Ashraf Engineer
August 9, 2025
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to All Indians Matter. I am Ashraf Engineer.
Few countries have exemplified democratic recession more than India over the past decade. It’s a lesson in how to kill a democracy in this age: you don’t stage a coup, you don’t burst into leaders’ homes at midnight and arrest them; instead, you gradually squeeze the life out of every right, you legally harass your critics, you intimidate or buy out the media, and you steadily take powers away from the states. You equate the nation to the autocrat and therefore claim that any criticism of him is equivalent to anti-nationalism. No wonder India is now often called an ‘electoral autocracy’ rather than the world’s largest democracy. India accounted for a large proportion of the people living in truly free countries. Its downgrading changed that proportion significantly. So, in many ways, India is where the global battle for democracy is being fought.
SIGNATURE TUNE
What’s playing out in India is perhaps as astonishing as what happened after Independence. Much to the surprise of the sceptics, India’s democracy didn’t just last, it grew stronger for seven decades. It happened through the consolidation of civilian rule rather than the military’s, something Pakistan wasn’t able to achieve, the creation and commitment to institutions such as the judiciary and vibrant, multi-party participation.
Now, the country has taken a turn. Democratic governance has steadily eroded and, if the trend continues, India may well be in the grip of authoritarianism for decades.
In 2021, several reputed organisations raised questions about India’s trajectory. For instance, The Economist Intelligence Unit said India was a “flawed democracy” and ranked it 53rd of the 167 that it rated for democratic quality. Democracy watchdog Freedom House had since 1998 labelled India “Free” in terms of political rights and civil liberties but downgraded it to “Partly Free”. The Sweden-based Varieties of Democracy, or V-Dem, project termed the country an “electoral autocracy”.
You could break the downslide down into social issues such as contracting healthcare and labour rights, institutional decline such as that of the judiciary and the Election Commission, and growing restrictions on civil liberties.
Many scholars trace the problem back to the first few years of freedom. While we created a Constitution and institutions, we failed to deal with the deep-rooted social inequities at the heart of our society. In fact, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar had argued that these divisions could negate the Constitution’s promise of equal outcomes. Today, these inequities are used to make the argument that democracy doesn’t work and what’s needed instead is a benevolent dictator.
What’s not mentioned is that this alternative approach makes matters worse and wipes out all the gains of the past seven decades, even on the social front.
Policy and execution failings are also papered over, such as the disastrous management of the COVID-19 pandemic or demonetisation. The inadequacy of healthcare, meanwhile, is alarming. For example, half of the districts of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, did not have a single intensive care bed when the pandemic struck.
Chronic food shortages, hunger and malnutrition are still common. As a result, it is estimated that 35% of Indian children are stunted – that is, short for their age.
Coming back to institutional regression, India has seen growing attempts to manipulate elections. It is alleged often that the Election Commission looks the other way while votes are sought along communal lines. There are also questionable counting practices that always seem to favour Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Also, since India does not have public campaign financing, the amount of slush money in elections is rising.
As you can see, there are serious social and policy failures – all of which have undermined faith in democracy.
Of course, there is a lot of fight left in civil society and regional parties often hold their own against a majoritarian agenda. Whether they can stem the decline is open to debate.
This is, of course, not the first democratic decline witnessed by India. Between June 1975 and March 1977, Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency during which key rights were suspended and Opposition leaders jailed.
There is no formal emergency today but the underpinnings of democracy are frayed. Call it an informal democratic decline. Authoritarians window-dress democracy while diminishing institutions essential to its functioning. So, when democracies are assessed by watchdogs now, they incorporate the importance of institutional norms. What they’ve found is that democratic decline is being achieved through a slow but incremental undermining of institutions.
Today, India lies somewhere between democracy and complete autocracy. Democracy watchdogs classify this state as a “hybrid regime” — neither a full democracy nor a full autocracy. This drop halved the share of the world’s population living in countries categorised as “Free”. So, the truly democratic world is considerably less populous without India.
What exactly is a truly democratic country?
Most scholars point to five factors:
- Free and fair elections, which includes the freedom to vote and stand for elections
- Genuine political competition
- Government free from military intervention
- Civil liberties
- Executive checks
On virtually all these fronts, India is doing badly. Except the one on intervention by the military, which has stuck to its duty and stayed away from government.
One of the clearest signs of democratic erosion is elected leaders questioning the legitimacy of all opposition. Democracies slowly die when the elected use the might of the law to quash rivals. This has consequences for the right to dissent. It remains in place legally but the practicality of dissent free from overwhelming harassment has disappeared. The media too remain legally free, but widespread harassment and concentrating ownership of media houses mean that journalists practice a high degree of self-censorship.
