed by the rates of India’s economic growth. A tempting response to this puzzle is to argue, correctly, that the benefits of economic growth have not been evenly shared across Indians. Indeed, the evidence that inequalities of wealth and income have both increased in India is impossible to ignore. Moreover, the government is perceived to be favorable to rich industrialists: Modi is often personally identified as close to India’s richest industrialists, the Adanis and the Ambanis. These ties were repeatedly raised by opposition politician Rahul Gandhi, scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family and leader of the Congress party. In rallies held as far apart as Konbir (Jharkhand), Khargone (Madhya Pradesh), Nagarkurnool (Telangana), Pune (Maharashtra), and Delhi, Gandhi urged his audiences to question the close links between the Modi-led government and rentier segments of big business. Opposition politicians repeatedly raised the growing compact between state and big business and the resultant concentration of political and economic power during the election campaign. This set of explanations would prime us to believe that the BJP’s electoral reversal could be explained as a class war. 

Indeed, the Uttar Pradesh (UP) vote suggests a gradual politicization of inequality. The richer west and far western regions returned a majority of National Democratic Alliance (NDA) legislators—the BJP-led right-wing coalition. The middling east and central regions were a mixed bag, with both coalitions matched evenly. The poorer south and south-central were harshest on NDA and were swept by the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), the Congress-led opposition coalition. Here, agricultural distress played a pivotal role. It was in Kheri, one of these constituencies, that a BJP legislator mowed down protesting farmers a few years ago and was shown the door. Prosperous urban constituencies—Varanasi, Lucknow, Kanpur—went entirely to BJP, suggesting the vote’s class dimension. Rural and semi-rural UP went largely to INDIA, suggesting the resonance of its campaign which spoke to material struggles. 

However, a nationwide analysis of the election results defy such a generalized economic explanation. Poor people in UP voted against the BJP to much greater extent than they did in neighboring Bihar which shares similar economic difficulties and social hierarchies. Some of India’s poorest districts in Odisha voted for the BJP despite the economic inequalities fomented under its watch. Voting patterns in affluent constituencies further undermine this narrative. The BJP expectedly swept Delhi where its claims to economic growth resonated with voters. But it was washed out in Mumbai, the financial capital where many beneficiaries of the economic growth touted by Modi live.

Findings of the well-respected Lok Niti exit poll suggests that almost an equal proportion of the richest and poorest quintiles in their sample voted for the Congress Party, suggesting that class polarization might not be as salient in shaping the electoral results as the electoral rhetoric might suggest. 

Democracy in India

While a simple economic narrative doesn’t quite hold, a qualitative look at transformations in Indian political economy may shed more light on present circumstances. India was always an unlikely democracy: for decades, it defied the conventional wisdom that development is a prerequisite for democratic transition. Upon independence in 1947, few people expected the impoverished country to survive. It had just emerged from a blood-soaked religious partition that left at least one million dead and rendered ten million people refugees. Hindu nationalists called for a whole-scale expulsion of Muslims so that the partition could be full and final, a call that ceased only when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a radical Hindu. 500-odd princely States dotted the Indian Union, threatening to tear under its territorial integrity: these were eventually incorporated within the Union with the promise of a privy purse, a lifelong payment to compensate them for the loss of their reigns. Indians obtained universal adult suffrage soon after obtaining independence and adopted a republican constitution in 1950, a full fifteen years before then-superpowers such as the US lifted literacy and tax qualifications for voting.

Independent India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, buttressed its democracy through a coalition of dominant proprietary classes that included big business, landlords, and professional groups including, most importantly, the bureaucracy.¹ Big businesses were guaranteed large doses of public investment, including subsidies for inputs. Landlords were allowed enormous sway in the countryside and succeeded in extracting a major fiscal concession from the government: agricultural income was hereafter exempt from taxation. Professional groups—including lawyers and bureaucrats but also doctors, teachers, and other salaried personnel—were assured subsidies for higher education, an elaborate welfare system, and cheap food grains via the public distribution system. 

