India under Modi’s second term: Democratic resilience amidst illiberal impulses

Illiberal impulses and democratic resilience

Yet, India’s democratic political order is far more resilient than often assumed. First, India’s experience as a stable constitutional democracy for over 70 years has meant not only that democratic practices have become deeply institutionalized, but that Indians are proud to be citizens of the world’s largest democracy and see democracy as a precious national accomplishment. In fact, democracy has become such an indelible part of the nation’s political consciousness that—despite the disillusionment with “politics as usual”—that Indians from all walks of life continue to maintain a deep philosophical commitment to democracy and embrace the fundamental idea that the state’s authority must derive solely from the uncoerced consent of the majority, tested regularly through open competitive elections. The 2019 general elections were the 17th since the Indian constitution came into effect in 1950. In fact, elections have been held almost regularly since independence in 1947, with everyone from the village heads to the prime minister elected by the citizenry. ² Just as important, democratic norms are deeply ingrained, with both the incumbents and challengers readily accepting the peoples’ verdict, resulting in peaceful transition of power. Not surprisingly, the authorities take elections seriously. In the 2019 election, to accommodate the estimated 900 million voters and the 8040 candidates seeking the 543 seats, voting was “phased,” taking place in “four stages” between April and May. To ensure full and open participation and fair voting, the elections were supervised by 11 million poll workers, who were aided by 4 million state-of-the-art electronic voting machines (complete with the candidate’s picture and party symbol), in over 700,000 polling stations spread throughout the country. To make voting immune from booth capturing and ballot box stuffing, each polling station was secured by police and security forces—who in turn were under the watchful eye of a fiercely independent media and an array of independent civilian monitors. In an unprecedented step, in the lead-up to that election, the Election Commission implemented a nationwide initiative called Systematic Voters Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) to educate voters, in particular the illiterate and the poor, about the voting process and the importance of universal franchise. The voter turnout of over 67 percent (the highest since the inception of India’s national elections) is a testament to the peoples’ confidence that elections are fair and that their votes matter. ³

Second, the BJP defied expectations by winning a bigger mandate (it won 303 of the 542 seats, up from 282 in 2014), giving the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) 352 seats—close to a two-thirds majority—while the opposition Indian National Congress won 52 seats (in 2014 the Congress won only 44 seats, its worst performance ever; Election Commission of India, 2015; Tillin, 2015). But there is more to these results than meets the eye. Under India’s “first-past-the-post” system (FPTP, where the candidate with the largest vote share from a constituency wins the seat), votes do not automatically translate into number of seats (Mitra, 2011). In fact, a party can win a majority of seats in parliament with 35 to 40 percent of the total vote. In 2019, the Congress party’s vote share of 19.5 percent translated into only 52 seats, while the BJP’s vote share of 37.4 percent translated into 303 seats. Although the FPTP system has limitations (and, arguably, the proportional representation system would serve Indian democracy better), it does tend to militate against “electoral authoritarianism.” It also tends to keep the winners reasonably humble and responsive to voters, as they are aware that they have won a majority of seats without the majority of voters’ support. And, because under FPTP even a small swing in vote share can translate to significant change in seat share, the system incentivizes incumbents to be responsive to the preferences of average citizens/voters if they are to secure a majority in the future. Politicians and political parties are not only cognizant of this, but also of the fact that Indian voters display a strong anti-incumbent bias.

Third, the claim that the BJP’s consecutive majority wins make it into a new dominant party (reminiscent of the Congress in its heyday; Kothari, 2006), with the ability to run roughshod over India’s democratic order, is premature and needs to be qualified. In particular, although the BJP won a majority of the seats in the Lok Sabha in 17 out of the 29 states that make up the Indian union, it did not win all the seats by itself, but as a senior coalition partner. Indeed, without the support of its alliance partners, the BJP would not have won an estimated 42 seats in the states of Maharashtra, Bihar and the Punjab. In other words, the BJP by itself won just over 37 percent of the vote, but the BJP-led NDA won 45 percent. Thus, it is too early to conclude that the Indian party system has returned to its earlier system of one-party dominance. Rather, contrary to conventional thinking, the BJP remains a relatively weak “hegemonic party.” It is a dominant partner in a coalition, but it also needs its coalition partners—and, if its previous governing experience is any guide, it will conspicuously refrain from throwing its weight around. Arguably, the reason the BJP has refrained from pushing its majoritarian Hindu nationalist agenda (despite pressure from the RSS) is that the moderates within the BJP and its coalition partners (including the majority public opinion) do not support such narrow Hindu nationalism. Moreover, India’s parliaments (both the federal and provincial) jealously guard their autonomy from the executive and are often active partners in the making of legislation. In short, they serve as a bulwark against one-party dominance. For example, the BJP currently enjoys a majority in the Lok Sabha, but even with the combined support of its NDA coalition partners it does not have the critical two-thirds majority needed to impose its will. Similarly, the BJP does not enjoy a majority in the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of parliament), even with its NDA partners. Thus, contrary to what the pessimists fear, the BJP cannot arbitrarily amend the constitution, as this requires a two-thirds majority—not to mention that the Supreme Court has the power of judicial review over all legislation.

