Democratic Backsliding in India: When Institutions Bend and Oligarchs Rise
The vicious nexus between oligarchs who wield immense financial leverage and the people commanding apex political power takes no time to catapult the national politico-economic landscape into a system running under a compromised centralized machinery. It creates a conflict of interest scenario and a hotbed of corruption, ultimately stifling democratic processes and undermining public trust.
Elon Musk has raised a very appropriate question: “Is Ambani the real boss of India?” by his rightful comments around why Starlink has not been allowed a license in India even after compliance for quite a time. Oligarchs such as Ambani’s and Adani’s close and proximate link to the powerful offices of the Indian prime minister is not a surprise new fact.
A 2022 article from The New Indian Express reads: “Last December, the government admitted in Parliament that as many as 2,783 foreign companies ceased operations between 2014 and November 2021. These included some big names such as Cairn Energy, Holcim, Daiichi Sankyo, Carrefour, Henkel, Harley Davidson, and Ford.”
But frankly, economic conditions and crony capitalism fall one place behind the list on the many issues and critical questions facing a country experiencing democratic backsliding. It seems minute when compared to the recent eruption of nationwide backlash and agitation over the controversy-ridden national election authority’s complacency in actively manipulating voter lists with the aim of eliminating non-BJP aligned voters and the utter lack of impartiality, independence, and transparency flowing from the decisions made from the office of the Election Commission of India. In my view, democratic trust and strong democratic foundations take greater precedence over economic or financial issues that cause a comparatively less severe, but admittedly substantial, long-term principled damage.
My absolute worst fear remains that the assumptions of few international political observers during the decolonization era of the mid-20th century should not come true regarding the collapse of the strong democratic foundations of India — as they were laid back in 1947 by great men like Nehru — as a result of endless internal regional, linguistic, cultural, and political differences. Indian democracy should live to be a much stronger experiment on a subcontinent historically full of casteism and intrareligious infighting.
The rapid erosion of free speech and freedom of expression under Modi’s regime, alarming decline in the autonomy and leveraging power of regional political entities — and the attempts made to systematically break rival political parties — in states like Maharashtra, the sheer arrogance of the central government in refusing to acknowledge honest mistakes or drawbacks, gradual political control over the institutional independence of agencies such as the Election Commission, national favoritism and bias toward states such as Gujarat, brutal repression of peaceful protests aimed at legitimate demands, and even the fudging of national statistical data to inflate positive economic numbers are but just a few examples of a larger democratic backsliding taking place in India. The dangerous scenario of Modi engineering total institutional capture and the BJP’s ulterior motive of actively disenfranchising millions of eligible voters stem from the BJP’s arrogance in holding themselves above fundamental democratic principles, above the law of the land and even above the Nation itself.
Regimes in expansionist countries such as Xi’s China and Putin’s Russia are often revisionist at home and follow a pattern of historical revisionism propagating authoritarian expansionism and presenting arguments to legitimize greater centralized authority of a strongman autocrat. These so-called ‘Leaders of the Global South’ must introspect on the domestic satisfaction of their own national economic and infrastructural conditions — from issues in India relating to food safety, potable water, electricity supply, and quality healthcare to much beyond. Domestic political repression remains the convenient path to choose in the absence of any credible alternative for the proponents of authoritarian expansionism.