Since 2014, India has fallen to 161 out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, ranking below Afghanistan, Libya and Pakistan. Indian journalists have been jailed without bail for years, have received threats and are trolled on social media.
Selective licensing and the acquisition of networks by Modi-supporting business groups have undermined media independence.
The independent Media Ownership Monitor said India is showing “a significant trend toward concentration and ultimately control of content and public opinion”. Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani controls media outlets followed by 800 million Indians. Gautam Adani, who is close to Modi, acquired India’s last major independent television network, NDTV, in December 2022. There are now only a handful of smaller independent news outlets left, and many have faced tax raids and lawsuits.
The government hasn’t spared even foreign media. British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC, offices were raided in February 2023, soon after it released a documentary critical of the Modi government. Emergency laws were used to ban the documentary.
As you can see, the checks on executive power are rapidly falling away.
Civil liberties have been curtailed dramatically too. CIVICUS, an organisation that tracks civil liberties across the world, classified India as “repressed” on its declining scale of open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed and closed countries. The downgrade from “obstructed”, which happened in 2019, implied that India’s civic space was one where “civil society members who criticise power holders risk surveillance, harassment, intimidation, imprisonment, injury and death”.
The government has increasingly deployed draconian sedition laws and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, or UAPA, to silence critics. The police regularly book individuals under sedition laws for creating posters, social media posts and raising slogans. Between 2010 and 2021, sedition cases rose by 28%. Of these cases, filed against citizens for criticising the government, 96% were filed after Modi came to power in 2014. One report estimated that in just a year, 10,000 tribal activists in a single district were charged with sedition for invoking their land rights.
The UAPA is particularly worrying. In 2019, it was amended so that the government could designate anyone as a terrorist without specifying a link to a terror outfit. There is no mechanism of judicial redress against this. Between 2015 and 2019, there was a 72% rise in UAPA arrests.
This has significantly chilled dissent because any dissent is likely to be termed “anti-national”. Even academicians have been targeted – for instance, university administrators and professors have been compelled to step down for their political views.
To stop protests, India has led the world in internet shutdowns – often imposed before and during protests to hamper public coordination.
India’s Muslims particularly have been in the crosshairs. They comprise 14% of the population and have suffered a steep decline in civil liberties. Violence targeted at them, as well as discrimination in jobs and housing, are now common. According to IndiaSpend, cattle-related lynching deaths rose substantially as a proportion of violence since 2010, with 97% of such attacks between 2010 and 2017 occurring after Modi came to power.
Most independent human rights organisations, such as Human Rights Watch and the US Commission on Religious Freedom, say Indian Muslims live in a “widespread climate of fear”.
The Citizenship Amendment Act also discriminates against Muslim refugees. Used in conjunction with the National Register of Citizens, it is a tool to disenfranchise Muslim voters and strip them of their citizenship.
India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, has been split into two and has been subjected to a severe shutdown of civil liberties.
Civil society too is under siege. In 2020, the government used the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act to choke NGOs’ independence by targeting their funding. It limited the spending and sharing of funds and gave Central and state governments the right to suspend NGOs at their discretion. Financial audits and tax raids have been used liberally against a range of organisations, such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace and the Centre for Policy Research.
All of the above has been exacerbated by an increasingly spineless judiciary. The Supreme Court’s rulings on most major issues — the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, the Aadhar ID system, habeas corpus in Kashmir — have gone in favour of the government.
So, can Indian democracy be saved?
India’s democratic slide is real, but it need not be permanent. That’s because autocratic power prevents its leadership from gaining a real understanding of citizens’ concerns. It is real democracies that do it best. The protests against the farm laws are a case in point.
Perhaps the best route to democratic revival lies in the emergence of a genuine opposition party with strong organisational structures. The Congress was such a party, but it has suffered several setbacks in recent times – although it has rebounded in the last general election. Its leader, Rahul Gandhi, has shown tremendous spirit in the face of horrific abuse and harassment. However, the Congress has a long way to go before it can be confident about unseating Modi.
Despite everything, there is hope. Reviving India’s democracy will be tough, but it’s not impossible.
Thank you all for listening. Please visit allindiansmatter.in for more columns and audio podcasts. You can follow me on Twitter at @AshrafEngineer and @AllIndiansCount. Search for the All Indians Matter page on Facebook. On Instagram, the handle is @AllIndiansMatter. Email me at editor@allindiansmatter.in. Catch you again soon.