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Why India’s Democracy Is Dying

Maya Tudor

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July 2023 34 3 121–32

SUBJECT
ABSTRACT

Democratic
decline India exemplifies the global democratic recession. India’s recent downgrade to a hybrid
regime is a major influence on the world’s autocratization. And the modality of India’s

REGION democratic decline reveals how democracies die today: not through a dramatic coup or
midnight arrests of opposition leaders, but instead, it moves through the fully legal
South Asia
harassment of the opposition, intimidation of media, and centralization of executive
power. By equating government criticism with disloyalty to the nation, the government of
COUNTRY
Narendra Modi is diminishing the very idea that opposition is legitimate. India today is no
India
longer the world’s largest democracy.

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This is one of five essays in a special package on the state of India’s democracy.

N o country is a better exemplar of our global democratic recession than India. Most
unlikely at its founding, India’s democracy confounded legions of naysayers by growing more
stable over its first seven decades. India’s democratic deepening happened in formal ways,
through the consolidation of civilian rule over the military as well as decades of vibrant
multiparty competition, and informal ways, through the strengthening of norms around
Electoral Commission independence and the increasing participation of women and other
social groups in formal political life.

India has also witnessed two significant democratic declines: the 21-month period from June
1975 to March 1977 known as the Emergency and a contemporary decline beginning with
Narendra Modi’s election in 2014. During Modi’s tenure, key democratic institutions have
 remained formally in place while the norms and practices underpinning democracy have
substantially deteriorated. This informal democratic decline in contemporary India stands in
stark contrast to the Emergency, when Indira Gandhi formally eliminated nearly all
democratic institutions—banning elections, arresting political opposition, eviscerating civil
liberties, muzzling independent media, and passing three constitutional amendments that
undermined the power of the country’s courts.

Yet democracy watchdogs agree that today India resides somewhere

About the Author in a nether region between full democracy and full autocracy. While

Maya Tudor is associate professor of politics and public democracy-watching organizations categorize democracies
policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at the differently, they all classify India today as a “hybrid regime”—that is,
University of Oxford. She is the author of The Promise
neither a full democracy nor a full autocracy. And this is new. In 2021,
of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and
Autocracy in Pakistan (2013) and Varieties of Freedom House dropped India’s rating from Free to Partly Free (the
Nationalism: Communities, Narratives, Identities (with
only remaining category is Not Free). That same year, the Varieties of
Harris Mylonas, 2023).
Democracy (V-Dem) project relegated India to the status of “electoral
View all work by Maya Tudor
autocracy” on its scale of closed autocracy, electoral autocracy,
electoral democracy, or liberal democracy. And the Economist
Intelligence Unit moved India into the “flawed democracy” category
on its scale of full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime, and authoritarian regime.
India’s democratic downgrading moved 1.4 billion of the world’s 8 billion people into the
category of autocratizing countries. Its drop from Free to Partly Free fully halved the share of
the world living in a Free country. 1 Wherever you draw the conceptual lines between the
land of democracy, the sea of autocracy, and the marshlands marking the hybrid regions, our
democratic world is considerably less populous without India among its ranks. The question
of whether India is a democracy today is not just pivotal to our analysis of the country’s
political future but to our understanding of democratic trends more broadly. India, this year
the world’s most populous country, is where the global battle for democracy is being fought.

Some disagree that India has substantively deteriorated into hybrid-regime territory.
Unsurprisingly, the Indian government has reacted with accusations of Western bias, calling
India’s democratic downgrade “misleading, incorrect and misplaced.” 2 In August 2022, the
Economic Advisory Council to India’s prime minister released a working paper calling out
inconsistencies in democracy rankings. Yet there is reason why regime assessments, like a
central bank’s interest rates, are best made by independent organizations. Notably, democracy
watchdogs have not been shy about critiquing the quality of Western democracies.

But a minority of independent voices also resist India’s recategorization as a hybrid regime. In
the article “Why India’s Democracy Is Not Dying,” Akhilish Pillalamarri writes that “cultural and
social trends [in India today] are not necessarily evidence of democratic backsliding, but are
rather evidence of social norms in India that are illiberal toward speech, individual expression,
and criticism.” 3 So has India really departed the shores of democracy? And if so, is India’s
transition into a hybrid regime reversible? The answer to both questions is yes.

