Has Modi Pushed Indian Democracy Past Its Breaking Point?

 

By Isaac Chotiner

March 31, 2023

 

The researcher Christophe Jaffrelot says that the recent conviction of Narendra Modi’s primary challenger “means that we are in an authoritarian regime where the man in charge is supposed to rule forever.”Soruce photograph by T. Narayan / Bloomberg / Getty

Earlier this month, Rahul Gandhi, India’s main opposition leader, was convicted of defamation, for, several years ago, likening Narendra Modi, the country’s Prime Minister, to a thief. Days after the verdict, Gandhi was disqualified from serving in the lower house of Parliament, which is controlled by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The trial took place in Modi’s home state of Gujarat; the sentence—two years—is the exact length necessary to deem a member of Parliament unfit to serve. (Gandhi announced that he would appeal the sentence.) Meanwhile, opposition parties have joined forces to speak out against the increasing number of non-B.J.P. politicians who have been targeted by courts or state agencies. It remains unclear whether the various opposition parties will unite ahead of next year’s elections, where Modi is expected to lead his party to a third straight victory.

 

Over the course of Modi’s premiership, which began in 2014, he has turned India into an increasingly illiberal democracy. Vigilante attacks on religious minorities have increased markedly, the ruling party has taken steps to strip citizenship from Indian Muslims, and the historically repressed Muslim-majority state of Kashmir has faced even harsher crackdowns. Still, Modi remains remarkably popular, with approval ratings above seventy per cent. The moves against Gandhi—the scion of India’s Congress Party, which ruled the country for most of the post-independence era—were surprising in part because Gandhi doesn’t seem to pose a real threat to Modi politically.

 

To talk about Gandhi’s conviction and disqualification, I recently spoke by phone with Christophe Jaffrelot, a senior research fellow at Sciences Po, a professor of Indian politics and sociology at King’s College, London, and the author of “Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Modi’s government has evolved in a more authoritarian direction, the central role that anti-Muslim politics has played in his success, and where opposition to the B.J.P. is likely to emerge.

 

Is the Gandhi conviction and disqualification just another step that the Modi government has taken to restrict political freedom in India? Or does it signal something new?

 

It is a restriction of a new kind. We have seen minor politicians affected by these kinds of moves at the state level, or at the provincial level. For instance, Manish Sisodia, the right-hand man of the chief minister of New Delhi, was arrested last month. That was clearly a big issue. But to attack Rahul Gandhi is a bigger issue, and you can say the difference is in kind, not in degree, because he is the leader of the opposition, and he is therefore the main contender for dislodging Modi from power. So if Modi attacks someone like him, it means that to replace Modi will be very difficult. It means that we are in an authoritarian regime where the man in charge is supposed to rule forever.

 

In a recent piece, you expressed some hope that the B.J.P. might have gone too far. Why is that?

 

Well, it’s one of the possibilities. It may be seen as an existential threat by state parties. And they may realize that they need to close ranks. If the rules of the game are changing so quickly, so radically, they may not be in a position to retain power at the state level, where they are so well entrenched. They may do what we’ve seen in Turkey, in Israel, in Poland, in Hungary, in all these countries, where finally the opposition leaders realize that if they do not unite they’re done.

 

Opposition parties still control many of India’s twenty-eight states, and you’re saying that Gandhi’s conviction could be a sign that the ruling party is going to go after them, too? And that the only way to hold on to what power they do have is to unite?

 

Exactly. Power in India lies largely at the state level. It’s a federal system.

 

Modi is probably the most popular leader in the world. His party has amassed incredible power to a degree not seen in India in many decades. Yet, at the state level, especially in the south, you see regional parties keeping the B.J.P. out of power. How has this been possible?

 

He’s not as popular as he claims. The B.J.P. never got more than thirty-seven per cent of the vote nationally. They control half a dozen big states, and most of them are in the Hindi Heartland. [These are states in the northern and central parts of the country.] If you look at the periphery, if you look at the states which are outside the Hindi Heartland—they do not control Tamil Nadu and they will never control Tamil Nadu. They do not control Kerala and they will never control Kerala. Look at West Bengal and Punjab, and even Maharashtra, which is not a finished story. There is a kind of exaggeration of the control they exert. And they exert control not because of the popularity of the B.J.P.; they exert control largely because Modi gets the B.J.P. elected every five years, which means that, after him, the B.J.P. may be in trouble. They have so much power because of their authoritarian modus vivendi, not because of their popularity.

 

I’m looking at Morning Consult’s global approval-rating tracker for world leaders. Modi is currently at seventy-six-per-cent approval. That is fifteen percentage points higher than any other world leader.

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you go by the voting patterns of Indians, which is for me the real measure of popularity, Indians in more than half of the country’s states do not vote for the B.J.P. and for Modi when he is the candidate.

 

In that case, how do you understand this dynamic, where Modi himself is personally popular but he can’t yet lead the B.J.P. to take control of a majority of states?

