India's Democratic Reckoning
The world's largest democracy has been testing the limits of democratic governance for a decade. The results are a warning that the rest of the world has not adequately absorbed.
The political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of India's most distinguished public intellectuals, resigned from Ashoka University in 2021, citing what he described as pressure on the institution from those who objected to his public criticism of the government. The resignation was noted abroad as a data point in the global democratic recession. In India, it was something more: a signal, from a person who had spent his career thinking seriously about democratic institutions, that the environment for that kind of thinking had fundamentally changed.
Mehta did not say that India was no longer a democracy. He is too careful a thinker for that. What he said, in various public statements afterward, was that the formal institutions of Indian democracy — elections, courts, federalism, free press — continued to exist while the informal norms and political culture that give those institutions their substance had been significantly eroded. India could hold free elections and still have a democracy that was less free than it appeared.
This argument — that formal institutions can persist while the norms that animate them are hollowed out — is the central insight of a large body of academic work on what scholars call "democratic backsliding." It is the insight that the story of India's democracy in the past decade is designed to test.
Let me be precise about what has happened and what has not. India has not experienced a military coup. It has not canceled elections. Its Supreme Court continues to function; its press, though under significant pressure, has not been shut down; opposition parties exist and occasionally win. The BJP, the party that has governed India since 2014 under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has won elections that most international observers have regarded as genuinely competitive.
What has happened is more subtle and, in some ways, more significant. The institutions that counterbalance executive power — the Election Commission, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Enforcement Directorate, the Comptroller and Auditor General — have, in the assessments of independent analysts, become progressively less willing to act against the governing party's interests. This is not unique to India; institutional capture is a common tool of democratic backsliders. But in India's case, the scale and speed of the shift have been notable.
The press freedom situation is similarly complex. India is a country with hundreds of newspapers, dozens of television channels, and a thriving digital media ecosystem. It is also a country in which the largest media conglomerates have developed what analysts describe as a pattern of self-censorship on stories unfavorable to the governing party; in which journalists have been arrested under laws like the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act for reporting on human rights conditions; and in which press freedom indices from Reporters Without Borders and Freedom House have shown India declining continuously since 2014.
To note these changes is not to claim that Indian democracy has ended or that its essential character has been determined. It is to observe that a democracy can be degraded without being abolished — and that the degradation, once established, tends to compound.
The ideological project that has accompanied these institutional changes is also worth understanding on its own terms. The BJP's governing ideology, Hindutva, is not simply Hindu nationalism in the sense of a majority community asserting its cultural preferences. It is a more ambitious project: the redefinition of Indian identity away from the pluralist, constitutional framework established at independence and toward an understanding of India as a Hindu civilizational state in which non-Hindu minorities — primarily Muslims, who constitute roughly 14 percent of India's population — are guests rather than equal citizens.
This is a significant departure from the constitutional framework established by the framers of the Indian constitution, who were explicitly committed to a secular, pluralist republic. Ambedkar, Nehru, and their colleagues built a constitutional architecture specifically designed to manage a society of enormous religious and linguistic diversity — one in which, as Nehru famously put it, there was no such thing as a majority community, only an aggregate of minorities.
The Hindutva project is, at its core, a contestation of this founding premise. And it has been advanced not primarily through constitutional amendment — the BJP does not have the two-thirds majority required for that — but through the accumulation of administrative practice, legislative change, and cultural normalization. The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, which created a religious test for citizenship that excluded Muslims, was the most visible example. The treatment of protests against that act — which included large-scale demonstrations and a crackdown that resulted in deaths, arrests, and what international human rights organizations documented as systematic state violence — was another.
I spent three weeks traveling in India in late 2025, speaking with journalists, academics, lawyers, opposition politicians, and ordinary citizens in Delhi, Mumbai, and smaller cities in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. What I found did not fit neatly into either the celebratory narrative ("India is a rising power and a democratic success story") or the catastrophist one ("Indian democracy is over"). It was messier than either.
The genuine complexity is that India is simultaneously a place where real democratic competition continues — where state elections are won and lost by opposition parties, where courts sometimes rule against the government, where a vigorous if embattled press continues to report — and a place where the space for opposition, dissent, and minority belonging has narrowed in ways that are real and frightening to the people experiencing them.
The Muslim journalist I met in Lucknow who spoke to me only under conditions of strict anonymity, not because of anything he was doing but because of the general climate of fear. The opposition politician in Bihar who had been through three Enforcement Directorate investigations in two years, all related to activities from before she entered politics, and who told me flatly that the timing was no coincidence. The academic at a private university who asked me not to record our conversation, even though she said nothing that was not a matter of public record, because she had seen what happened to colleagues who spoke on record.
These are not the experiences of a functioning democracy that is merely performing imperfectly. They are the experiences of a democracy that has begun to teach its citizens that speaking is dangerous — and that lesson, once learned, is very difficult to unlearn.
The international implications of India's democratic trajectory are significant and underappreciated. India is the world's most populous country, a nuclear power, and a potentially decisive voice in global governance. Its democratic health matters both as a matter of principle and as a matter of geopolitics.
The United States and Europe have been reluctant to press India on democratic governance partly because of India's strategic importance — its role in countering Chinese power in Asia, its large and growing economy, its potential as a reliable partner in a world of fracturing alliances. This calculation is understandable but shortsighted. A country that is governed by the principle that religious and ethnic minorities are less than full citizens is not, in the long run, a reliable partner for a rules-based international order, regardless of what strategic interests might temporarily align.
The harder argument, which I want to make explicitly, is that what is happening in India has lessons for democracies everywhere. The story of Indian backsliding is not exotic; it is a sharper and faster version of pressures that exist in most democracies. The combination of majoritarian nationalism, institutional capture, media intimidation, and the criminalization of political opposition is a recognizable playbook that has been executed in Hungary, Turkey, Poland, and elsewhere.
What makes India different is its scale — the world's most populous nation — and its speed. India has gone further in a shorter time than almost any previously established democracy. This makes it not a cautionary tale in the abstract but a laboratory in the specific: a live case study in how democratic institutions fail, which should be studied by everyone who cares about whether they fail.
Sunita Krishnamurthy is a contributing editor at The Auguro and a fellow at the Center for Democracy and Civil Society. She has reported from South Asia for 15 years.