NEW DELHI – India, with 968 million eligible voters, is currently holding the largest exercise of democratic rights in the world. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – the world’s largest political party – is widely expected to win.

The BJP has come to dominate India’s electoral landscape for several reasons: it focused relentlessly on building its organizational strength, promoted meritocracy within its ranks, widened its voter base, and competently delivered benefits to the poor.

Socially conservative but economically centrist, the BJP was formally established in 1980, though its roots lie in the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, a party that emerged in the 1950s to offer a Hindu nationalistic, laissez-faire alternative to that era’s prevailing socialist mindset. The BJP has been in power for about 19 of the 77 years since Indian independence: three years from 1977, 13 days in 1996, one year in 1998, five years from 1999, and ten years since 2014. Thus, it has retained the DNA of a challenger, despite winning 303 of the Lok Sabha’s 543 seats in the 2019 elections, when the Indian National Congress, the second-largest party, won only 52.

After making a dent in parliament in the late 1960s, the BJP formed the first-ever non-Congress government in the late 1970s, following Indira Gandhi’s suspension of civil liberties. Owing to broad sociological developments in the late 1980s, regional caste-based parties started gaining ground. With Congress having jeopardized its standing by repeatedly adopting erratic political positions, the BJP’s religious messaging helped it unite Hindu society, resulting in the first non-Congress government ever to last a full term.

The past decade saw a similar pattern. In 2014, the vacuum created by complacency within Congress and succession-related challenges in regional parties enabled the BJP to become the first party to win an outright majority in the Lok Sabha since 1984. Thereafter, it gradually built a near-hegemonic position.

In a country dominated by political dynasties, the BJP stands out for its commitment to meritocracy. In this year’s parliamentary election cycle, it replaced roughly one-quarter of its current MPs with new candidates, demonstrating both a detailed knowledge of electoral dynamics and a capacity for tough decision-making. This regular churn keeps everyone on their toes and protects the party against capture by narrow groups.

While the BJP was primarily supported by upper-middle-class, urban, privileged Hindus 30 years ago, it has since built a broader political base. In 2019, it won 37.6% of the rural vote, 32.9% of the semi-rural vote, 36% of the lower-income vote, and 33-48% of the vote from various lower castes. Those results reflect the groundwork laid by the party’s ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an organization founded in 1925 to advance a vision of India as a “Hindu nation,” and which combines a volunteer paramilitary wing with grassroots economic rehabilitation and social work.

Yet, despite its explicitly Hindu-nationalist agenda and muzzling of the Muslim community, the BJP has also increased its share of the vote among religious minorities. While only 4% of Muslims voted for it in 2009, that figure rose to 9% in 2014, and to 19% in 2019, compared to 30% for Congress that year, with the rest going to fragmented regional parties.

India’s direct benefits program is by far the most tangible source of the BJP’s mass appeal. In 2023, the government distributed $60 billion to more than 900 million beneficiaries, through 4.9 billion transactions involving 315 government schemes and 54 ministries. That is a marked change from 40 years ago, when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi complained that only 15% of Indian government spending on welfare programs reached the intended beneficiaries.

Few commentators appreciate the conscious efforts that BJP leaders make to stay abreast of developments on the ground. In 2014, the party instituted its Sahyog policy, whereby a rotation of serving ministers make themselves available at party headquarters, so that staffers can engage with them directly. Some 200 people participate in these meetings every day, offering direct feedback and eliminating distortions that arise from multiple organizational layers.

The BJP also offers a strong aspirational narrative. Modi’s government has fostered a can-do spirit with widespread infrastructure investments that include the construction of 75 new airports in the last decade, last year’s G20 summit which was showcased across India, and a $5 trillion GDP target. India is now far more prominent on the world stage; this has captured the national imagination.

The BJP’s campaign operation leaves no stone unturned. Canvassers are assigned lists of individual voters to target, convert, and mobilize. In each district, 18-20 media vans blare out the party’s message, even in small villages of only 2,000 people. The party’s “know your customer” database would put many multinational companies to shame.

