Country: India

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October 2024, Volume 35, Issue 4

Majoritarianism Without Majorities

Majoritarian nationalism is a defining feature of our time. If we are to resist ethnonationalist leaders trying to recast our societies into imagined majorities, we must revise our conception of democracy and the exclusion inherent in majority rule.

July 2024, Volume 35, Issue 3

The Rise of India’s Second Republic

While he did not achieve the sweeping victory many predicted, Narendra Modi led his ruling coalition to a third consecutive victory. In so doing, he is laying the foundation for a new political order in which India is simultaneously more democratic and more illiberal.

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January 2024, Volume 35, Issue 1

Hindu Nationalism and the New Jim Crow

While the histories of white supremacy and Hindu supremacy are different, their political objectives are much the same. The BJP is forging a regime of exclusion and oppression as brutal as the Jim Crow South. Only India’s voters can reverse its advance.

January 2024, Volume 35, Issue 1

How to Stop India’s Authoritarian Slide

The BJP is ruling with a heavier hand than ever before, attacking opponents and silencing critics. Ironically, these may be the ideal conditions for a democratic revival—if the opposition seizes the moment.

July 2023, Volume 34, Issue 3

Is India Still a Democracy?

In this symposium, the Journal of Democracy brings together leading scholars of India to perform a biopsy on the state of that country’s fragile democracy, and to offer us a prognosis for its future.

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July 2023, Volume 34, Issue 3

Why India’s Democracy Is Dying

Under Narendra Modi, India is maintaining the trappings of democracy while it increasingly harasses the opposition, attacks minorities, and stifles dissent. It can still reverse course, but the damage is mounting.

July 2023, Volume 34, Issue 3

Modi’s Undeclared Emergency

Since the beginning of the second Modi government, an emboldened BJP has launched a steady, comprehensive, and unprecedented attack on civil liberties, personal rights, and free speech across India.

July 2023, Volume 34, Issue 3

The Exaggerated Death of Indian Democracy

It is true that politics under the BJP is a break from the past. But attempts to reduce the country’s present condition to democratic backsliding misunderstands the moment and is an injustice to India’s journey as a democracy.

October 2021, Volume 32, Issue 4

India’s Endangered Democracy

Shortcomings in governance and electoral administration may be accelerating India’s slide to autocracy. Were these flaws embedded in Indian democracy from the start?

October 2020, Volume 31, Issue 4

Covid vs. Democracy: India’s Illiberal Remedy

India’s covid-19 response has accelerated the country’s slide toward competitive authoritarian rule by centralizing decision making, undermining federalism, and providing new pretexts for stifling dissent.

January 2020, Volume 31, Issue 1

An Illiberal India?

The country’s hold on electoral democracy is firm, but its claim still to be a liberal democracy is increasingly dubious.

October 2019, Volume 30, Issue 4

Modi Consolidates Power: Leveraging Welfare Politics

To a degree that is still not widely appreciated, the BJP has replaced Congress as India’s party of welfarism. The carefully crafted political persona of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the “leader of the poor” has been crucial to this shift.

January 2019, Volume 30, Issue 1

India Under Modi: Threats to Pluralism

In the world’s largest democracy, liberalism is in retreat, as evidenced by a pattern of assaults on minorities, press freedom, and the independence of key cultural and intellectual institutions.

January 2019, Volume 30, Issue 1

India Under Modi: The Establishment Overreacts

Charges that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party threaten liberal-democratic safeguards are best understood as the overheated reaction of an insular elite that is still struggling to come to terms with its democratic displacement from power.

July 2018, Volume 29, Issue 3

Enrolling India

A review of How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise by Ornit Shani.

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July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3

India’s Democracy at 70: Growth, Inequality, and Nationalism

Of late, Indian democracy has been confronted with a new political economy. Strong economic growth over the last three decades has generated the world’s fourth-largest collection of dollar billionaires and the third-largest middle class, both for the first time in Indian history, while still leaving the single largest concentration of the poor behind. In a…

July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3

India’s Democracy at 70: Toward a Hindu State?