What’s in a Name?
To evaluate India’s democratic downgrading, it is first necessary to define democracy, both
because adjudicating the debate over India’s democratic decline rests on conceptual clarity
and because democracy undoubtedly connotes normative legitimacy. Democracy is a concept
that instantiates a system of government that is “of the people, by the people, and for the
people,” to quote Abraham Lincoln. Clarity on the non-normative dimensions of democracy
that operationalize this idea points us toward the criteria we can use to assess the state of
India’s democracy.
Scholars mostly agree that five institutions are central to a country’s designation as
democratic. Of these five institutions, elections for the chief executive and legislature are the
first and most important. The second institutional pillar of democracy is thus the presence of
genuine political competition. Countries where individuals have the right to vote in elections,
but where incumbents make it difficult for the opposition to organize are not generally
considered democracies. Democracy also requires governmental autonomy from other forces
—such as a colonial ruler or powerful military elites—that can halt or wholly subvert
democratic elections; this autonomy is the third institutional pillar.

Two more institutions are also conceptually crucial to democracy because they enable both
citizens and independent branches of government to evaluate the government’s
performance: civil liberties (both de jure and de facto), the fourth pillar, and executive
checks, the fifth pillar. Many prominent scholars have correctly argued that definitions of
democracy which do not include basic civil liberties are inadequate. 4 An independent press
that enables the formation of critical public opinion is increasingly understood as being part
of this civil-liberties pillar. The final institutional pillar of democracy, executive checks, is what
prevents an elected head of government from declaring l’état, c’est moi. Democracy is a set of
institutions that embed a practice of government accountability. This accountability takes two
forms: vertical accountability between the people and the highest levels of elected
government, typically elections and alternative political forces; and horizontal accountability
between the executive and independent institutions, typically independent legislatures and
courts that can constrain an elected executive from trampling on civil liberties.

Two important points follow from this five-pillar conceptualization of democracy that are
germane to our assessment of India’s contemporary democratic decline. The first is that the
scholarly definition of democracy has rightly expanded over time. In the past half-century, as
authoritarian leaders have learned to adopt the window-dressing of democracy while
quashing those institutions essential to its functioning, democracy watchdogs have wisely
adapted by seeking to better assess whether government institutions embody accountability
and whether institutional rights exist not just in law but in practice.

One specific way in which scholarly conceptions of democracy have expanded is a newfound
understanding of the importance of institutional norms in buttressing democracy. As Nancy
Bermeo prophetically wrote in these pages in 2016, we are living in an age of democratic
backsliding characterized by the decline of overt democratic breakdown. Coup d’états are
being replaced by promissory coups (presenting “the ouster of an elected government as a
defense of democratic legality”); executive coups are being replaced by executive
aggrandizement (“elected executives weaken checks on executive power one by one,
undertaking a series of institutional changes that hamper the power of opposition forces to
challenge executive preferences”); and election-day vote fraud is being replaced by
preelection strategic manipulation (reflecting “a range of actions aimed at tilting the electoral
playing field in favor of incumbents”). In other words, democratic decline is assuming the
form of an incremental undermining of democratic institutions wherein “troubled
democracies are now more likely to erode than shatter.” 5

And the clearest signs of such democratic erosion are that elected leaders question the
legitimacy of all opposition and use every available legal tool to undermine it. Drawing on a
broad range of historical cases, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that unwritten rules
and norms of behavior toward political opposition are the key to preventing such democratic
deterioration. They argue that the two most important norms are opposition
tolerance, meaning that political opponents are not treated as enemies but simply as political
rivals, and forbearance, that is, limited use of the legal methods to steamroll opposition, such
as executive orders, vetoes, and filibusters. 6 Contemporary democratic backsliders
tend not to transform overnight to autocracies. Instead, democracies slowly die when
opposition is no longer tolerated and when elected politicians use the full might of the law to
quash rather than compromise with political opposition.