Modi amplifies the BJP’s strengths. He is the most charismatic prime minister in recent memory, and he has a firm grip on the issues. These attributes have made him one of the world’s most popular leaders, with an approval rating of 78%, according to Morning Consult. Parliamentary seats are won in his name. In the 2019 election, members who switched from rival parties to the BJP won 56.52% of the time, compared to 14.9% for those who switched to other parties.

Many of the BJP’s strengths are also sources of criticism: its nationalist ideology gives it blind spots, its challenger mentality has rough edges, Modi’s popularity can lead to hubris, and its cadres can become a source of organizational rigidity. The BJP will need to guard against the pathologies of incumbency, lest it starts looking like Congress, once a great political party whose relevance is currently being questioned by many. As the BJP thinks about its legacy, it should internalize an old Indian proverb: “Forts decay from the inside.”

PRINCETON – The late, sharp-witted economist Michael Mussa, my first boss at the International Monetary Fund, once told me that every statistic must pass the “smell test.” I recalled this sage advice recently when Indian authorities published the first driblets of a consumption survey in over a decade. The numbers stink.

Economists have long maintained that India’s official GDP data overstate growth. Before the September 2023 G20 summit in New Delhi, the Indian National Statistical Office issued a particularly brazen overestimate. The last decennial census was in 2011. A survey highlighting stubbornly high malnutrition and anemia cost the survey’s director his job.

The last comprehensive consumption-expenditure survey in 2012 showed 22% living in poverty. The government junked a 2018 survey when leaked data indicated an increase in the poverty rate. Not surprisingly, the new partial consumption figures generated much excitement. Hastily, Surjit Bhalla, India’s former executive director at the IMF, and economist Karan Bhasin proclaimed – under the Brookings Institution’s imprimatur – that extreme poverty has been “eliminated.”

But while such misuse of statistics will amplify the India hype in elite echo chambers, poverty remains deeply entrenched in India, and broader deprivation appears to have increased as inflation erodes incomes of the poor.

Measuring poverty is a complicated task, the essence of which lies in establishing a poverty threshold. The World Bank, which initially set the international poverty line at $1 per day in 1990, updated this figure to $1.90 in 2011 to account for inflation. Only those who cannot afford to spend $1.90 per day are classified as “extremely poor.”

For India, however, the $1.90 threshold represents below-subsistence-level consumption. As economists Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion have noted, it allows for minimal food consumption and little else. In 2012, $1.90 translated to a meager 30 rupees a day in purchasing-power-parity terms – barely enough for two basic meals, according to the poverty expert S. Subramanian.

In analyzing the recently released consumption-expenditure data, Bhalla and Bhasin seem to have converted the $1.90 threshold into rupees at the IMF-reported PPP rate of 22.9 rupees per dollar. Consequently, their analysis categorizes people as poor only if they cannot spend 45 rupees a day.

This approach is tantamount to wishing away poverty. Assuming an average annual inflation rate of 6%, as stated in the government’s press release, the set of goods that cost 30 rupees in 2012 would now cost at least 58 rupees. Moreover, low-income households face diabolical inflation inequality – higher-than-average inflation rates due to the type of goods they buy, their limited mobility (which leaves them at the mercy of local monopolists), and their inability to buy in bulk.

Regrettably, Indian authorities do not provide inflation data segmented by household income. If the annual inflation were 8.5% for the bottom half of Indian households, they would need roughly 80 rupees per day to cover their basic needs. In that case, India’s poverty rate would be around 22%, essentially the same as in 2012.

Setting the bar slightly higher underscores the grim reality. In 2014, a committee led by Chakravarthi Rangarajan, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, concluded that the appropriate poverty line for rural regions was 33 rupees a day – close to the World Bank’s line – while urban residents required at least 47 rupees per day to cover commuting and housing expenses. Subramanian emphasized that the urban poverty line was a gross underestimate; he estimated a daily expenditure of 88 rupees to avoid severe deprivation.

Adjusting the Rangarajan and Subramanian estimates using plausible current inflation rates leads to a stark conclusion: Urban poverty rates range between 40% and 60%, which means that 30-40% of all Indians are poor. This is likely conservative, given the sharp increase in education, transportation, and housing costs, as well as out-of-pocket medical expenses. With numerous parents forced to choose between food and their children’s education, is it any wonder that the government feels obliged to provide free supplementary grain rations to 60% of the population?