Read the full essay here. While the Constitution of India has not been amended after the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in 2014, BJP-ruled states have passed laws which have reflected the Hindu-nationalist ideology of this party, including those known as “beef bans.” These laws and the activities of Hindu nationalist…

July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3

India’s Democracy at 70: The Federalist Compromise

Read the full essay here. The institutionalized recognition of diversity within India’s federal system has been crucial for democratic consolidation. Substantial decentralization since the 1990s has made state governments central actors in shaping economic activity and national-election outcomes. However, since his rise to national office in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has projected an image…

July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3

India’s Democracy at 70: The Shifting Party Balance

Read the full essay here. This article reviews the state of India’s two major national parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress (INC or Congress party), seventy years after independence in 1947 and three years after the BJP won a majority in the 2014 national election. The article looks at whether…

July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3

India’s Democracy at 70: The Impact of Instant Universal Suffrage

Read the full essay here. When the authors of India’s Constitution took the extraordinarily bold step of establishing universal suffrage, thus giving the right to vote to all adult citizens, India became the world’s first large democracy to adopt universal adult suffrage from its very inception. We call India’s move “instant universal suffrage,” and distinguish…

July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3

India’s Democracy at 70: The Disputed Role of the Courts

Read the full essay here. India’s Supreme Court has played the role of a countermajoritarian check but has also flirted with populism. This essay examines three aspects of India’s higher judiciary: the struggle between the judiciary and the other branches over “custody” of the Constitution; the question of judicial independence and who has the right…

July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3

India’s Democracy at 70: Civil Society and Its Shadow

Read the full essay here. The relationship between democracy and civil society is not straightforward. Angry crowds can stymie the functioning of the democratic process, institutions, and governance. Drawing on recent Indian examples, this article sets out a typology of civil society movements in order to assess their impact on Indian democracy. It shows how…

July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3

India’s Democracy at 70: The Troublesome Security State

Read the full essay here. Seven decades after gaining its independence from the British Empire, India retains all the hallmarks of a functioning democracy: It holds reasonably free and fair elections, has a mostly independent judiciary plus a largely free press, and enjoys a robust and growing civil society. Yet thanks to India’s colonial inheritance…

January 2015, Volume 26, Issue 1

India, Sri Lanka, and the Majoritarian Danger

Does the electoral victory of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party signal that the world’s largest democracy may be following Sri Lanka toward a politics where the will of the majority is exalted above minority rights?

October 2013, Volume 24, Issue 4

Separated at Birth?

A review of The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan by Maya Tudor.

July 2011, Volume 22, Issue 3

Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy: Growth and Hunger in India

Despite India’s impressive achievements in democracy, economic development, and the rule of law, it remains home to a third of the world’s poor. Although it has successfully averted famine since independence, it still struggles to prevent chronic hunger.

July 2010, Volume 21, Issue 3

The Rise of “State-Nations”

Must every state be a nation and every nation a state? Or should we look instead to the example of countries such as India, where one state holds together a congeries of “national” groups and cultures in a single and wisely conceived federal republic?

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April 2010, Volume 21, Issue 2

Democracy and Deep Divides

How do democracies deal with the deep divisions created by race, ethnicity, religion, and language? The cases of Canada, India, and the United States show that democratic institutions—notably, competitive elections and independent judiciaries—can bridge divides and build stability, but they must find a way to manage the tension between individual and group equality.

January 2010, Volume 21, Issue 1

Transitions to the Rule of Law

While we have witnessed many transitions to multiparty systems, it has proven much harder for countries to attain a genuine rule of law. We need to know more about the origins of the rule of law in order to promote it successfully today.

April 2008, Volume 19, Issue 2

India’s Improbable Success

A review of India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha and The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India's Future by Martha C. Nussbaum.

October 2003, Volume 14, Issue 4

The Crisis of Indian Secularism

The principled separation of religious from political claims upon which Indian democracy depends may not be dead, but it is ailing badly. How did things reach this pass, and what is the prognosis for recovery?

July 1998, Volume 9, Issue 3

India Defies the Odds: Enduring Another Election

Indians appear to love the practice of democracy so much that they are in danger of overdoing it. In February and March of 1998, the world's largest democracy held its twelfth general election since gaining its independence a half-century ago. The voting was largely fair and peaceful. New, right-of-center rulers led by the Bharatiya Janata…

July 1998, Volume 9, Issue 3

India Defies the Odds: Making Federalism Work

To understand how India’s democracy works, and how it manages demands from social groups for greater power, resources, autonomy, and respect, it is essential to understand Indian federalism. That, in turn, requires us to address two questions. First, why have relations between New Delhi and the various state governments (there are at present 25) usually…

July 1998, Volume 9, Issue 3

India Defies the Odds: Why Democracy Survives

India has long baffled theorists of democracy. Democratic theory holds that poverty, widespread illiteracy, and a deeply hierarchical social structure are inhospitable conditions for the functioning of democracy. Yet except for 18 months in 1975-77, India has maintained its democratic institutions ever since it became independent of Britain in 1947. Over those five decades, there…

Ashutosh Varshney’s Greatest Hits

With India’s next general election just a year away, here are five of his Journal of Democracy essays that offer critical analysis of the world’s largest democracy at a crucial time.

Political Parties and Democracy

Political parties are one of the core institutions of democracy. But in democracies around the world, there is growing evidence of low or declining public confidence in parties. But are they in decline, or are they simply changing their forms and functions?