Fourth, in the case of the 2019 election, every major voter survey confirmed the importance of Modi to the BJP. Put bluntly, the BJP’s victory was the result of positive voter swing in favor of Modi, with exit polls showing that large numbers of people only voted for the BJP because Modi was the prime ministerial candidate. ⁴ Equally important, several struggling BJP candidates won their seats riding on Modi’s coattails. However, beyond personal popularity, Modi was also helped by exogenous factors. More specifically, he is a master politician who rarely misses an opportunity to boost his persona. For example, he successfully turned to his electoral advantage a terrorist attack (on February, 14, 2019) led by Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistan-based terrorist group, that resulted in the death of 40 Indian security personnel in the border town of Pulwama in the disputed state of Kashmir. Referring to those killed as “martyrs,” on February 26 Modi authorized a retaliatory air strike on Jaish’s terrorist camps inside Pakistani territory. This “surgical strike,” the first time India had used lethal airpower across an international border since the 1971 war with Pakistan, received overwhelming public support—further cementing Modi’s reputation as a strong and decisive leader firmly committed to defending the motherland. It is also important to note that Modi and the BJP were helped immensely by a weak and ineffectual opposition. The principal opposition party, the Congress, now seen as a family fiefdom of the Gandhis (i.e. Sonia Gandhi, widow of the assassinated Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and their son, Rahul Gandhi), and without a compelling programmatic alternative to Modi and the BJP, is on the path towards electoral oblivion. ⁵ Last but not least, the BJP had far greater resources at its disposal than any other party—drawing generous “donations” from business and corporate elites as well as from the masses. Yet, under the FPTP system, “personal popularity” can be ephemeral. In the case of Modi, his charisma, personal integrity and incorruptibility have certainly drawn many voters to him, but they also come with inherent risks. Specifically, the quasi-presidential election system (where voters choose the candidate in their voting area of the party whose leader they wish to see become the prime minister) means that if Modi falls from grace or if he and the BJP try to abuse their powers, they could very quickly lose public support, including the generous financial support of wealthy donors.

Fifth, and more importantly, if Modi and the BJP fail to live up to the many promises they have made, their public support could quickly erode, including facing the voters’ wrath in the next election. This is because the Indian voter is not only notorious for their strong anti-incumbent bias, but the Indian party system is changing where good governance (meaning political stability and economic growth) are becoming essential to electoral victory. Specifically, traditionally in India, political parties instead of functioning as vehicles for representation and competition have often operated simultaneously as electoral machines, networks of patronage and drivers of identity (caste, religious and regional) politics. Even the all-India catch-all national parties like the Indian National Congress were held together more by patronage than any distinctive policy programs. The BJP’s victory is in no small measure the result of the party significantly eroding the “vote banks” of the purveyors of plebiscitary and identity politics (in the Indian context, caste politics) by winning the support of the traditionally marginalized and disadvantaged lower caste groups by delivering them tangible economic benefits. For example, in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh (which provides 80 parliamentary seats), the BJP wiped out the two major caste-based parties: the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP). The BSP drew its electoral strength from the low caste “untouchable” Dalit votes, while the SP drew from the “backward” peasant castes in alliance with the Muslims. ⁶ For the 2019 elections, the two parties formed a “grand alliance” to counter the BJP. Despite this, the BJP won 62 seats against 15 for the “grand alliance.” Moreover, the BJP broadened its political base by increasing its vote share from 42 percent in 2014 to 49 percent in 2019. These trends indicate that the voters’ political affiliations are becoming less bound up with narrow personal identities (Banerjee et al., 2019). Rather, voters are looking at political parties’ record when it comes to good governance. Clearly, the BJP not only had a more coherent set of programmatic policies than its rivals but, as will be discussed, it also had a track record of delivering tangible benefits to all communities, especially the most marginalized. This new ground reality is not lost on other parties, and many are now in the process of reinventing themselves to meet the BJP’s challenge. Certainly, if the Congress party reinvents itself, it could once again provide an alternative to the BJP. After all, the Congress has been written off before, but has a distinguished record of coming back with a bang.