Built into this coalition was a system of checks and balances. Big businesses were subject to stringent regulations on who could set up industries, where they could locate their factories and how much they could produce in them. Landlords were stripped of the revenue-collecting authority they enjoyed in colonial times and were fed the fearful rhetoric of land reforms, which led many of them to sell their surplus lands to rich farmers who soon became masters of the countryside. Despite their social privileges, professional groups were too disparate to form a coherent class fraction and enjoyed neither the economic clout of the big businessmen nor the political clout of the landlord-rich farmer. 

Against all predictions, India emerged—warts and all—as the world’s largest democracy. As the dominant coalition sought an upper hand in gaining political and economic power, they often aligned with one or the other constituents to marginalize the third. The Congress Party’s leftward lurch under Indira Gandhi’s first Prime Ministerial tenure (1966–77) facilitated an alliance between emboldened professional groups and rich farmers, who demanded governmental support to keep agriculture profitable. Gandhi’s government nationalized banks as well as the production and distribution of coal and copper, abolished privy purses promised to the princes, and terminated monopolies and other practices that restricted trade. Big businesses were kept firmly in check by an alliance of bureaucratic and agricultural elites.

This alliance prompted a wave of demands from below: members of the so-called lower castes claimed greater representation in jobs and employment while peasants, sharecroppers, and landless laborers demanded a redistribution of land in the countryside. In response, successive governments through the 1980s drew up a plethora of welfare schemes and affirmative action programs. These measures in turn provoked an “elite revolt” as big businesses sought to assert their economic and political power.² The gradual liberalization of India’s economy during the 1990s assuage their economic worries somewhat, even as political power leached away from the once-dominant Congress Party toward regional, leftist, and anti-caste parties that ruled the country in coalition with one another. 

The extent and depth of these political struggles testify to how some of the poorest people on the planet have sought to construct and sustain democracy against enormous odds. Free and fair elections were held as scheduled. India’s states, many of which are larger than several European countries, were asserting their voice in national politics and shaping it toward a truly inclusive polity. The national parliament and provincial legislative assemblies had become more and more representative of the country’s diverse population.

Inclusive growth

The collapse of the Congress Party as India’s dominant political formation heralded an era of coalition politics that gradually liberalized the economy but also enabled hitherto marginalized groups a share in political power. For example, UP, where entrenched caste hierarchies had weathered Hindu, Turko-Mughal, and British rule in succession, came to be governed by political parties led by politicians stigmatized as “low caste” or “untouchable.” As caste hierarchies were shaken up by political parties committed to social equality, India’s economy went from a feeble “Hindu rate of growth” to a productivity surge that delivered decades of strong growth beginning in the 1990s.³ The average annual growth in GDP went from 5.9 percent in the decade between 1990–2000 to 8 percent in the decade between 2000–2010.⁴ Increased growth rates persisted irrespective of whether the coalition governments were led by the Congress (1991–96 and 2004–14), BJP (1998–2004) or other parties (1996–8). 

Between 1999 and 2012, unemployment declined across both rural and urban regions and among both men and women. The proportion of the population in regular employment increased from 16 percent to 20 percent and those in casual employment dropped from 24 percent to 29 percent.⁵ At the same time, the growth of social protections, such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), contributed to poverty reduction. Though precise estimates vary, most scholars of poverty in India concur that poverty in the country significantly declined,⁶ with one influential study suggesting that the plethora of social welfare schemes may well have pulled 271 million people out of poverty.⁷

A large new middle class of mixed caste composition emerged. As a percentage of the population, the middle class increased from 29 percent in 1999 to over 50 percent in 2012.⁸ Using a per capita expenditure method which defines the middle class as earning between US$2 and US$10 per day, other scholars estimate that the size of the middle class in India more than doubled from 290 million people in 1999 to 604 million in 2012.⁹ This expansion was not limited to urban India, as the middle class increased from 20 percent to 41 percent of the population between 1999 and 2012 in rural areas. Notably, while the expansion of the middle class occurred across all social groups, it was most prominent among the caste groups stigmatized as lower caste. These groups, while considered ritually inferior to the self-styled upper castes, regarded themselves superior to the groups historically oppressed as untouchables: in 1999–2000, 24 percent of these households (officially known as Other Backward Class, OBC) could be enumerated as middle class, a figure that crossed 50 percent in 2012.