 

There are very strong regional identities that are not represented by the B.J.P. The B.J.P. is seen as a North Indian, Hindi-speaking party. It’s also seen as an upper-caste party. So those who are not Hindus—in Kashmir, of course, and Sikh people in Punjab—do not vote for the B.J.P. And those who are not Hindi speakers in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, and Kerala cannot share this ideology of the B.J.P.’s.

 

You’re suggesting that Modi’s personal popularity is real, but it hasn’t completely transferred to support for the Party, which is why the Party could be in trouble after he’s gone?

 

Exactly.

 

In your book, you say that, in 2014, after Modi’s election, India was an “ethnic democracy,” and that it adopted something that you call “competitive authoritarianism.” Can you talk about what you think each of those two things are, and how India has changed during Modi’s nine years in power?

 

There are two sequences, or phases. “Ethnic democracy” is a formulation that comes from Israel. It was coined for understanding that kind of democracy. In India, we have a democracy in the sense that, after 2014, you still had elections, you still had a somewhat independent judiciary, at least till 2017 or 2018, and you still had a rather independent press. It has changed a lot. But it was an ethnic democracy, in the sense that the minorities—the non-Hindus, the Muslims, but also the Christians—were second-class citizens in their own country. And they were second-class citizens mostly because of the support of vigilante groups by the government. Vigilantism is a very important dimension of national-populist regimes. You have groups of activists making the lives of minorities very difficult.

 

For instance, in India, Muslims have been attacked because they were accused of taking cows to slaughterhouses. You had many, many cases of lynching. Muslims were also prevented from talking to Hindu girls. The vigilante groups called that “love jihad.” Muslims were also prevented from purchasing flats in Hindu-dominated neighborhoods. There was a real deterioration of life for Muslims. De facto, you saw them becoming second-class citizens.

 

After 2019, we saw something new. We saw things changing in the laws. A very important law, for instance, was the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. It was passed in order to make religion the criterion for accessing Indian nationality. Only non-Muslim refugees from Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Pakistan were eligible for citizenship. Also, new laws were passed to make interreligious marriages more difficult.

 

There was also the revocation of Article 370, which had granted some autonomy for Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state.

 

You’re very right. In fact, these laws were all passed at the same time, after the 2019 election. These elections marked a kind of transformation of a de-facto ethnic democracy into a kind of de-jure ethnic democracy. But they also marked a shift toward authoritarianism. And this authoritarianism took different forms.

 

First, we saw an attack on the judiciary. [The B.J.P.] tried to change the procedure for appointing judges. They failed. In fact, they failed the way that Benjamin Netanyahu is failing—not so much because of popular demonstrations but because the judges themselves, the Supreme Court, said, no, we don’t want to change the way people are appointed. But, in retaliation, the Modi government refused to appoint the judges that the judiciary itself had selected for the job. And therefore in 2017, 2018, and 2019, you had an amazing number of vacancies. And now the judiciary was on the defensive. They finally internalized this, and they stopped nominating judges that they knew the government would not accept. They also started to become very complacent. So either they validated any law that the government was passing or they refused to take a stand.

 

The Citizenship (Amendment) Act is illegal, but the judges are sitting on it and don’t want to give any verdict. Abolition of Article 370 was illegal, too. There are a great number of laws that are in contradiction to the constitution and which the judges should invalidate. That’s one symptom of authoritarianism.

 

There is another very interesting symptom, which is the way that the media has been treated. The media in India used to be vibrant, like the judiciary. That’s over. [The B.J.P.] used the leverage they had on the owners. The people who own the media in India are all businessmen. And these businessmen have other businesses. They need the support of the government for the other businesses, and if the government is not happy with some of the journalists they ask the businessmen to ease out the journalists.

 

Have we seen this kind of transition into competitive authoritarianism in other countries? What is normally the next step?

 

There are different scenarios. You have the resilience scenario, where some opposition leader can shift the discourse and stage a comeback, like Lula did. This happens because he appears as a man of the people and he replaces the emphasis on ethnic nationalism, or conservatism, with a focus on socioeconomic issues with robust institutions. And in Brazil the judiciary was, in fact, remarkably robust. The other scenario we see is the Israeli scenario, where you have people in the streets. The democratic culture is sufficiently robust to force Netanyahu to postpone his agenda. These are the two positive scenarios.

 

But in many places you have the negative scenario. Look at Hungary or Poland. They get away with it. And, in India, I’m afraid this scenario is more likely, because you don’t have the civil society that Israel has, you don’t have the judiciary and the leaders that Brazil has. So we may be stuck with Modi till he leaves the scene. And the big question is: After Modi, what will happen?

 

Modi does seem to be more popular across India than Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have been in their respective countries. Even if the B.J.P. hasn’t instituted itself in all the states in India, it does seem that the broader Hindu-nationalist project is popular. Do you think that’s wrong?

