Authoritarianism in Indian State, Law, and Society

Abstract

While India possesses features conventionally associated with liberal democracies, it has lately been understood to suffer from “democratic backsliding”. Commentators have used descriptions like “authoritarianism”, “electoral autocracy”, “ethnic democracy” and “totalitarianism” to understand the current moment in Indian history. The framework of “autocratic legalism” illuminates the dynamics of centralization of power but there are also elements in the Indian experience that complicate this framework and reflect potentially unique features of the country’s democratic decline. These features can be attributed to the political rise and entrenchment of the Hindu nationalist ideology, profoundly facilitated by the electoral dominance of the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi since 2014. This article argues that India’s spiral towards authoritarianism is also characterized by a range of disturbing and insidious developments beyond the centralization of state power, which are more concerned with majoritarian power seeping into everyday legality. The article considers three examples of such majoritarianism in everyday legality: the use of “anti-terror” laws against minorities and political opponents, policies driving towards the dispossession of minority citizenship, and the mobilization of the mob in ways that blur the lines separating the state from Hindu nationalist actors. These examples demonstrate how in India, autocratic forces are not merely interested in undermining (meaningful) democracy—all in the name of democracy. Instead, autocracy flourishes as a diverse and relatively disaggregated set of actors undermine democracy in the name of an ostensibly truer, Hindu, Indian nationhood.

Good Bye, Liberal-Legal Democracy!

“…Similarly, countries may have adopted liberal laws, but these coexist with institutionalized illiberal practices, which incumbents can bolster and expand. This is again the case in India, where a liberal Constitution was admittedly “imposed upon a society riven by hierarchies of religion, caste, class, and gender” (Bhat, Suresh, and Das Acevedo, 2022) and, in Brazil, where, as Machado and Pimenta (2022) note, deficits in the rule of law’s consolidation, despite the successful adoption of elections, left open persistent “zones of authoritarianism,” which Bolsonaro could tap into and expand.…”

“…I fully recognize, however, that: 1) illiberalism involves attacks on other scripts of the liberal project (economic, cultural, geopolitical, civilizational) besides political liberalism (Laruelle 2022), and 2) in democratic backsliding, the political change at hand can encompass more than just the weakening of political liberalism. It can also include, for example, socioeconomic and cultural change (de Sa e Silva, forthcoming; Bhat, Suresh, and Das Acevedo, 2022).…”