EDITORIAL: CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY PORTENDS ITS DEMISE IN THE WORLD’S LARGEST “DEMOCRACY”
Vinod Mubayi
Liberal democracy in many countries is facing an acute existential crisis. At the heart of the crisis is the structural disconnect between democratic politics, based on the notion of equality of all citizens as embodied in the principle of one person one vote, and the capitalist economy characterized by significant inequality. When this inequality reaches an extreme level, where a relative handful of ultra-wealthy individuals control more wealth than, say, half the country’s population, political instability sets in.
Last month’s editorial analyzed the crisis in the United States, which bills itself as the world’s oldest democracy, where 62 persons were recently assessed to control more wealth than the bottom half of the country amounting to over 160 million people. It was argued that the rise of a megalomaniac billionaire like Donald Trump, a convicted criminal in cases of rape and financial fraud, to the position of President, and his frequent threats to subvert long-standing practices of electoral democracy as well as actually ride roughshod over constitutional democratic rights using police state measures, is a manifestation in some respects of this extreme economic inequality.
This month we look at India, often called the world’s largest democracy, which in recent years has begun to experience a severe democratic deficit. Under the rule of Modi’s BJP, India has experienced over a decade of K-shaped growth where the wealth of the top 1% has surged while the wealth of the bottom 90% has stagnated or diminished. According to Oxfam data in 2023 the richest 21 Indian billionaires owned more wealth than 700 million Indians.
A very recent article by the Research Unit of Political Economy (RUPE), Mumbai, India published in the September 2026 issue of Monthly Review points out: “A recent study puts the present income and wealth shares of India’s top 1 percent at their highest historical levels, with India’s top 1 percent income share among the highest in the world.” The Indian crony capitalists, Ambani and Adani, strong supporters and funders of Modi and his party, rank among the top 20 billionaires in the world, in a country that despite all the hype is among the lower middle-income countries. The RUPE article demonstrates via a detailed statistical analysis how income inequality in India has accelerated to previously unimaginable levels under the Modi regime’s policies: “The Modi government has also accelerated the ongoing process of concentration of wealth in the big capitalist class. With the help of lower corporate tax rates, reduced debt, and low single-digit wage growth, corporate profits have risen steeply for the last five years.”
In both the US and India, the resentments and instability generated by extreme economic inequality have been harnessed by the ruling elites and their political representatives using social and cultural factors relevant to their societies to promote a right-wing fascism disguised as populism using the full force of a pliant media along with the money power of the uber-wealthy. Examples from the US were cited last month; in India the RUPE article says “By 2013, India’s big business houses switched to backing Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with the agenda of reviving growth through a combination of measures: deregulation and privatization, clearances for land acquisition, diversion of fiscal resources away from welfare and to the corporate sector, and more systematic repression of labor. Big business thus in effect embraced “communal fascistic” ideology and organizations built around that ideology as a method of rule that could overcome popular resistance.”
Aakar Patel, an Indian journalist who served as head of Amnesty International in India from 2015 to 2019, wrote in the Deccan Herald newspaper of September 27: “The Economist Intelligence Unit, part of the Economist magazine, produces a crony capitalism index every few years. It measures how large a part of the economy has been surrendered to making individuals rich by manipulating policy, a practice known as rent-seeking. In 2016, crony capitalism accounted for three per cent of India’s GDP. In 2023, the last year in which this was measured, it had doubled. This may or may not be bribery but it is certainly corruption, because the power and legitimacy of the state is being eroded and misused to enrich chosen individuals.”
The erosion of democratic rights that are guaranteed by India’s liberal constitution has been going on overtly and covertly since Modi’s BJP gained power in 2014. The power behind the BJP is the right-wing Hindu nationalist RSS, in which Modi himself was a ranking member and promoter for several decades before entering politics, and which has no love lost for the secular, democratic Indian Constitution.
RSS, founded in 1925 during British rule, modeled its political ideology on European fascism, and wished to create a Hindu Nation in which religious minorities, such as Muslims and Christians, could at best aspire to a second-class status. After a former RSS member assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948, the organization was banned for a couple of years but then re-surfaced claiming itself as a purely cultural group while it worked insidiously to spread its ideology of upper caste Hindu society among middle class Hindu society. In north and east India, it was helped in its malign journey of divisive politics based on Hindu majoritarianism by the orgy of religion-based violence that accompanied the British Raj-planned Partition of British India into two countries, India and Pakistan, in August 1947.
Since Modi and the BJP ascended to power in 2014, changes to the constitutional framework in the direction of increasing authoritarianism and eroding democratic rights with the aim of stamping out dissent have been a constant feature of the polity. The independence of governmental bodies charged with enforcing laws has been consciously subverted while increasingly draconian laws have been passed to silence opposition. The façade of a democratic state, an executive overseen by the legislature and an independent judiciary, has been preserved while its content is sought to be hollowed out.
The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act UAPA has been made more repressive to an extent where political opponents undergo pre-trial detention for years and years on mere suspicion or claims by the police and denied bail even when the entire justice system knows that there is no prospect of a trial date being set. Thus Umar Khalid, a well-known PhD academic from JNU, and Sharjeel Imam have been kept in jail for over six years and denied bail even when there is no prospect of a trial anytime soon. The higher judiciary including the Supreme Court is complicit in these police state measures.
Then there is the use of malware to plant false documents on the personal computers of rights activists or use surveillance software such as Pegasus to illegally invade their privacy. This was done to those arrested In the Bhima-Koregaon case, where Father Stan Swamy died in jail while human rights lawyers and activists stayed in jail for many years again with no prospect of a trial starting.