High, possibly rising, poverty can be partly attributed to the 2016 demonetization that nullified 86% of India’s currency and to the haphazard implementation of the Goods and Services Tax of 2017, both of which caused huge distress to the vulnerable.

The COVID-19 pandemic delivered another harsh blow, causing millions of Indian workers to revert to low-productivity agricultural jobs. Today, 70 million more Indians work in agriculture than in 2018, owing to the scarcity of non-agricultural job opportunities, which are mostly confined to financially and physically precarious sectors such as construction, street vending, security, and domestic work.

Given the significant hardship faced by millions of Indians, the pre-election release of partial consumption data invites suspicion. And the Bhalla and Bhasin declaration of the end of poverty borders on the malicious. Moreover, their assertion that consumption inequality has declined sharply is risible: wealthy Indians do not report their $400 designer sneakers, Lamborghinis, or lavish parties to government surveyors.

The gap between India’s rich and poor is startling. Consider the $120 million pre-wedding celebrations for tycoon Mukesh Ambani’s son: the lad wore a $1 million watch, a superstar received $6 million to perform, and the Indian aviation authority temporarily cleared a nearby airport to fly in international celebrities.

Meanwhile, the lack of comprehensive consumption – and inflation – data makes it impossible to get an accurate picture of Indian poverty. Sadly, the government’s strategically released data and cherry-picked analysis both continue to reek.

NEW DELHI – As India’s general election enters its second month, most conventional expectations have already been upended. Complacent pundits had long ago concluded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would win comfortably. But two phases in to the seven-phase election – with some 190 constituencies having already cast their votes – the situation no longer looks quite that simple.

India’s autonomous Election Commission prohibits the publication of any exit polls until all seven phases of voting have concluded. (That will happen on June 1, with the result announced on June 4). But unofficial readings of voter sentiment strongly indicate that things are not going the BJP’s way. The public, it seems, has simply not been given enough reason to vote for the party a third time.

Those who put Modi in office in 2014 hoping that he would fulfill his promise to spur job creation have no reason to vote for him again. Unemployment rose significantly under his leadership, and though it appears to have fallen more recently, there is good reason to believe that the real unemployment rate is much higher than official figures indicate. Moreover, a staggering 80% of Indians have seen their incomes decline since 2014, and both purchasing power and household savings have collapsed. Many blame the government for not adequately protecting their welfare.

To be sure, Modi himself remains popular, thanks to the personality cult he has painstakingly built. But his party’s candidates are being met largely with apathy, if not outright disdain. Modi’s demeanor reveals his mounting disquiet: his anti-Muslim dog whistles have lately escalated into direct attacks.

Modi has also ramped up his assaults on the opposition Indian National Congress, claiming that the party’s manifesto has the “stamp of the Muslim League.” He even suggested at a campaign meeting last month that a Congress-led government would redistribute Hindus’ private property and personal assets to Muslims.

Beyond wholly misrepresenting the Congress party’s positions – neither the word “Muslim” nor “redistribution” appears anywhere in the manifesto – Modi disparages Muslims as “infiltrators,” not Indians, and as “those with more children.” Such grossly inflammatory rhetoric demeans his office: a prime minister is supposed to serve all citizens, yet Modi openly expresses contempt for 200 million of them.

Other BJP officials have also gotten in on the fearmongering, further betraying the party’s growing desperation. For example, Home Minister Amit Shah declared that if the BJP is defeated, Sharia law will come to India.

As extreme as such rhetoric is, it is hardly surprising. Attempting to polarize the electorate on religious grounds is a tried-and-tested BJP tactic. The logic is simple: if the demonization of Muslims can get even half of India’s Hindus (who comprise 80% of the population) to forget their other differences and rally around the party, another electoral victory is in the bag.

But this strategy is not foolproof. So, the BJP is also employing other tactics. For starters, it has absorbed a large number of opposition politicians into its ranks, often by coercing those accused of corruption into switching sides to avoid prosecution. The BJP “washing machine” – which “cleans” tainted politicians – has become a national joke.