Sixth, in their acclaimed How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018: 3) point out that democracies do not always die “at the hands of men with guns,” as there are less dramatic “ways to break a democracy”—namely at the hands of politicians who undermine the democratic system via which they attain office once they are in power. The common strategy these “authoritarians” adopt is the systematic evisceration of both the formal and informal institutions of democratic governance—in particular, institutions which provide checks and balances and restrain the powers of politicians, such as the constitution, the courts and the legal system, law enforcement agencies, the media and civil society organizations. The good news is that India’s core political and administrative institutions, such as the Supreme Court, the Judiciary, the Election Commission of India and the Central Bureau of Investigation, are not only constitutionally mandated to be autonomous agencies, but on the whole they have performed their duties independently of the political executive and have provided the needed checks and balances to constrain executive power. The recent furor over the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) is illustrative. The CAA, passed by the Lok Sabha on December 9, 2019, amended the Citizenship Act of 1955 by providing a path to Indian citizenship for illegal migrants of the Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian and Christian religious faiths who had fled persecution, or, more specifically, who had been “forced or compelled to seek shelter in India due to persecution on the ground of religion” from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan before December 2014. ⁷ However, Muslims fleeing religious persecution from these countries were not eligible. ⁸ Although the President of India gave his assent to the CAA on December 12 (a day after it was passed by the Rajya Sabha), the issue is far from settled. Predictably, the CAA has been strongly opposed by the opposition parties, including civil liberties groups who have petitioned the Supreme Court to declare the bill unconstitutional as it explicitly discriminates against a particular religious faith (Islam), and therefore violates the right to equality enshrined in the constitution. In response, the Modi government has defended the CAA, stating that because Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are declared Islamic Republics where Muslims are in the majority, Muslims cannot be regarded as persecuted minorities. On the other hand, it is India’s humanitarian obligation to protect the vulnerable and persecuted religious minorities. Nevertheless, the government agrees to review applications from Muslims on case by case basis. Despite the widespread protests against the CAA (with about 30 deaths over a month of protest), this issue will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court. Although the Supreme Court has refused to put on hold the implementation of the citizenship law, and asked the government to respond to about 60 pending petitions challenging the CAA’s constitutional validity, it has also hinted that it may refer the CAA to a larger constitution bench for a more exhaustive review. If past experience is any guide, it may take this deliberative body years to address this matter.

Last, but not least, India’s federal system acts as a powerful check on central authority. Indeed, it is the chief ministers of several of the Indian states who have bluntly informed the Modi government that they will not implement the CAA in their particular states. ⁹ In fact, non-BJP or opposition-ruled state governments such as West Bengal (with over 90 million people), Odisha (whose popular chief minister has governed uninterrupted for two decades) and Andhra Pradesh (where the opposition won a landslide victory against the BJP) have served notice to Modi and the BJP that they will hold them accountable on every legislation they consider as “undemocratic.” It is not an exaggeration to state that the Indian federal system militates against the rise of strongmen. Specifically, India’s parliamentary system of government, by giving the prime minister less discretion and autonomy, acts as a powerful constraint against capricious leaders who try to portray themselves as the personification of the popular will. So far there is no credible evidence of the so-called illiberal drift or that Modi is following in the footsteps of e.g. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte or Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

A micro-economy

According to the conventional political economy explanation, the economy has a decisive bearing on the popularity of the incumbent government and its electoral fortunes. However, this maxim did not prove to be an electoral liability for Modi. Why? Although, the performance of the macro-economy was disappointing, arguably the micro-economy did not disappoint. More specifically, during much of Modi’s first tenure, economic growth remained lackluster: the millions of jobs Modi promised never materialized, farmers’ incomes continued to stagnate, the demonetization policy (which resulted in the overnight withdrawal of an estimated 80 percent of currency in circulation) adversely impacted economic activity and people’s lives ¹⁰ and the boast of turning India into a US$5 trillion economy by 2024 was a distant dream.

In fact, many predicted that demonetization would be Modi’s “Waterloo.” After all, the use of cash in everyday transactions in India is widespread and the problems caused by the cash crunch were felt broadly. India’s teeming ranks of “the poor” felt the negative impact more acutely as they depend on cash for daily expenses. For example, manual urban workers and agricultural laborers who depend on daily wages for their livelihood had to work without pay as employers did not have the new currency on hand to pay them. Moreover, because a decline in currency supply is akin to a temporary tightening of monetary conditions, demonetization adversely impacted economic growth, slowing India’s GDP growth to 6 percent in the second half of the 2016–2017 fiscal year.