Reducing poverty was one thing; containing inequality was another. Disproportionate gains were made by the wealthiest. Wealth shares owned by the top 1 percent in India rapidly increased since 2010, when they owned 40 percent of the country’s total wealth, to 58 percent in 2016.¹⁰ Growing inequality was witnessed within states and within the most important social grouping of caste. The income gap between the poorest and the richest states increased, and urban inequality increased for all the fifteen major states during the 1990s.¹¹

Successive Indian governments tried to ensure that economic liberalization would not undermine political stability.¹² Governments prioritized manufacturing and information technology (IT) sectors precisely because they were least likely to generate opposition. The state also invited foreign direct investments in finance and insurance, although nationalized institutions remained widespread, thus minimizing their exposure to global trends. The government also invited private sector participation in the mining and mineral sector, but the state retained the power to allocate licenses. The agricultural sector was almost entirely exempt from liberalization as governments feared social turbulence in the countryside. This partial liberalization suggested a tenuous alliance between bureaucrats and big business in a desperate bid to salvage the political and economic power of the dominant proprietary classes. 

The partial nature of economic liberalization also saved India from the worst effects of the Global Financial Crisis that ravaged the west (refer to the Index of Economic Freedom chart below). The extensive network of nationalized banks, coupled with the Reserve Bank of India’s heavy regulations, protected the banking sector from turmoil. When the effects did begin to show (due to decline in FDI, remittances, and earnings from exports), they were relatively minimal thanks to India’s limited reliance on the global economy. The Indian government responded with an extensive fiscal stimulus over and above the budgetary provisions for increased expenditures that had already been announced earlier in the year. Given that 2009 was an election year, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government did not want to take any chances. The stimulus packages paid off and the UPA government was re-elected to power. 

Index of Economic Freedom: India and the United States, 1996–2004

But economic growth began to slow down in 2010. It fell from 8.5 percent to 5.2 percent in one year, increasing slightly to 6.3 percent by 2013.¹³ This slowdown resulted from the model of economic growth pursued by the UPA government as it prioritized investments in minerals and mining, telecommunications, and construction and real estate—sectors from which politicians and bureaucrats could extract rents through corruption. Indeed, the proportion of billionaire wealth originating in these sectors grew rapidly compared to other, more competitive sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, and IT.¹⁴ The professional groups splintered as the rapidly expanding salaried middle class, as well as civil society activists and influential members of the judiciary, protested the corruption of the bureaucrats and politicians. Big businesses also fractured between the rentier segments mentioned above and the competitive groups. The countryside was aflame as far-left Maoist Naxalites contested the extractive political economy that exploited mineral resources in areas inhabited mostly by Adivasi citizens commonly derided as “primitive.” 

As the government’s inability to control these agitations became evident, investors lost confidence. Government seemed paralyzed. Decision-making ground to a halt and voters grew anxious. A Carnegie Endowment report found that economic growth was the foremost issue that worried voters in 2014.  

The advent of Narendra Modi

Narendra Modi emerged as a solution to voters’ worries. Unlike the Congress Party, which emphasized poverty reduction, the BJP led by Modi offered the prospects of inclusive development: “Sabka saath, sabka vikas,” Modi thundered in Hindi to emphasize his commitment to sustain economic growth, increase jobs, and ensure that everyone benefitted. His promises sutured the alliance between big business and professional groups by assuring expanded infrastructure, encouragement to manufacturing, and creation of salaried jobs—even as it neglected the agricultural sector. He also made much of his own “low caste” origins. These were infused by his commitment to Hindu nationalism, a century-old idea that Hindu ideals (ought to) provide the bedrock of politics in the country. The stage had been set in an interview to Reuters, when he was pointedly asked if he was a Hindu nationalist, Modi glibly replied: “Well, I am a Hindu and I am a nationalist, so—yes—I am a Hindu nationalist.”¹⁵