India’s contemporary democratic decline is a paradigmatic case of these crucial democracy-

supporting norms sharply eroding. The formal institutions of India’s democracy (largely
reflected in Freedom House’s political-rights category and corresponding to the elections,
competition, and autonomy pillars of democracy) have remained relatively stable over the
past decade. India’s civil-liberties ranking, in contrast, has eroded year on year since 2019,
dropping from 42 (out of a possible 60) points in 2010 to 33 in 2023. It is this nine-point drop
in Freedom House’s civil-liberties index that has moved India from the category of democracy
(those generally score above 70) to the terrain of a hybrid regime (generally scoring between
35 and 70). And, as I detail below, the downgrade is warranted.

A second, related point is that the same regime can become autocratic in decidedly different
ways at different points in time. And different regimes can be equally undemocratic, but for
different reasons. Democratic recessions need not assume a dramatic form, like military
coups or the kind of autogolpe that India witnessed under Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. In 2023,
Freedom House classified both Iraq and Mali as Not Free and gave them the exact same score
of 29—but for radically different reasons. Mali ranks low on political rights (8 out of 40
possible points) because the country has not yet returned to having regular elections after
military coups. But Mali ranks high among full autocracies for civil liberties (21 out of 60
possible points) because its media are relatively independent and it has broad rights to dissent
and free speech. By contrast, Iraq scores relatively high among full autocracies on political
rights (16 out of 40 possible points) because it holds regular, competitive elections, and its
various religious and ethnic groups maintain representation within the political system. Yet
Iraq does less well on civil liberties (13 out of 60 possible points) because of frequently
documented cases of militias depriving citizens and journalists of liberties. Countries can dip
below the democratic threshold by declining sharply in some domains. But they can also dip
into hybrid-regime territory by declining only somewhat across a broad range of indicators—
and this is what we see in contemporary India.

Stable Rights and Declining Liberties

India’s democracy was never very high-quality. The formal exercise of autonomous,
competitive elections with a broad range of civil liberties—while it did translate into a mass
poverty-alleviation program and the world’s largest affirmative-action program—always had
plenty of shortcomings. But democracy also had a built-in autocorrect feature, which allowed
incumbents to be turned out of power. That autocorrect feature is endangered today in
mostly informal ways. In terms of Freedom House’s political-rights score (encompassing the
pillars of elections, competition, and autonomy), India’s average for the nine years before
Modi came to power was the same as for the nine years since 2014. Incumbent turnover
remains electorally possible but improbable because the Modi government has substantially
eroded the de facto protection of civil liberties and executive constraints—the fourth and fifth
pillars of democracy. It is the drop in India’s civil-liberties rating that accounts for its
contemporary democratic decline.

The legal right to dissent, historically only erratically protected in Indian courts, remains
legally in place while the practical possibility of vocal dissent free from overwhelming
harassment has virtually disappeared. To be sure, India’s media, while generally vibrant and
free, were sometimes censored before Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government came
to power in 2014. But today, while the media remain legally free to dissent, widespread
harassment of independent journalism and concentrating ownership structures have meant
that journalists and individuals practice a high degree of self-censorship. Checks on executive
power, while formally in place, are rapidly falling away.

Radically constrained civil liberties. Since 2016, civil liberties have been curtailed, to some
extent legally and to a significant extent practically. CIVICUS, an international organization
that tracks global civil liberties in 197 countries, now classifies India as “repressed” on its
declining scale of open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed, and closed. The downgrade from
“obstructed,” which happened in 2019, meant that India’s civic space was, according to the
organization’s website, one where “civil society members who criticise power holders risk
surveillance, harassment, intimidation, imprisonment, injury and death.” Among its neighbors,
India is now in the same ratings category as Pakistan and Bangladesh, and in a lower category
than Nepal and Sri Lanka.

The Modi government has increasingly employed two kinds of laws to silence its critics—
colonial-era sedition laws and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). Authorities have
regularly booked individuals under sedition laws for dissent in the form of posters, social-
media posts, slogans, personal communications, and in one case, posting celebratory
messages for a Pakistani cricket win. Sedition cases rose by 28 percent between 2010 and
2021. Of the sedition cases filed against citizens for criticizing the government, 96 percent
were filed after Modi came to power in 2014. One report estimates that over the course of
just one year, ten-thousand tribal activists in a single district were charged with sedition for
invoking their land rights. 7