Yet, a broad cross section of the citizenry (in particular, the youth and the poor), despite the personal and business hardships, remained loyal to Modi as they understood his use of stealth tactics as necessary to weed out the use of black money and corruption and the shadow economy in which it thrives. Not surprisingly, the BJP’s vote share actually increased from 31.4 in 2014 to 37.4 percent in 2019, while the Congress (the BJP’s main adversary) saw its vote share plummet to 19.5 percent from 28.55 percent in 2009. This underscores Gourevitch’s (1986) observation that democratic publics, at critical junctures, are willing to accept short-term pain for long-term gains. Perhaps more importantly, Modi’s humble roots—his non-elite “backward” caste background as the son of a railway station chai-wallah (tea seller), having also worked as a chai-wallah himself in his youth—resonated with the masses, in particular his claim that he understood what it is like to live in poverty and his commitment to bring real improvements to the lives of the country’s “forgotten millions” or, as Modi likes to call them, the “small ordinary people.” Indeed, Modi’s greatest success has been in providing some much-needed relief to the everyday struggles of India’s poor. By expeditiously connecting the country’s 600,000 villages with internet access, his administration was able to empower millions. By enhancing “financial inclusion,” the administration provided access to bank accounts to millions excluded from the formal banking sector so they could save and invest, including facilitating direct benefit transfers via safe bio-metric or the Aadhaar identification system. Since millions of Indians, in particular women, lacked access to formal banking and credit markets (thereby making them vulnerable to predatory lending by informal moneylenders), the Modi administration made significant progress in enhancing financial inclusion. Under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (launched in August 2014), an estimated that 240 million previously unbanked individuals (with the majority being rural residents) gained access to bank accounts. Similarly, the Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana (launched in January 2016) provided micro, small and medium-sized businesses access to collateral-free loans. Also, given the tragic reality that India has one of the worst child sex ratios (that is, the number of girls per 1000 boys) in the world, and it continues to decline, Modi’s Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (Celebrate Girl Child, Enable Her Education) scheme launched by the prime minister himself in January 2015 resonated with the non-elite classes. They were impressed by the scheme’s quick implementation in 100 selected districts with low child sex ratios with the aim to prevent the practice of sex selection with better education and community involvement. Last but not least, the prime minister’s much-publicized and favorite program, the Swachh Bharat (Clean India) program (launched in October 2014), which in a few short months had some 31 million toilets built in the countryside, not only reduced the problems associated with open defecation, but also brought tangible relief to the lives of many. Clearly, the BJP’s massive electoral victory underscores that good governance in the micro-economy pays political dividends.

Concluding reflections

In a “liberal democracy,” the will of the majority is tempered with the protection of minority rights via constitutional, judicial and other legal constraints. However, there is concern that India is increasingly a “majoritarian democracy,” in which the majority (often defined as Hindus) considers itself entitled to rights and privileges above all others even if it means subverting or breaking “unjust laws.” It is important to note that, in practice, the gulf has always been wide between the procedural and deliberative aspects of democracy in India. On one hand, the democratic procedures and rules, such as regular, open and competitive elections, the existence of political parties representing competing interests and viewpoints, broad electoral participation and the right to freedom of speech, assembly and association, are deeply ingrained and taken for granted. On the other hand, the deliberative process, which requires commitment to political compromise and consensus-building, and respect for the rules and procedures of representative institutions and for the rule of law and individual rights and freedoms, is at best perfunctorily followed. In fact, the substantive everyday practice of politics in India is hardly deliberative, but is rather one that is boisterous, strident and uncompromising and whose lifeblood is popular mobilization. It is a democracy of agitated and intransigent leaders (and political entrepreneurs) and followers, with all sides claiming to represent “the will of the people,” which usually means that their particular demands and wishes are just and legitimate regardless of any other consideration.

Following his landslide victory, Modi stated that the central focus of his administration would not only include inclusive economic development, but also winning the trust of all communities—captured in the pithy slogan “Sabka sath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas [prosperity, trust and bright future for all].” The second Modi administration has a historic opportunity to put in place programmatic economic reforms, as the BJP’s majority means that the prime minister no longer has to succumb (as he did in the first term) to politically expedient economic populism—which in the Indian context usually means giving out generous (and wasteful) subsidies, including cash handouts to various interest groups. A more inclusive development, coupled with the commitment to provide broad representation for all groups (rather than simply operating as an electoral machine and driver of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism), will help the BJP win the trust of the country’s large Muslim minority who account for roughly 14 percent of India’s population of 1.2 billion. If Modi can engineer this, it will mark the transformation of the BJP into a formidable all-India party.