EDITORIAL: AS INDIA’S ELECTORAL LAMP CONTINUES TO DIM, THE US ONE SEEMS TO SHOW A FLICKER OF HOPE
Vinod Mubayi
The results of elections that confer both legitimacy and authority to the winners have become the most important determinants of politics in states that consider themselves electoral democracies. Other aspects of democratic functioning that were once regarded as fundamental, such as freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press along with rights guaranteed by the constitution, including the rights of ethnic and religious minorities and the political opposition, seem to have acquired a kind of second-class status in the operations of government as reflected in much of the popular media in countries like India, the world’s largest democracy, and the U.S., the world’s oldest democracy.
Part of the reason why this has happened is due to the emergence of extreme economic inequality and the concentration of wealth that has increased greatly from the evolution of the neoliberal capitalist system in the last few decades. A relative handful of multi-billionaire families at the very top, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg or Ellison in the U.S. and Ambani and Adani in India, now own and control more wealth than the many millions who constitute the bottom half of the country’s population; these elites also happen to control large swaths of the media, whether print or audio-visual, and own significant numbers of cultural, entertainment and social media organizations. This socio-economic fact has resulted in the dominance of money in politics, an outcome that in the U.S. has been greatly facilitated by a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions. These judicial rulings equated money spent on political campaigns with freedom of speech protected under the Constitution and essentially abolished all limits on campaign spending by the wealthy. In India, the electoral bonds scheme introduced by the Modi regime in 2017 that let corporations and individuals anonymously donate unlimited amounts to political parties lingered for six long years before it was finally struck down by the court in 2024 but it allowed the ruling BJP, which got over 90% of the donations, to accumulate many millions in quid pro quo contributions.
The influence of unlimited money in the political process coupled to the significant decline in checks and balances among the three branches of government, executive, legislative and judicial, has led to creeping authoritarianism in both the U.S. and India. The Modi regime that has been in power in India since 2014 has systematically captured and weaponized all the nominally independent agencies of the state to carry out its own political interests. Crucial among these is the Election Commission of India (ECI) that is charged with conducting elections all over the country at both the federal and state levels. For many years, the ECI was a model of probity for conducting free and fair elections. That does not appear to be the case now. The three members who constitute the ECI used to be selected by a panel consisting of the Prime Minister (PM), the Chief Justice of India (CJI) and the Leader of the Opposition (LOP) in Parliament. A few years ago, the Modi regime passed a law in Parliament that changed the composition of the selection panel by replacing the CJI with a cabinet minister of the regime thus giving the ruling party a built-in 2-1 majority on the ECI. An astute political commentator remarked on this development: “That India has an electoral system where the umpire is appointed by its most powerful player should set off alarm bells.” Sure enough, the alarm bells sounded in the 2019 national elections that were handily won by the BJP. A painstaking statistical analysis of election results by Prof Sabyasachi Das of Ashoka University presented in an academic research paper entitled “Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy” in 2023 established that certain seats won by the BJP in the 2019 elections were a result of electoral manipulation.
Since then, numerous credible charges of vote rigging in recent elections have been made that include deletion of legitimate voters and addition of fraudulent voters to the electoral rolls, irregularities in vote counting, surge voting by fake voters after closure of voting, and flagrant violations of the model code of conduct (MCC) by the ruling party that have gone unchallenged by the ECI. The most recent election in the state of Bihar where the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won an unprecedented 203 out of a total 243 seats has been roundly criticized on many grounds including violations of the MCC and vote manipulation. One of the more egregious results of this election was that the opposition RJD party obtained over 23% of the vote but only 25 seats while the BJP obtained 20% of the vote and 90 seats and its NDA partner the JDU got around 17% of the vote and 87 seats. Many independent observers agree that the election playing field in India is sharply tilted in favor of the BJP and its allies while some argue that vote manipulation and fraud also play an important role.
However, whether it is lack of fairness or presence of fraud, the results of elections in India for the near future appear to point to the continued dominance of the BJP and progress towards a more authoritarian politics culminating in a one-party Hindu Rashtra (nation) India.
In the context of the latest election in India in the state of Bihar earlier this month (November), the magazine Frontline commented editorially in its issue of November 26: “we are living through …democracy’s strategic exhaustion. Governments are not suspending elections; they are making them suitably irrelevant. Opposition is not banned; it is buried under procedural sludge. The press is not censored; it is drowned in manufactured cacophony powered by social media. The process works below the threshold of coups or constitutional shocks, wearing down democratic attention until citizens stop noticing when the system stops functioning.”
With the election of Trump last year, the U.S. appeared to be headed in the same authoritarian, fascist direction as Trump unleashed the military for domestic control, attacked and imprisoned both legal and undocumented immigrants in Nazi-style raids by ICE agents, vilified marginalized groups while promoting white supremacy, repeatedly defied the lower levels of the federal judiciary, attacked freedom of the press, and manufactured emergencies to justify killing of foreign civilians in international waters.
However, the results of the recent New York City Mayor election demonstrated that it is possible that concerted, organized action on a class basis by a multi-ethnic and multi-racial electorate can kindle a hope of successfully challenging elites and the power of their wealth in a fair election. The election of Zohran Mamdani, a young Muslim with South Asian roots who was born in Africa and immigrated to the U.S. as a 7-year old child, at a time when immigrants, particularly from “shithole” countries, are being demonized daily by the Trump administration shows that it is possible to construct a winning coalition of voters primarily on the basis of economic class who are united by the precarity of their existence under a set of demands for “affordability”, in other words for a program of city government actions to improve their lives. The demands articulated by Mamdani include a rent freeze on rent-controlled apartments, free city buses, universal childcare, and city-owned grocery stores to curb profiteering by giant corporate food chain stores. In addition to the core economic demands, Mamdani’s campaign was joined by other political activists opposed to U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the fascist actions of ICE against immigrants as well Trump’s use of the military in cities against domestic opposition that are strongly opposed by a large majority of New Yorkers. The many millions of dollars contributed by Wall St. titans to Mamdani’s opponents, the abuses hurled at him by Trump before the election and the opposition to his candidacy by all the mainstream media, including the liberal New York Times newspaper, spectacularly backfired. The negative campaign galvanized Mamdani’s supporters as he received an unprecedented one million plus votes and triumphed over his nearest rival by a margin of almost 10%.
In a perceptive article on November 22 in the Wire Prof. Zoya Hasan of JNU points to a paradox: comparing Indian elections in poverty-stricken states like Bihar and Mamdani’s victory in New York, she asks why “given the depth of economic distress across much of India” do economic issues not “steer voter behavior?” She points out that in elections in India issues related to identity politics, caste alignments or cash transfers from the government seem to play a much larger role and contrasts this with the economic class-based program of Mamdani’s victorious campaign in New York.
Of course, it goes without saying that an election victory does not automatically translate into the implementation of any of Mamdani’s affordability demands. New York City is in one sense the world center of global capitalism and the democratic socialist agenda of Mamdani’s campaign is bound to face a strong pushback and obstruction from the elites at the top, not the least of which is the need to convince many conservative politicians in New York State to pass progressive legislation like a wealth tax through the state legislature. However, the fact that Mamdani’s coalition of working-class and immigrant New Yorkers could successfully put economic demands at the forefront of the mayoral election campaign in the largest city in America creates a flicker of hope that it could be replicated elsewhere. And nowhere is it more urgent than in India where Mamdani’s victory, given his Indian roots, has naturally generated a huge amount of interest although, predictably, not from Hindutva-oriented BJP regime ruling the country or their ideological supporters.
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