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India’s Despotic Election – Part 2

Debasish Roy Chowdhury. Project Syndicate. May 3, 2024

Indians tend to fetishize elections, which now wholly define their self-imagination as a democratic society, obscuring other institutional necessities. The carnivalesque quality of the world’s biggest electoral process hides a bitter truth: this year’s elaborate exercise in offering the franchise to 970 million people has all the hallmarks of a despotic election. The voting is not overtly rigged (as in Russia’s farcical polls), but the playing field is tilted decisively in favor of the ruling party. The chances of an electoral upset have not been eliminated, just sharply minimized. ["An electoral upset" refers to an unexpected or surprising outcome in an election, typically one where a candidate or party who was not favored to win manages to secure victory. This phrase is often used to describe a result that defies predictions or goes against the prevailing expectations of political analysts, pundits, or the public.]

Cash Is King

The Modi government’s targeting of opposition bank accounts and funding is an efficient way of doing just that. Indian electoral outcomes have become almost entirely a function of money. The last parliamentary election, in 2019, was estimated to have been the most expensive ever held anywhere. Total spending exceeded $7 billion, which was more than the $6.5 billion spent in the 2016 US presidential and congressional elections (even though America’s per capita GDP is 32 times greater).

India’s campaign finance system has always lacked transparency and accountability, but it has grown even more opaque under Modi. In 2017, the government opened the floodgates for dark money by introducing electoral bonds that allowed for unlimited, undisclosed campaign donations to parties. Dark money distorts democracy by making it easier to hijack elections, and by privileging secretive special-interest groups over voters in policymaking. After years of civil-society groups challenging the legality of electoral bonds, India’s Supreme Court finally ruled against this financing instrument in February.

Since then, court-ordered disclosures of previously private donations have revealed just how closely corporate capital has become intertwined with politics. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – which reportedly spent around $3 billion in the 2019 campaign – had cornered 84% of all electoral-bond funding. Policies have been regularly made and unmade on the basis of donations. In a blatant conflict of interest, the BJP has accepted millions of rupees from government contractors that depend on public procurement (such as tenders to build tunnels and rail lines). Companies facing regulatory scrutiny from government agencies have magically found relief after buying BJP bonds. Modi clearly has had no qualms about using the state’s power to bend big business to his will, and to press firms into underwriting despotism.

The money trails also confirm that India’s historically apolitical bureaucracy now unabashedly works for the ruling party, having abandoned any pretense of neutrality. Neither does the party feel compelled to hide its strong arm. This became abundantly clear just before the election, when Modi handpicked two commissioners to stack the three-member Election Commission in his favor. That move followed from a new law, enacted last year, that changed the process by which commission members are appointed (a seat previously reserved for the neutral chief justice now goes to a government minister).

Unchecked Imbalances

Predictably, the Election Commission has since turned a blind eye to even the most obvious violations by the BJP, which is openly deploying vile, “othering” tropes against Muslims to mobilize Hindu votes. One of its promotional videos was so replete with hate speech that Instagram removed it. And Modi himself is giving speeches calling Muslims “infiltrators” who produce more children than Hindus, and claiming that if