 

No, I think you’re right. And I think it has a lot to do with the magnitude of anti-Muslim prejudice. It is so strong. People find refuge in the B.J.P. against Muslims, and against Pakistan. It has a lot to do with the public sphere. They have really propagated such diabolical images of Muslims that now it’s deeply rooted in the psyche of the society. So, for that reason, you can say, yeah, the popular support remains strong.

 

I’ve been struck by this as well. I don’t want to say that Brazil or the United States or any of these places don’t have bigotry that shapes our politics. But the scale of anti-Muslim prejudice in India and how it has openly infected so many areas of Indian public life, especially in the past decade, is astonishing and depressing. I’m curious why you think that is, or how it’s happened.

 

I would say there is a push factor and there is a pull factor. The Islamophobia was fostered by not only Partition but by the way Pakistan supported jihadi groups in the two-thousands. That was horrendous. I’m sure you remember 2008, the attack on Bombay, and so many other attacks. That’s clearly a factor in the mobilization against Muslims, who are seen as a fifth column of Pakistan articulating a jihadi discourse. But there is also a pull factor, in the sense that we’ve seen a Hinduization of society.

 

You are against Muslims on the one hand, and you’re for Hinduism on the other hand. These two factors are combined. But why has Hinduism become such an appealing identity? That, I think, is something you can only understand if you look at the modernization of Indian society after 1991, when economic liberalization resulted in more growth, urbanization, and consumerism. These were the ingredients of a new middle class, which was to become the core electorate of the B.J.P. This group became affluent, but also rootless. They searched for an identity and found it in Hindu nationalism, which endowed them with some cultural anchor points. This upper-caste middle class turned to new, modern, English-speaking gurus, and sectarian movements in Gujarat and elsewhere. It started to follow the yoga classes of saffron-clad masters on television. The B.J.P. has been very good at tapping that source of legitimacy by co-opting these gurus. More generally, the Ayodhya movement, the movement for the building of the temple in Ayodhya, has enabled the B.J.P. to capitalize on this appetite for Hinduism and pride in a Hindu identity.

 

Ayodhya was a place where a mosque was destroyed in 1992 by a mob. And now there’s been a contested case about building a Hindu temple there, which the ruling party has been pushing.

 

Yeah, and finally they won, because, in 2020, the Supreme Court of India said, yeah, go ahead, you can lay the first stone. Modi acts as though he were a priest, as if he were the great priestly head of India. You have a kind of theocracy in the making here, right? It explains a very important part of his popularity.

 

I want to return to the opposition. Rahul Gandhi is essentially the leader of the Congress Party. He didn’t do well in elections in 2014 and 2019. He is the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Indian Prime Ministers, and he was seen as a bit of a political failure. He recently embarked on this kind of tour where he travelled around the country and seemed to get the best press, or at least the best English-language press, that he has had in a very long time. But do you think that he or the Congress Party have shown any signs of being able to be more politically effective? Moreover, do you think that India’s electoral system will allow for all the opposition parties to unite in a fruitful way?

 

Congress has a leader now. It had a program already—the 2019 Congress Party election manifesto was absolutely superb. The big question is the Congress electoral machine. This Bharat Jodo Yatra, this march of Rahul’s, was intended to activate the new machine, the new cadre. That was really one of his objectives: to get in touch with local support. What we don’t know is whether it was effective.

 

We’ll know soon, because there will be elections in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan. This is a very important election year at the state level, preparing for 2024. For me, this is a question mark. The Congress Party can improve at the national level if it improves at the state level, and we’ll know soon whether it is in a position to do that or not.

 

The second question, of course, is a difficult one, because, on the one hand, all these state parties realize that if they don’t fight the B.J.P. it will swallow them or take away their voters. The risk is real. And the B.J.P. is very good at co-opting opponents. Modi has done it in Gujarat for years. He has attracted so many Congress leaders to the B.J.P. He can continue to do it. And that makes the opponents very weak. That’s one problem.

 

The question is: Will these state parties rally around Congress? Here we have a problem. Who can be Prime Minister? Who can be the opposition’s head? I don’t think that Rahul will try to be the opposition’s Prime-Minister-in-waiting. He can be a great mobilizer. He can be what his mother was for ten years. Sonia Gandhi was the person who kept the ruling coalition together. But there was a Prime Minister: Manmohan Singh. The big problem today is: Who can be the Manmohan Singh of the opposition? Who can be the Prime Minister whom opposition parties consider unthreatening in their own states? Until they’ve found this person, there’ll be a missing link. The glue for the opposition parties will not be so easy to find.

 

Now, there is one last possibility, and this is, well, people may try to vote for change. They may just have one slogan: We want change. We have no leader. We don’t have any Prime-Minister-in-waiting. But we want change, and if we ally only for change, it can work simply because it’s a first-past-the-post system. So if there is no competition between opposition parties, that in itself can make a huge difference. ♦