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India’s Despotic Election – Part 1

Debasish Roy Chowdhury. Project Syndicate. May 3, 2024

India is no longer the model free-market democracy that Westerners spent years imagining, encouraging, and touting. With Prime Minister Narendra Modi having bent the media, big business, and democratic institutions to his will, India's markets and politics are becoming less free – as the ongoing election is set to confirm.

A couple of months before India’s general election began on April 19 (voting will continue until June 1), the opposition Indian National Congress made a stunning disclosure at a press conference in New Delhi. Apparently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government had frozen some of the party’s main bank accounts and slapped it with an outsize bill for a minor tax-filing lapse five years earlier, leaving it with no money even to pay for electricity or salaries, let alone conduct an election campaign. The freeze was soon lifted, but the message was clear: this wasn’t going to be a regular election. [The phrase describes the government's action of issuing a disproportionately large bill to the Indian National Congress due to a minor error in tax filing that happened five years earlier. This action severely impacted the party's financial situation, as it left them with insufficient funds even for basic expenses like electricity bills and salaries, let alone conducting an election campaign.]

Though Congress had ruled India for most of the period since independence in 1947, Modi’s rise to national power in 2014 has left the party flailing. Congress officials decried the account freeze as a “deep assault on India’s democracy,” but this was merely the latest example in a longer-running saga. Modi’s government has spent a decade eroding civil liberties and minority rights, curtailing dissent, undermining democratic institutions, and building a cult of personality. While Western governments continue to pretend that India is the world’s largest democracy, the country is beginning to resemble a Central Asian dictatorship.

“One Of The Worst”

Those monitoring the health of democracy around the world are unanimous in their bleak prognosis of India under Modi. Freedom House describes India as only “partly free,” and the V-Dem Institute in Sweden has, since 2018, categorized it as an “electoral autocracy.” In its 2024 Democracy Report, V-Dem singles India out as “one of the worst autocratizers lately.”

From Russia and Hungary to Turkey and (until recently) Poland, a common pattern of the twenty-first-century autocratizers is that, unlike textbook authoritarians, the new despots cunningly stop short of destroying or fully dismantling democracy. Recognizing the legitimizing power of democracy, they use its processes to rise to power, often through polarizing identity politics. Once in office, they then move to capture or hollow out democratic institutions – including the judiciary and independent media – that otherwise might serve as a check on their majoritarianism. Modi’s decade in power has offered a masterclass in this process.

It is often said that democracy’s greatest advantage over other forms of government is its built-in capacity to self-correct. In theory, regularly scheduled elections ensure accountability for incompetence, corruption, and misrule; and in the meantime, the force of public opinion restrains the arbitrary exercise of power. But in the real world, the vulnerability of democratic institutions means that elections can be reduced to raucous rituals that merely reaffirm the power of the incumbent ruler. Voting choices can be manipulated through the force of money. Opposition candidates can be subdued through state organs (like tax-enforcement authorities). And citizens can be deprived of the independent, objective information that they need to evaluate the government to decide whom to vote for. When this happens, elections no longer serve as a check on creeping despotism; they enable it.