In power, the BJP at first appeared to have succeeded where the Congress-led UPA failed in stemming the economic slowdown. Modi’s arrival to Delhi on a private jet owned by Adani, one of India’s leading businessman with investments in industry and infrastructure, was a sign of things to come. Since then, growth rates have eclipsed those of the waning UPA years, supported by government efforts to tame environmental laws and regulations in order to facilitate extractive industries, investments in real estate, and construction of infrastructure projects, as well as dilute labor laws. Both these measures assure big business of their ability to profit and serve to attract investment. In 2016, the government demonetized high-denomination currency notes, rendering worthless over 85 percent of all cash circulating in the economy: even as the country’s laboring poor struggled to use the now-illegal currency notes they held, the digital infrastructure that was put in place saw a surge in the profits made by new fintech startups such as Paytm, PayU India, and Ezetap. 

These profits were not distributed equally. Manufacturing has remained stagnant, jobs are fewer to come by, and unemployment has increased. In 2020, the government quickly, and without broader consultation, passed three laws that promised to liberalize agriculture, thereby weakening state oversight over farming and dismantling the elaborate protections that guaranteed farmers a minimum support price to guard against fluctuations in the market and prevent the takeover of agricultural land by corporate entities. 

Like its predecessor, the BJP continued to pursue a growth model that favored rentier segments of big business such as infrastructure, telecommunications, and construction and real estate. But it deviated from earlier governments in two key respects. First, the BJP’s cultural policies have actively fomented religious polarization to attract Hindu voters across caste and region. It has shied away from reining in vigilantes who have taken it upon themselves to protect cows, sacred to many Hindus: such vigilante action has resulted in lynchings, beatings and killings of individuals suspected of killing cows and eating beef. An overwhelming majority of the victims of these lynchings have been Muslim. More recently, the government introduced the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), a religious filter to India’s citizenship laws, further entrenching the marginalization of Muslims. Calls for expelling Muslims to Pakistan have been resurrected, threatening India’s complex social fabric. 

Secondly, the Modi government has invoked colonial-era sedition laws against individuals whose activities are deemed against the interests of the state. To be clear, the UPA government was on the side of the rentier magnates against Adivasi communities in what has been dubbed “India’s dirty war,” and it cautiously initiated the liberalization of agriculture. But the Modi-led government has been more extreme in unleashing the full force of India’s security apparatus, using alleged plots to assassinate the Prime Minister as an excuse to clamp down on resistance. Civil society activists are frequently criminalized as “urban Naxals” and dissenting farmers branded as secessionists, anti-nationals, and terrorists. 

These heavy-handed efforts at delegitimizing dissent have disrupted the carefully cultivated checks and balances between the dominant proprietary classes that had been the mainstay of Indian democracy since Independence. While attempting to draw voters through a Hindu First ideology, these efforts have not stymied rising inequality. India overtook its former colonial power, Britain, as the world’s fifth largest economy in 2021. Top 1 percent incomes are now at an all-time high, surpassing colonial-era inequalities, bolstered by Modi’s authoritarian tendencies. 

Defending Indian democracy

Such inequalities—and the underlying authoritarianism—have not gone unchallenged. The past decade has witnessed a series of social movements against the Modi government, attesting to the breadth of opposition from different sectors of society that have resurrected checks on the central government’s power. In 2016, India was rocked by chilling images of seven laborers of Dalit backgrounds, stigmatized as “untouchables,” being lynched by cow protection vigilantes. The video of lynchings sparked unprecedented protests from Dalits in Gujarat, and over 1,500 Dalits traveled to the Una to dump cow carcasses in front of the district office. These protests, which forced Gujarat’s chief minister to resign, demonstrated the force of working-class mobilization.