The BJP has also offered to form alliances with various opposition parties. One of them – the Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh – tabled a no-confidence motion against Modi’s government in the Lok Sabha (lower house) just a few years ago, and its leader has sharply criticized Modi. Now, suddenly, all has been forgiven.

The BJP’s very public attempts to woo the Biju Janata Dal in the eastern state of Odisha and the Akali Dal in the western state of Punjab – both of which abandoned the BJP during previous coalitions – were less successful. Both parties spurned the BJP’s entreaties.

When its attempts at persuasion and cooptation fail, the BJP turns to outright intimidation. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal – the president of the opposition Aam Aadmi Party, which is in power in Delhi and Punjab – was thrown in jail after a midnight arrest, part of an ongoing investigation. Kejriwal’s deputy has been in jail for a year, but no charges have yet been brought against him.

As for Congress, its bank accounts were frozen at the start of the campaign, and party leader Rahul Gandhi’s helicopter was raided last month in an abortive search for illicit booty. These are not the actions of a confident party with abundant popular support, but rather of a party that feels power slipping from its grasp.

The BJP sailed through the last general election in 2019, winning every parliamentary seat in six states, all but one seat in three states, and all but two seats in two states. In all these states, the BJP has only one way to go: down. Even if it loses just a handful of seats in each, it will cumulatively lose its majority, which stands at just 32 seats.

And there is a good chance that will happen. After all, in 2019, the BJP got a major boost from a terrorist attack on a military convoy in Kashmir, which was carried out just a couple of months before the vote by the Pakistan-based group Jaish-e-Mohammed. With no such event galvanizing Indian voters today, the BJP cannot hope to replicate its performance from the last election.

The public has had enough of the BJP’s broken promises, and the opposition is seized by a new confidence. Change is in the air.

BERKELEY – India’s ongoing parliamentary election, in which nearly a billion people may cast their votes over a six-week period, should represent an extraordinary exercise of democracy. The bleak reality, however, is that the election appears poised to consolidate a decade-long process of democratic decay, which has included the decimation of liberal institutions and practices and weakening of political competition. After all, the leader who has presided over this process – Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – remains wildly popular.

Apart from the dedicated and disciplined ground-level work by masses of volunteers for Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the fountainhead of the BJP, this popularity reflects factors sometimes similar to, but also quite different from, those fueling support for right-wing demagogues elsewhere.

As I noted in my 2022 book A World of Insecurity: Democratic Disenchantment in Rich and Poor Countries, such forces tend to find support primarily among less-educated, rural, and older populations. Yet Modi has the backing of educated, urban, aspirational youth. Whereas former US President Donald Trump, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have struggled to carry major cities in elections, Modi had secured thumping victories in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore.

A key reason for this is that political liberalism – including abiding faith in democratic institutions, checks and balances on government power, and free expression – never really took hold in India, outside of a small Westernized elite. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey showed that 67% of Indians have a positive view of rule by a “strong leader” who can make decisions without interference from courts or parliaments – the highest rate of any of the surveyed countries. Populist demagogues always emphasize the participatory aspects of democracy; but in India, the procedural aspects are particularly weak, enabling vicious forms of majoritarianism and state-abetted persecution of dissenters and, particularly, of religious minorities.

Illiberalism thrives among India’s radical left as well, for whom liberal institutions reek of “bourgeois” democracy, and among traditionalists, including Gandhians, as even Mahatma Gandhi, for all his tolerance and empathy, subscribed to the patriarchal and hierarchical values of traditional Indian society. The Hindu-supremacist ideology of the RSS – which has been influential among the upper castes and classes, particularly in northern India – certainly does not lend itself to liberalism.

Poorer Indians, who have traditionally favored center-left national or regional parties, have been attracted to the BJP by the party’s strategy of Hindu consolidation, which includes bringing historical leaders (and even deities) of marginal groups under the broad tent of religious nationalism. Social-welfare benefits – often framed as “gifts” from Modi (prominently bearing his photograph) – have helped, as has the BJP’s cooptation of sub-caste leaders with promises of official privileges.

