What ails Indian democracy today?

Most western academics were skeptical about the future of India, the world’s largest democracy, throughout the 1950s to the 1970s. It succeeded beyond all expectations in mobilizing large-scale electoral participation especially among poor and illiterate voters. And yet today its very existence seems to hang in the balance as the country faces a deep crisis of liberal, secular democratic norms, values and institutional practices. Freedom House even downgraded India from a free democracy to a "partially free democracy" last year. So what ails Indian democracy so suddenly? Yogendra Yadav (a leading political theorist and leader of the Swaraj India party established in 2016) helps us make sense of the past, present and future of democracy in India.

Democracy in Question? is brought to you by:

• The Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna: IWM

• The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: AHCD

• The Excellence Chair and Soft Authoritarianism Research Group in Bremen: WOC

• The Podcast Company: Earshot Strategies

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Making Sense of Indian Democracy. (2020).

• Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies. (2011). Co-authored with Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan.

• Electoral Politics in Indian States: Lok Sabha Elections in 2004 and Beyond. (2009). Co-edited with Sandeep Shastri and K.C. Suri.

• Learn more about Swaraj India.

GLOSSARY

What is universal Adult Franchise?

(00:05:00 or p. 4 in the transcript)

Universal Adult Franchise means that all adult citizens of the country should have the right to vote without any discrimination of class, caste, religion, or gender. Ornit Shani, Associate Professor of Modern Indian History writes: “From November 1947 India embarked on the preparation of the first draft electoral roll on the basis of universal adult franchise. […] Turning all adult Indians into voters over the next two years against many odds, and before they became citizens with the commencement of the constitution, required an immense power of imagination. Doing so was India’s stark act of decolonisation. This was no legacy of colonial rule: Indians imagined the universal franchise for themselves, acted on this imaginary, and made it their political reality. By late 1949 India pushed through the frontiers of the world’s democratic imagination, and gave birth to its largest democracy.” Read more.

What does Balkanization mean?

(00:10:30 or p. 6 in the transcript)

Balkanization is a pejorative term used to describe the division of a multinational state into smaller ethnically homogeneous entities. The term also is used to refer to ethnic conflict within multiethnic states. It was coined at the end of World War I to describe the ethnic and political fragmentation that followed the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, particularly in the Balkans. Learn more.

What does Hindu nationalism refer to?

(00:10:30 or p. 6 in the transcript)

For more context information we recommend this and this New York Times article.

What is the European nation-state approach and how does it differ from a state-nation approach?

(00:11:30 or p. 6 in the transcript)

Nation-state approaches aspire to a congruence between state borders and the boundaries of the national community, so that the national group is contained in the territory of its state and the state contains only that nation. In his 2011 book “Crafting State-Nations” Yadav argues that this European approach has led to enormous bloodshed in the 20th century and instead proposes a “state-nation approach”, where deep cultural differences should be accommodated within political boundaries of a state. In his book Yadav argued that India was one of the prime examples of a successful state-nation. Learn more.

What is the BJP?

(00:14:50 or p. 8 in the transcript)

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is a Hindu nationalist party, which has ruled India uninterruptedly since 2014. BJP is led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Learn more.

What happened to Babri mosque and what did the Indian Supreme Court say?

(00:33:00 or p. 17 in the transcript)

The dispute over the 16th-century Babri mosque, in Ayodhya, goes back decades. In December 1992, Hindu militants razed the mosque, which is on a disputed religious site in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, triggering clashes with Muslims that left 2,000 people dead and plunged the country into political crisis. In September 2020 the Supreme Court has acquitted all senior figures in India’s ruling party of their role in the demolition of the Babri mosque by Hindu rioters. All 32 men, including the former deputy prime minister LK Advani, three leaders from the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) and a sitting BJP politician, were cleared of inciting the violence in 1992 that led to the mosque being torn down by an armed Hindu nationalist mob. Click here to learn more.

What are the farmers’ protests in India about?

(00:37:15 or p. 19 in the transcript)

Indian farmers object to new laws that constitute the most sweeping reform to agriculture for decades. The government of the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, says the laws will bring necessary modernization and private competition to an ailing sector that has left millions of farmers destitute. Farmers say the laws were passed without consultation and will allow private corporations to control the prices of crops, crush their livelihoods and take away their land. Learn more.

Which incident of police firing in the state of Madhya Pradesh is Yadav referring to?

(00:28:15 or p. 20 in the transcript)

In 2017 six farmers were killed in police firing during protests in Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh. The farmers, who had been protesting for several days, were seeking loan waivers and appropriate pricing for their produce.