The 2019 protests against the CAA were perhaps the largest in the BJP’s tenure. Beyond the well-documented sit-in at Shaheen Bagh, at the south-eastern edge of Delhi, people protested the divisive legislation across the country. Many of the protestors came from middle class backgrounds, suggesting a growing discontent within this social group against the social polarization wrought by the BJP’s policies. 

The farmers’ protests of 2020 forced Modi to retreat on legislation that promised to reform India’s ailing agricultural sector by allowing big business to intervene and invest in land. Angered by the speed with which the laws were pushed through the Lok Sabha, farmers across social classes (rich and poor, landed and landless, upper caste and lower caste) converged on Delhi to protest through the bitter winter of 2020 to 2021. Hindu and Muslim farmers across western UP found common cause. The national strike called on September 27, 2021 paralyzed Punjab and parts of western UP and received extensive support in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala. With the repeal of the acts, the farmers’ decisive victory demonstrated their resurgence as a social bloc that refused to be relegated to the political margins. 

The spectrum of movements that challenged the ruling party contributed to the electoral reversal witnessed in 2024, in which voters in many formerly BJP-voting States rejected Modi’s vision. The BJP lost forty-four rural constituencies while the Congress gained seventy-seven of these, reflecting discontent in the countryside: the Congress won seventy of 147 semi-urban constituencies, reflecting a hunger for change in these rapidly transforming spaces. Of 131 constituencies “reserved” for Dalits and Adivasis under India’s affirmative action programs, the BJP won fifty-five, down from seventy-seven in the previous elections.  

There is little doubt that India’s democratic achievements since Independence, far from perfect, have eroded after 2014. Indeed, the 2024 elections have been widely billed as the among the most unfair and unfree elections in India’s postcolonial history. The ruling party cornered most of the political finance. The mainstream media crawled when asked to bend, seeking to create an atmosphere favorable to the government. Barely three months before the elections were to commence, the government hurriedly consecrated a temple dedicated to the Hindu deity Ram in the northern town of Ayodhya in UP. Built on a site where a 450-plus-year mosque had been torn down by Hindutva activists mobilized by the BJP and its associate bodies in 1992, Ayodhya’s Ram temple was meant to symbolize the advent of a Hindu Renaissance. Modi himself presided over the consecration ceremony, thus actively personifying his government’s Hindu First ideology. The ceremony was broadcast live across the world as a means of projecting India’s revival as a civilisational state. When the elections commenced, the ruling party and its allies, billed as the NDA, appeared to be easily able to crush the opposition. 

But the election results revealed the hollowness of these performances. The temple construction left behind a trail of destruction, evicting almost 5,000 households and businesses without commensurate compensation. The Faizabad constituency, Ayodhya’s electoral home, saw the BJP’s candidate lose definitively to the opposition candidate. Along with thirty-five of the UP’s eighty constituencies, Faizabad’s residents chose the Samajwadi Party (literally: Socialist Party), known for taking a hard line against the movement to build the Ram Temple. 

The BJP’s electoral prospects were further dimmed by the widespread perception, fanned by its own politicians, that if the party secured a two-thirds majority, it would amend the Indian constitution—code for dismantling affirmative actions for historically oppressed communities. In response, the Constitution and its democratic guarantees quickly emerged as the talking point for voters across the State. Building on the state’s vernacular socialist tradition, opposition allies assured audiences that a caste census would be conducted and resources distributed accordingly. “Jiski jitni sankhyabhari, utni uski hissedari,” a phrase popularized by the widely-respected social justice activist Kanshiram, was revived. Modi tried communalizing this claim to fair distribution by suggesting that the opposition would confiscate properties owned by Hindus and distribute these to Muslims. The vitriol backfired as people in UP, as elsewhere, tuned in ever more to the opposition manifesto. 

India’s democratic decline appears to have slowed down. Although it has neither been arrested nor reversed, the election results have compelled the BJP to rely on coalition partners for their political survival. Economic inequalities may not be resolved, and they may even deepen in the years to come. Nonetheless, the recent results point to the limitations not only of the unequally distributed benefits of economic growth but of the authoritarian politics underpinning Modi’s economic model.