The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act was amended in 2019 to allow the government to
designate individuals as terrorists without a specific link to a terrorist organization. There is
no mechanism of judicial redress to challenge this categorization. The law now specifies that
it can be used to target individuals committing any act “likely to threaten” or “likely to strike
terror in people.” Between 2015 and 2019, there was a 72 percent increase in arrests under the
UAPA, with 98 percent of those arrested remaining in jail without bail. 8

The frequent invocation of these strengthened laws is substantively new and has significantly
chilled dissent. The state has intimidated opposition by broadly labeling criticisms of
government policy as contrary to the national interest, or “anti-national,” and by employing
an army of volunteers to identify problematic online dissent. BJP politicians have popularized
the term “anti-national” in patterns that target individuals, causes, and
organizations. 9 Academics were first to be targeted, with university administrators and
faculty investigated, disciplined, or compelled to step down owing to their perceived political
views. But such tactics were quickly broadened to include any high-profile dissenters.

India’s Muslim community, comprising 14 percent of the population, has suffered a

particularly marked decline in civil liberties. Acts of anti-Muslim violence, including lynchings
or mob killings, have risen sharply. According to IndiaSpend, bovine-related mob-lynching
deaths (involving rumors of those handling beef, typically Muslims) have substantially risen as
a proportion of violence in India since 2010, with 97 percent of bovine-related attacks
between 2010 and 2017 occurring after Modi came to power in 2014. A majority of the victims
of public killings are believed to have been Muslim. India’s largest minority now lives in a
“widespread climate of fear” according to most independent international organizations
reporting on such matters, including Human Rights Watch and the U.S. Commission on
Religious Freedom. 10 With Parliament’s passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019,
discrimination against Muslims assumed legal form, specifically excluding Muslim refugees
from a streamlined citizenship process. Observers believe this Act, together with a planned
national register of citizens, will be used in tandem to disenfranchise Muslim voters who lack
the paperwork to prove they are citizens. India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and
Kashmir, is experiencing a shutdown of its civil liberties that is in every major respect similar
to India’s Emergency—a fact reflected in Freedom House’s separate categorization of Indian
Kashmir as Not Free.

Constrained individual freedom to dissent is compounded by legal constraints on the freedom

of assembly. A 2021 International Center for Not-For-Profit Law report assessing freedom of
assembly in India found: “A punitive, security-focused approach has been increasingly
deployed, amidst a growing trend of demonizing and criminalizing public protests, including
the vilification of assembly organizers.” 11

The government has frequently barred access to the internet, the de facto means of
coordinating protest. India not only leads the world in government-directed internet
shutdowns, with 84 government-directed shutdowns in 2022, but these blackouts are
typically imposed before and during protests to impede effective public coordination, often
without clear criteria for suspension. 12 The report finds that while de jure protections for
speech and assembly have eroded only marginally, de facto protections have significantly
decreased.

The government’s critics in civil society are frequent targets of administrative harassment. In
2020, the Modi government tightened the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) to
choke civil society independence, targeting the logistics of foreign-fund transfers, limiting
the nature of spending and the sharing of funds between NGOs, giving the central and state
governments the right to suspend NGOs at discretion, and forbidding public servants from
joining organizations. Government authorities have systematically used financial audits and
tax-related raids on technical but fully legal grounds against a wide range of civil society
groups, including Amnesty International, Greenpeace, the Centre for Policy Research, the
Ford Foundation, the Lawyers Collective, and Oxfam. 13

Over the last decade, Indian media have radically circumscribed their criticism of government
due to outright intimidation and structural changes. Since 2014, India has fallen to 161st out of
180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, ranking below
Afghanistan, Belarus, Hong Kong, Libya, Pakistan, and Turkey. According to the organization,
Indian journalists sometimes receive death threats and are frequent targets of social-media
hate campaigns driven by troll farms affiliated with the government. Major media networks do
not feel free to criticize the Modi government. One study analyzing prime-time television
debates on the channel Times Now over three months in 2020 found not a single episode in
which a debate criticized the Modi government in any form. A separate study of RepublicTV
from 2017 through 2020 found coverage to be “consistently biased in favour of the Modi
government and its policies.” 14 Modi himself has limited his interactions with the media,
holding not a single press conference in the last nine years.