Two key narratives further bolster support for the BJP, though neither withstands scrutiny. The first is that Modi’s government alone can slay the demon of corruption. But there is little evidence that his administration has made progress on this front. On the contrary, according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, India ranked 93rd for corruption in 2023 (out of 180 countries), having fallen eight places since Modi took power in 2014. A recent survey in India by Lokniti also shows that 55% of respondents think that corruption has increased over the last five years.

Petty corruption remains rampant in India. Demands for bribes by police officers, inspectors, or contractors do not seem to have declined in recent years. Moreover, the disastrous demonetization that Modi oversaw in 2016 – which was particularly harmful for small businesses and the poor – unearthed hardly any of the “black money” it was supposed to flush out.

There is also little reason to believe that grand corruption has declined. Stories about officials collecting hefty “commissions” from contractors on large public projects abound, and government agencies’ increasingly aggressive pursuit of “corrupt” opposition politicians reeks of disingenuousness.

In fact, getting corruption charges dropped or shelved can be as easy as joining the ruling party, even for opposition leaders who have long faced BJP accusations of corruption. These defections contribute to a decline in reported political corruption, but the actual extent of the problem is another story.

Meanwhile, the BJP – which exerts near-total control over Indian media – has ensured that the nexus between politics and business remains opaque. As we know, absolute power can corrupt absolutely. By blocking investigations of questionable business deals involving BJP leaders, the government effectively grants those it favors a kind of “sovereign guarantee” of impunity. These are often the same crony firms for which regulatory exemptions and other favors tend to be reserved.

It has long been suspected that large sums of money from favored firms flow into the BJP’s coffers. This process was facilitated by “electoral bonds” – an opaque mechanism, introduced by the Modi government in 2017, allowing businesses, individuals, and organizations to anonymously donate unlimited amounts to political parties – until the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in February. Subsequent disclosures have revealed that these donations were largely from sectors tending to have high levels of extractive rents, owing to dependence on links to the state, with the BJP being by far the largest beneficiary. According to The Economist, Indian billionaires derived nearly half (43%) of their wealth from such sectors in 2021, up from 29% in 2015. Crony capitalism is, after all, a corrupt form of capitalism.

Making matters worse, political donations might not always be entirely voluntary, as they sometimes follow raids or charges by investigative agencies. In any case, it is clear that electoral bonds were only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to political dark money in India.

The second BJP narrative that resonates most with voters can be summed up as MIGA (“Make India Great Again”). With the BJP in charge, the propaganda proclaims, India will soon be a global superpower, with all the influence, advantages, and prosperity this implies.

This narrative – which the West, seeking an alternative market and geopolitical counterweight to China, has often echoed and reinforced – has captured the imagination of India’s huge number of young people, even those who are unemployed and underemployed. But it is unlikely to become a reality any time soon: despite some achievements in digital and other infrastructure, and plenty of wealth accumulation by the richest decile of the population, India’s economic performance has been middling, at best, over the last decade. By lending credence to BJP hype, Western business leaders, politicians, and media have become complicit in the hollowing out of India’s democracy.

HONG KONG – A couple of months before India’s general election began on April 19 (voting will continue until June 1), the opposition Indian National Congress made a stunning disclosure at a press conference in New Delhi. Apparently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government had frozen some of the party’s main bank accounts and slapped it with an outsize bill for a minor tax-filing lapse five years earlier, leaving it with no money even to pay for electricity or salaries, let alone conduct an election campaign. The freeze was soon lifted, but the message was clear: this wasn’t going to be a regular election.

Though Congress had ruled India for most of the period since independence in 1947, Modi’s rise to national power in 2014 has left the party flailing. Congress officials decried the account freeze as a “deep assault on India’s democracy,” but this was merely the latest example in a longer-running saga. Modi’s government has spent a decade eroding civil liberties and minority rights, curtailing dissent, undermining democratic institutions, and building a cult of personality. While Western governments continue to pretend that India is the world’s largest democracy, the country is beginning to resemble a Central Asian dictatorship.

“One of the Worst”

Those monitoring the health of democracy around the world are unanimous in their bleak prognosis of India under Modi. Freedom House describes India as only “partly free,” and the V-Dem Institute in Sweden has, since 2018, categorized it as an “electoral autocracy.” In its 2024 Democracy Report, V-Dem singles India out as “one of the worst autocratizers lately.”

