Book review: Christophe Jaffrelot. Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Indian Democracy

Of late, liberal democracy seems to be in retreat everywhere. The world’s largest democracy, India, is no exception, manifesting visible democratic ‘backsliding’ and ‘regression’ and, if unchecked, may slip into an autocratic regime. The Tocquevillian worry that democracy might produce anarchy leading to the government accumulating and centralizing powers, rendering the people as a pliant and conforming mass, a sort of ‘democratic despotism’, is now haunting Indian democracy. Christophe Jaffrelot analyses the Tocquevillian anxieties of democracy in an India led by Narendra Modi and sets out to answer the key question: Why is India, despite being seen for long as an outlier in the post-colonial world for sustaining its democracy, losing its grip? Much of the answer can be found by considering the subtitle of the book.

Jaffrelot builds up his narrative, as explained in the introduction of the book, that Indian democracy traversed through three phases, moving from ‘conservative democracy’ to ‘democratization of democracy’, and finally, morphing itself into a kind of variant of ‘ethnic democracy’. Modi’s India falls in the third phase of ethnic democracy, which, as Jaffrelot explains it, is a democracy that works through the axis of dominant religious and cultural tropes, particularly through the imagined ideations of ethnic militant nationalism. For Jaffrelot, India began her modern democratic journey with a ‘conservative democracy’ socially, despite a progressive constitution. Both under Nehru and Indira, India was not able to unleash her potential for a deeper democratic consolidation. Congress, mired in clientelist politics during the first three decades of independence, prevented Nehru from carrying out the much-needed land reforms and achieving his vision of establishing a ‘socialistic pattern of society’. Jaffrelot notes that Nehru did not give much attention to the ideas of positive discrimination, a sign of ‘conservative democracy’. Indira too was not able to do much on land reforms, and by the declaration of emergency, she embarked on a politically authoritarian and socially conservative path.

The age of ‘democratization of democracy’, according to Jaffrelot, coincides with his previously published idea of a ‘silent revolution’—characterized by the rise of lower castes in north Indian politics and the relative retreat of upper-caste and middle-class voters from the democratic arena. The reaction to this ‘silent revolution’ is what Jaffrelot describes as a counter-revolution contingent upon inventing ‘ethnic democracy’.

The first part of the book constructs the argument that there is a discursive turn in the understanding of the idea of India on the basis of the Hindu nationalist quest for power, mainly with a backdrop of Hindutva and populist politics. Narendra Modi was chosen as the Prime Minister by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won the elections in 2014, to practise the politics of the ‘Gujarat Model’ at the pan-India level. That model was based not only on countering the ‘silent revolution’, by transcending the caste bottlenecks and embedding the Hindu nationalist populism, but also on generating huge fear of a backlash of attacks by Islamists, thereby treating Muslims as ‘the other’ at one level and reactivating a Hindu sense of vulnerability and inferiority, particularly by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), at another level. Modi, as the Chief Minister of Gujarat prior to 2014, experimented quite successfully with the methods of exploiting hope, fear and anger, and after 2014, proclaimed himself as the commander, leading from the front, of all the electoral wars in India. However, on the policy delivery front, Jaffrelot argues, the Modi government was high on pro-poor rhetoric, but in practice, policy outcomes made the rich richer and the poor poorer.

In Part II of the book, a broad framework is laid down, which argues that the idea of India is transitioning from the world’s largest constitutional democracy into the world’s largest de facto ethnic democracy. According to Jaffrelot, the instruments used by Modi’s government for the transition were quite a few, such as ‘Hinduizing’ the public space—laws on cow protection and conversions; pitting ancient ‘Bharat’ against modern India and giving precedence to ‘Bharat’ in critiquing India; opening up of the state apparatus to RSS influence; adding myths through doctoring history to accommodate Hindutva politics; crusades against the left liberals; taming civil society organizations; educating and re-educating for enmeshing Hindutva with history and science; and debunking secularism’s mode of social practices. One distinct instrument used to convert India into an ethnic democracy was targeting both Muslim and Christian minorities and the unleashing of violence against them. Jaffrelot says that the vigilantes—digital and physical—as purveyors of violence against minorities colluded with the state apparatus, especially the police, and have become an all-pervasive social phenomenon. The twin practices of ‘anti-Christian xenophobia’ and ‘recurrent mobilizations against Muslims’ led to laying the foundations for ‘de facto Hindu rashtra’.

The final part of the book quintessentially focuses on the different facets of the form of authoritarianism under Narendra Modi. This part elucidates the linkages between the categories of populism, homogenization, polarization and authoritarianism. Nationalist–populist leaders often end up being authoritarian and, as Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) explain in their book, they often endorse their supporters’ violence when they refuse to unambiguously condemn and punish it. The hegemonic project of ‘ethnic democracy’, as Jaffrelot mentions, cannot be completed without the capture of all branches of the government, including the press and media (p. 298), and deinstitutionalization of all democratic institutions. The project, therefore, signifies the criticality of elections in terms of ‘electoral authoritarianism’ and inescapably manufactures others as the enemy. In the final chapter Jaffrelot posits that it is the Indian Muslims who are not only socially marginalized but are institutionally excluded and judicially obliterated.

The book makes a strong indictment of Modi’s India and establishes the thesis that India is becoming a model of ethnic majoritarian democracy, heading into the terrain of illiberal democracy. Political events since the book was published provide added evidence of India’s democratic backsliding. The book, though voluminous, is descriptive and both interesting and easy to read.