Practices such as selective licensing, the acquisition of independent networks by Modi-

affiliated businessmen, and harassment of the few remaining independent outlets further
undermine media independence. The government must grant a license to broadcast
television, for example, and will deny licenses to critical domestic organizations. The
government withheld a license from the founder of the news website Quint, Raghav Bahl
(working in partnership with Bloomberg), for so long that he closed the company’s television
division. Bahl was investigated and charged with money laundering in 2019.

While the sheer number of news organizations in India would seem to indicate a thriving
media, scrutiny of the functional ownership structure indicates otherwise. The independent
Media Ownership Monitor finds in India “a significant trend toward concentration and
ultimately control of content and public opinion.” 15 Mukesh Ambani, a businessman with close
ties to Modi, directly controls media outlets followed by at least 800 million Indians. Another
close Modi associate, Gautam Adani, acquired India’s last major independent television
network, NDTV, in December 2022. 16 According to analysts, Adani’s acquisition of NDTV
“marks the endgame for independent media in India, leaving the country’s biggest television
news channels in the hands of billionaires who have strong ties to the Indian
government.” 17 While there are a handful of smaller, determined sources of independent news
left, they have faced tax raids and lawsuits for their reporting since 2013.

The government also targets international news organizations for their criticism, typically
portraying critical foreign news reports as part of a plot to hold back India’s global
ascendance. The Indian offices of the British Broadcasting Corporation were raided in
February 2023, just weeks after the news organization released a documentary critical of the
Modi government. Laws used under the Emergency were invoked just months ago to ban both
the BBC documentary and any clips from circulating within India. As the raids occurred, BJP
spokesman Gaurav Bhatia called the BBC the “most corrupt organisation in the
world.” 18 When a few of the dozen Indian students I teach organized a private screening of
this documentary at Oxford University, the fear among them was palpable. Invitees were
asked to refrain from posting on social media and from exchanging WhatsApp messages, since
videos have documented police asking individuals to unlock their phones during routine
stops. 19

The loss of horizontal accountability. Legislative scrutiny of executive action has been waning
in real terms during Modi’s government. Committees of India’s primary parliamentary
bodies serve as a key check on the executive, closely examining and debating the merits of all
bills. Committees scrutinized 71 percent of bills in the 2009–14 parliament before Modi came
to power and just 25 percent of bills in the 2014–19 parliament under Modi’s first term. Since
2019, such scrutiny has declined to 13 percent, with not a single legislative bill sent to a
committee during the 2020 pandemic. Some of India’s most important laws and political
decisions in recent years—the imposition of a national lockdown with four hours’ notice,
demonetization, farm laws—were passed without parliamentary consultation and over
opposition protest. The Modi government also introduced a raft of legal amendments to
weaken whistleblower protection. 20

The growing lack of executive accountability to Parliament is exacerbated by an increasingly

quiescent judiciary. The Supreme Court is the custodian of India’s constitution and through it,
of civil liberties. During the two decades before 2014, the independence of the Supreme Court
was seen to grow mightily, earning it the moniker of the “most powerful apex court in the
world.” 21 This has notably changed, with the central government controversially transferring
independent-minded justices and minimizing norms that checked executive power. 22 Such
moves prompted the four most senior members of India’s Supreme Court to hold an
unprecedented press conference in 2018, warning that the chief justice’s unusual assigning of
cases could be a sign of political interference. One of those four justices, Jasti Chelameswar,
also penned an open letter to the chief justice, admonishing that the “bonhomie between the
Judiciary and the Government in any State sounds the death knell to Democracy.” 23 The
Supreme Court’s rulings on every major political issue that has come before it—the Ayodha
temple, the Aadhar biometric ID system, habeas corpus in Kashmir, electoral bonds, the
Prevention of Money Laundering Act—have gone in favor of the Modi government. This marks
a break from the past. The practical difference between the Supreme Court during the
Emergency and today is minimal. Some even argue that, today, an Emergency is simply
“undeclared.” 24

Can Indian Democracy Be Saved?

Democracy in India, as elsewhere in the world, is not today dying through a military coup or
the dramatic, coordinated mass arrests of opponents. Instead, autocrats have learned to talk
democratically and walk autocratically, maintaining a legal façade of democracy while
harassing opposition and shrinking space for loyal dissent. While India’s formal institutions of
democracy are also under pressure—Modi’s most prominent political rivals have recently been
disqualified from running in elections—it is primarily the inability of the ordinary citizen to
read critical appraisals of government policy, to speak and assemble freely without fear of
harassment as well as the absence of substantive checks on executive power that have
transitioned India into a hybrid regime.

