Globally, there are many countries where low levels of trust coexist with stable democracies and several others where distrust is so pervasive that democracy barely survives or simply dies. India as the world’s largest democracy faces a trust deficit but opinion is divided on the survival of democracy. We argue that the current Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) may damage democracy in India.
Under NDA rule, persistent questioning of the survival of democracy has dominated the political discourse in recent years. Specifically, with the aggressive pursuit of Hindutva, unprovoked brutality against minorities, especially Muslims and Dalits, and heavy-handed suppression of the freedom of speech and press have undermined the trustworthiness of democracy. A related question is whether the loss of trust has reduced well-being. A third is whether these inferences are valid and whether India’s democracy is at risk. With the national election looming in the horizon, these questions have high priority.
Transformation of the state
In a succinct exposition of how the Indian state has been transformed, Milan Vaishnav and Madhav Khosla (2021) focused on three manifestations: the ethnic state, the absolute state, and the opaque state. Although familiar individually, these add up to a robust critique of the NDA rule.
In 2019, an amendment of the Citizenship Act, 1955, declared that Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Christians, and Parsis, who arrived in India from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh before 2014, could receive an expedited pathway to Indian citizenship. Muslims, however, were excluded. A serious failure of this Act is that it is limited to religious identity but not whether a person has suffered persecution. This violates the constitutional principle of secularism. Violent protesters were gunned down.
A more compelling manifestation is the absolute state. An example is the dilution of Article 370 in August 2019 and the bifurcation of the State of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) into two Union Territories — J&K and Ladakh — largely under the Central government’s jurisdiction. This violated the constitutional requirement that the Centre consult an affected State before redrawing its boundaries or changing its constitutional status. Data show that the number of militant deaths after 2019 in J&K is nearly double that of the relatively calmer years of 2011 to 2015. The number of forced Internet shutdowns peaked in 2020. Ironically, the Supreme Court upheld the dilution of Article 370.
The opacity of the state is instrumented by controlling the media, suppressing dissent, and withdrawing national surveys that raise concerns about rising economic distress and cast doubts on the exaggerated achievements of the government. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5 was one such survey. Soon after its findings were published, the Director of the International Institute of Population Studies, the nodal agency to provide coordination and technical guidance to the NFHS, was suspended, and subsequently resigned. Similarly, the results of the National Sample Survey on consumption expenditure in 2017-18 were scrapped as leaked data revealed that the real monthly per capita expenditure had actually fallen.
Other shocks
Equally worrying are the shocks to democratic functioning of Parliament. In December, 146 MPs were suspended from Parliament after they demanded that the government, specifically the Home Minister, speak about the security breach in the Lok Sabha. Without these MPs, three draconian criminal Bills were passed.
Although these manifestations could be curbed by an independent judiciary, this has not happened, as was seen in the Supreme Court’s ruling on Ayodhya and its rejection of a probe by a Special Investigation Team or the Central Bureau of Investigation of Adani’s acts of malfeasance, in favour of the SEBI probe moving at a snail’s pace.
Another critique points to damage of the economy and polity by the NDA, but also measures that partly offset the negative impact and likely impart short-term legitimacy. These include new welfare schemes for the poor — of which the Ujjwala scheme and the Swachh Bharat Mission have had the most significant impact — as well as continuing the most popular schemes of the Manmohan Singh-led governments for food distribution, rural employment, and affordable housing. Whether short-term legitimacy was accomplished is not self-evident as there were glaring shortfalls.
Life evaluation
None of these studies, however, focus on trust as the mediator between autocratic policies and survival of democracy. Trust in the NDA is high, presumably because of an overwhelming majority of Hindus in India, but declined between 2018 and 2021. Besides, our analysis, based on the Gallup World Poll Survey for India covering 2018-21, shows that the decline in trust reduced life evaluation. Specifically, a unit reduction in trust is associated with a 0.77 reduction in life evaluation. As income growth decelerated and food prices and unemployment rose, the political crisis deepened — a case in point is the failure to resolve the political crisis in Manipur. While some scholars are adamant that Indian democracy is already dead or dying, and others are cautious or uncertain, we believe that, unless these repressive and autocratic policies are reversed — a daunting challenge — the survival of democracy seems bleak.
Vidhya Unnikrishnan is a Lecturer in Development Economics, University of Manchester, U.K.; Raghav Gaiha is a Research Affiliate, Population Aging Research Centre, University of Pennsylvania, U.S.; Vani S. Kulkarni is a Research Affiliate, Population Studies Centre, University of Pennsylvania, U.S.
