The factors behind democratic backsliding in India

Neera Chandhoke

Political scientist

The arrest of the NewsClick founder-editor and the HR head and the raids by the Delhi Police on the residences and offices of journalists connected with the news portal have sparked protests. A joint statement by 30-odd academics and activists has condemned increasing restrictions on press freedom and democratic backsliding in South Asia. “Denying citizens the democratic space for critical questioning will drag South Asian countries into a new phase of authoritarian decay,” the statement says.

Their concern is legitimate. The print, visual and digital media are an integral part of democratic civil societies: the space of social associations and organisations that keeps a watch on acts of omission and commission of the government. This is necessary because all governments, howsoever democratic be their credentials, have a fatal tendency to accumulate and abuse power. “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is vigilance,” wrote John Curran (1750-1817), an Irish statesman, lawyer and acclaimed wit. This is the role the civil society organisations, media, civil liberty associations and human rights defenders play in a democracy.

Where the media is intimidated and harassed, where it is taken over by corporate houses that benefit from government patronage and when journalists and editors are coerced into submission, democracy is in great danger. The surveillance state keeps a watch on us, but who is going to keep a watch on a democratically elected government? Who will hold it accountable? A handful of leaders, we see, can hold the entire country to ransom by blocking dissent, which is nothing more than constructive criticism.

It is precisely this that has happened in India through the implementation of draconian laws, like the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). The Act was amended in 2019 to enable the Union Government to categorise a citizen as a terrorist without going through the judicial process.

Ironically, the muzzling of the media through the use of the UAPA does not block the criticism of the government. As every newspaper reader knows, in the annual reports of global organisations that track the record of democracy across the world, the status of India has consistently declined each year. These organisations have developed rigorous indexes to rank democracies. Over the past few years, they have issued worrying reports on the erosion of democracy in India, frightening polarisation, institutional decay, violence against minorities, censorship, suppression of any research that casts doubts on electoral integrity and rapidly closing space for dissent. The Freedom House, in its report ‘Freedom in the World’ (2023), held that India is a ‘partly free nation’. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project (2023) termed India as an ‘electoral autocracy’ and ranked it below countries known for authoritarianism and suppression of human rights. The Economist Intelligence Unit, in its 2023 report, called India a ‘flawed democracy’. India’s rank on the World Press Freedom Index has dropped from 151 to 161.

Our postcolonial leadership had institutionalised democracy despite scepticism that the country lacked the preconditions for democracy — literacy, a middle class, wealth and civic virtues. The millions of Indians who had fought shoulder to shoulder for Independence did not deserve anything less than a democracy. By the second decade of the 21st century, the scene changed in India and abroad. Generalised optimism that waves of protest had transformed a number of countries into democracies in the 1980s has been replaced by pessimism at democratic backsliding in the Global South, in the former socialist world, in Israel, and in some countries of Europe where the populist right wing has acquired prominence in politics. The US was marked by a deep political polarisation under the rule of then President Donald Trump. After the 2020 presidential elections, which Trump lost, he refused to accept the election results and his supporters attacked Capitol Hill.

One cause of democratic backsliding is attributed to the reported meddling of Russia and China in elections in other countries. The second is credited to social media that has heightened polarisation through fake news and replaced civility in the public discourse with abuse. The proximate cause everywhere is domestic. In many countries, the rise of right-wing parties, which are hostile to immigrants and minorities and openly espouse racist agendas, the misplaced priorities of the media that kneels to corporate power and the creation of social tensions that are a little short of a civil war are seen as factors that lead to democratic backsliding and the corrosion of democracy.

In recent years, India has been placed in the category of democratic backsliders. This is marked by two main characteristics: the decline of institutional autonomy and the shrinking of civic space for public discussion, debate and contestation. Democratic backsliding, in other words, is used to describe a process whereby established democracies become less democratic for a variety of reasons. The increased tolerance to violence in public and private lives and verbal violence against anyone who offers independent opinions silence citizens and force them to disengage with the government. Who wants to provoke toxic trolling?

This is a pity because citizens’ engagement with elected governments is a staple of democracy. Where citizens become silent, or withdraw into their private spheres to escape generalised incivility in the country, whatever remains of democracy falters and comes to a shuddering halt. No longer is democracy dramatically captured by military regimes or dictators; it erodes surely and steadily as elected leaders proceed to do away with democracy, except during the elections that bring them to power. 

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