Although India’s democratic slide is real, it is not irreversible. While hybrid regimes are often
stable, elections remain real moments of accountability, so long as the ballots remain secret
and elections fairly monitored. Even wholly autocratic regimes with thoroughly honed
policies of surveillance are subject to moments of effective protest because the very
structures of autocratic power also prevent such regimes from gaining an accurate
understanding of citizens’ concerns—what democracies do best. Recent protests against
China’s zero-covid strategy, Iran’s morality police, and India’s farm laws have all highlighted
the enduring possibilities of mass dissent.

Going forward, India’s surest route to democratic revival lies in the emergence of a genuine
opposition party with well-developed organizational roots. The Indian National Congress was
once such a party, but its grassroots linkages disappeared in 1969 when Indira Gandhi split the
party and cut off grassroots-party infrastructure in her bid to centralize power. Congress’s
success in the recent state assembly elections in Karnataka, the southern state that is home to
India’s Silicon Valley, underlines the BJP’s ongoing electoral vulnerability and likely owes
something to Rahul Gandhi’s grassroots campaign, Bharat Jodo Yatra. 25 On a smaller scale, the
Aam Aadmi Party is a promising political force that has managed to move beyond its Delhi
base. But both parties face a long battle to enduringly develop beyond their charismatic
leaders. And as ever, power must be well organized beyond individuals before it can be
effectively used. Set against the BJP, whose organizational roots have been growing for nearly
a century, this will be a tall order. But not an impossible one.

NOTES

1. Freedom House, Freedom in the World

2022, https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2022-
02/FIW_2022_PDF_Booklet_Digital_Final_Web.pdf.

2. “‘Misleading, Incorrect, Misplaced’: Centre Reacts to India’s Downgrading in Think Tank

Report,” The Wire, 5 March 2021, https://thewire.in/government/freedom-house-partly-free-
government-reaction..

3. Akhilesh Pillalamarii. “Why India’s Democracy Is Not Dying,” The Diplomat, 14 June
2021, https://thediplomat.com/2021/06/why-indias-democracy-is-not-dying/.

4. Marc F. Plattner, “Globalization and Self-Government,” Journal of Democracy 13 (July 2002),

56–57.

5. Nancy Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding,” Journal of Democracy 27 (January 2016): 8–14.

6. Steve Levitksy and Dan Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown 2018).

7. On the cricket sedition charge, see “UP Invokes Sedition Against Kashmiri Students;
Families, Activists Urge for Release,” The Wire. October 2021, https://thewire.in/rights/up-
invokes-sedition-against-kashmiri-students-families-activists-urge-for-release; on the rise in
cases, seeKunal Purohit, “Our New Database Reveals Rise in Sedition Cases in the Modi Era.”
Article 14, 2 February 2021, www.article-14.com/post/our-new-database-reveals-rise-in-
sedition-cases-in-the-modi-era; Supriya Sharma, “10,000 People Charged With Sedition in
One Jharkhand District. What Does Democracy Mean Here?” Scroll.in, 19 November
2019, https://scroll.in/article/944116/10000-people-charged-with-sedition-in-one-jharkhand-
district-what-does-democracy-mean-here.

8. “UAPA: 72% Rise in Arrests Between 2015 and 2019,” The Wire, 10 March
2021, https://thewire.in/government/uapa-72-rise-in-arrests-between-2015-and-2019.

9. Meenakshi Ganguly, “Dissent Is ‘Anti-National’ in Modi’s India,” Human Rights Watch, 13

December 2019,www.hrw.org/news/2019/12/13/dissent-anti-national-modis-india; A. Sharma
and J. Pal, “Indian Twitter and Its Anti-Nationals,” University of Michigan unpubl. ms.,
2020, http://joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/antinationals.

10. Sandipan Baksi and Aravindhan Nagarajan, “Mob Lynchings in India: A Look at Data and the
Story Behind the Numbers,” Newslaundry, 4 July
2017, www.newslaundry.com/2017/07/04/mob-lynchings-in-india-a-look-at-data-and-the-
story-behind-the-numbers; “Uttar Pradesh: India’s Muslims Victims of Hate Crimes Live in
Fear,” BBC News,21 February 2022, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-60225543.