Another law that has significantly expanded the repressive powers of the Indian state is the Prevention of Money Laundering Act ( PMLA), where the Enforcement Directorate (ED) doesn’t even have to reveal the substance of the charge to those arrested before putting them in jail as undertrials. Under the PMLA, the ED has powers to investigate, search, seize property, and arrest. The ED ‘s powers are extraordinary—they can be exercised even when there is no investigation or formal charge against a person in relation to the original offense. Unlike usual legal proceedings, the burden of proof under this law is reversed and falls upon the accused instead of the state. The minuscule conviction rates under all these draconian laws in the handful of cases where trials have actually occurred shows that harassment of opposition figures and creation of a climate of fear to deter opposition is the main objective.
In addition to repressive laws, reminiscent of fascist police states, Modi’s BJP government fostered a host of legislation using its majority in Parliament with a two-fold aim: one, to promote the interests of the crony corporate elite and two, to further the transformation of India to a Hindu Rashtra (nation). An example of the first is the Farm Bill passed in 2018 that aimed to accelerate the penetration of India’s farm sector, that is still host to a majority of the country’s population, by large corporate businesses that would displace and ruin the lives of hundreds of millions of small farmers. The second aim was sought to be achieved by the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and its corollary the National Register of Citizens (NRC); these laws would, in effect, make religious identity a criterion for citizenship.
The Farm Bill met with rigorous opposition, probably the longest sustained non-violent protest in history, by millions of farmers, hundreds of whom sacrificed their lives in opposition, and forced the Modi regime to eventually withdraw the law. Many religious minority groups, mostly Muslims, campaigned against the CAA/NRC but their protests were met with fierce repression and the laws have remained on the books so far.
Despite passing repressive laws and coddling its stable of crony capitalists, the K-shaped growth of the economy has continued to lead to the creation of a few more billionaires at the top along with relative impoverishment at the bottom. In the 2024 national elections, Modi’s BJP lost its parliamentary majority and was forced to rely on political support from two opportunistic parties to stay in power. The loss of its electoral majority in 2024 seems to have galvanized the leaders of the BJP regime and their cohorts into action to manipulate the electoral system in such a way as to preclude the possibility of their removal from power, To put it simply, electoral democracy would be transformed from a system in which people vote to choose their government to a system where the government would choose the people who would vote to maintain the same government in power.
Journalist Mukul Kesavan writing in the Deccan Chronicle newspaper on September 27 explains the evolution of BJP’s thinking on this issue in a passage worth quoting at length:
“The mass exclusion of voters from the electoral rolls through the Special Intensive Revision process initiated by the Election Commission of India (ECI) [In India, all elections, national, state and local, are conducted by a national body, the ECI, led by a 3-member panel of senior bureaucrats – Ed,] just before state elections (as in West Bengal) is the latest stage of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s long-cherished aim of creating a made-to-measure electorate. In an earlier phase, the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act were meant to achieve the same object: the NRC would weed out inadequately documented Indians while the CAA would help restore citizenship to non-Muslims (read Hindus) who became ‘collateral’ damage in the NRC exercise. However, the NRC proved unwieldy and slow and the setback of the 2024 general elections, which saw the BJP lose its absolute majority in Parliament, made the task of selecting a new, more pliable, people more urgent. It helped that the new law passed in 2023 for constituting the Election Commission allowed the government a two-to-one majority in the selection panel. The Commission, now refashioned into an Inquisition, would, under the pretext of updating the electoral rolls, perform the task of certifying true Indians and casting out false citizens.”
This process, begun in state elections over the last two years, resulted in the elimination of millions of voters from the electoral rolls via the SIR (Special Intensive Revision) process and, with the exception of southern states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala where it has a minimal presence, it allowed the BJP to win with large majorities in states like Haryana and MP (in the north), Maharashtra (west) and Bihar and West Bengal (east). In West Bengal, a state BJP had never won before, 2.7 million voters were excluded by the SIR process, many in constituencies with large numbers of minority Muslim voters,
The entire sordid SIR process and its corollary “Logical Discrepancy” used to weed out “undesirable” voters from the electoral rolls has been exposed within the last week in a series of articles by the journalist Ritika Chopra in the Indian Express newspaper. It is estimated that over the entire country a staggering number of over 135 million people stand to be excluded from the list of voters!
Protests have, of course, erupted all over the country calling for the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, as well as his political bosses, Modi and Shah, who presumably gave the orders. Most of the protests have been led by the opposition political parties while the Gen-Z led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has also effectively added its voice to the protests. It will be recalled that two months ago CJP led a strong protest against the corruption in the system of national exams for admission to medical colleges that seriously embarrassed the Modi regime and led to the resignation of the Health Minister. CJP’s protest was met with savage repression by the Delhi Police and some other paramilitary organizations that led to demands for Amit Shah’s ouster. At the same time, Modi and Shah were effectively routed and mocked by the uprising of the young led by the CJP that caused large numbers of youth to come out on the streets and defy the government.
How these protests evolve against the putative destruction of liberal democracy remains to be seen. The judiciary has a key role to play in normal circumstances when massive fraud is threatened but the attitude of the Supreme Court of India may be disappointing. In an important article in the Autumn 2025 issue of the Indian Politics and Policy Journal, the veteran analyst of Indian politics Christoph Jaffrelot and his colleague Prannv Dhawan point out that the Supreme Court “has failed to defend the rule of law under Modi’s rule.” In their judgement, there has been a “creeping ascendance of executive power, attempts at court packing, ideological affinities between judiciary and the government, and the ambivalent jurisprudence on fundamental rights.”
Veteran analysts like Aditya Nigam have indicated that a fascist government like the BJP will stop at nothing to violently suppress protests to maintain its power, and only a concerted and united opposition perhaps under a Gen-Z leadership is needed at this juncture.
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