11. Vrinda Grover, “Assessing India’s Legal Framework on the Right to Peaceful Assembly,”
International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, December
2021, www.icnl.org/post/report/assessing-indias-legal-framework-on-the-right-to-peaceful-
assembly.

12. Murali Krishnan, “India: ‘Internet Shutdown Capital of the World,’” Deutsche Welle, 15
March 2023, www.dw.com/en/india-internet-shutdown-capital-of-the-world/a-64997062.

13. Aakar Patel, Price of the Modi Years(Delhi: Vintage, 2022), ch. 5; Ganguly, “Dissent Is ‘Anti-
National’ in Modi’s India.”

14. Christophe Jaffrelot and Vihang Jumle, “One-Man Show,” Caravan, 15 December
2020, https://caravanmagazine.in/media/republic-debates-study-shows-channel-promotoes-
modi-ndtv.

15. Media Ownership Monitor, India, 2023, http://india.mom-gmr.org/en/.

16. “BloombergQuint Gives Up After Three Years, Suspends TV Division,” 20 April,

2020, Newslaundry,www.newslaundry.com/2020/04/22/bloombergquint-gives-up-after-
three-years-suspends-tv-division; Reports Without Borders, India Country Report
2023, https://rsf.org/en/country/india. Anjana Krishnan, Reuters Institute, Oxford University,
India Report 2022, https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2022/india.

17. Astha Rajvanshi, “India’s Richest Man Is Buying a Major TV Channel. It’s a Blow to
Independent Media in the Country,” Time, 1 December 2022, https://time.com/6238075/india-
ndtv-gautam-adani-narendramodi/.

18. Hannah Ellis-Petersen, “Indian Journalists Say BBC Raid Part of Drive to Intimidate
Media,” Guardian, 18 February 2023, www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/18/indian-
journalists-bbc-raid-media.
 19. Umang Poddar, “Can the Police in India Force Someone to Hand Over Their Phone and
Check Their Messages?” Scroll.in, 4 November 2021, https://scroll.in/article/1009529/can-the-
police-in-india-force-someone-to-hand-over-their-phone-and-check-their-messages.

20. Sani Ali and Amber Sharma, “In Modi Era, the Role of Parliamentary Committees Is Getting
Diminished,” Scroll.in, 16 September 2020; Zoya Hasan, “Indian Parliament Is Diminished by
Official Disruption,” The Wire, 9 April 2023; “80 RTI Activists Killed Since 2014, Yet Modi Govt
‘Refuses’ to Implement Whistleblowers Act,” The Counterview, 12 December 2019.

21. S.P. Sathe, Judicial Activism in India: Transgressing Borders and Enforcing Limits (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 249.

22. Manu Sebastian. “ How Has the Supreme Court Fared During the Modi Years?” The Wire, 12
April 2019, https://thewire.in/law/supreme-court-modi-years.

23. J. Chelameswar, “Bonhomie Between Judiciary, Government Sounds Death Knell to

Democracy,” Scroll.in, 29 March 2018, https://scroll.in/article/873787/full-text-bonhomie-
between-judiciary-and-government-sounds-the-death-knell-to-democracy.

24. Arvind Narrain, India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of
Resistance (Delhi: Westland Publications, 2021).

25. Ashutosh Varshney, “Democratic Unclogging,” Indian Express, 18 May 2023.

Copyright © 2023 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
Image Credit: Money Sharma/AFP via Getty Images

FURTHER READING

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3 VOLUME 25, ISSUE 4 VOLUME 25, ISSUE 2

India: Liberalism India’s Shifting Tides in

vs. Nationalism Watershed Vote: South Asia: India
Ashutosh Varshney The Risks Ahead and Its
A review of Democracy and Šumit Ganguly Neighbors
Discontent: India’s Growing
Will the Modi government focus Šumit Ganguly
Crisis of Governability, by Atul
on the economy, or will it seek
Kohli and The Politics of India Home to about a quarter of the
to implement a
Since Independence, by Paul world’s people, South Asia
transformational Hindu-
Brass. presents a murky and not very
nationalist agenda?
encouraging picture when it
comes to democracy.
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