From Russia and Hungary to Turkey and (until recently) Poland, a common pattern of the twenty-first-century autocratizers is that, unlike textbook authoritarians, the new despots cunningly stop short of destroying or fully dismantling democracy. Recognizing the legitimizing power of democracy, they use its processes to rise to power, often through polarizing identity politics. Once in office, they then move to capture or hollow out democratic institutions – including the judiciary and independent media – that otherwise might serve as a check on their majoritarianism. Modi’s decade in power has offered a masterclass in this process.

It is often said that democracy’s greatest advantage over other forms of government is its built-in capacity to self-correct. In theory, regularly scheduled elections ensure accountability for incompetence, corruption, and misrule; and in the meantime, the force of public opinion restrains the arbitrary exercise of power. But in the real world, the vulnerability of democratic institutions means that elections can be reduced to raucous rituals that merely reaffirm the power of the incumbent ruler. Voting choices can be manipulated through the force of money. Opposition candidates can be subdued through state organs (like tax-enforcement authorities). And citizens can be deprived of the independent, objective information that they need to evaluate the government to decide whom to vote for. When this happens, elections no longer serve as a check on creeping despotism; they enable it.

Indians tend to fetishize elections, which now wholly define their self-imagination as a democratic society, obscuring other institutional necessities. The carnivalesque quality of the world’s biggest electoral process hides a bitter truth: this year’s elaborate exercise in offering the franchise to 970 million people has all the hallmarks of a despotic election. The voting is not overtly rigged (as in Russia’s farcical polls), but the playing field is tilted decisively in favor of the ruling party. The chances of an electoral upset have not been eliminated, just sharply minimized.

Cash Is King

The Modi government’s targeting of opposition bank accounts and funding is an efficient way of doing just that. Indian electoral outcomes have become almost entirely a function of money. The last parliamentary election, in 2019, was estimated to have been the most expensive ever held anywhere. Total spending exceeded $7 billion, which was more than the $6.5 billion spent in the 2016 US presidential and congressional elections (even though America’s per capita GDP is 32 times greater).

India’s campaign finance system has always lacked transparency and accountability, but it has grown even more opaque under Modi. In 2017, the government opened the floodgates for dark money by introducing electoral bonds that allowed for unlimited, undisclosed campaign donations to parties. Dark money distorts democracy by making it easier to hijack elections, and by privileging secretive special-interest groups over voters in policymaking. After years of civil-society groups challenging the legality of electoral bonds, India’s Supreme Court finally ruled against this financing instrument in February.

Since then, court-ordered disclosures of previously private donations have revealed just how closely corporate capital has become intertwined with politics. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – which reportedly spent around $3 billion in the 2019 campaign – had cornered 84% of all electoral-bond funding. Policies have been regularly made and unmade on the basis of donations. In a blatant conflict of interest, the BJP has accepted millions of rupees from government contractors that depend on public procurement (such as tenders to build tunnels and rail lines). Companies facing regulatory scrutiny from government agencies have magically found relief after buying BJP bonds. Modi clearly has had no qualms about using the state’s power to bend big business to his will, and to press firms into underwriting despotism.

The money trails also confirm that India’s historically apolitical bureaucracy now unabashedly works for the ruling party, having abandoned any pretense of neutrality. Neither does the party feel compelled to hide its strong arm. This became abundantly clear just before the election, when Modi handpicked two commissioners to stack the three-member Election Commission in his favor. That move followed from a new law, enacted last year, that changed the process by which commission members are appointed (a seat previously reserved for the neutral chief justice now goes to a government minister).

Unchecked Imbalances

Predictably, the Election Commission has since turned a blind eye to even the most obvious violations by the BJP, which is openly deploying vile, “othering” tropes against Muslims to mobilize Hindu votes. One of its promotional videos was so replete with hate speech that Instagram removed it. And Modi himself is giving speeches calling Muslims “infiltrators” who produce more children than Hindus, and claiming that if Congress comes to power, it will seize Hindus’ wealth and distribute it to Muslims.

Even though these statements violate election rules that clearly prohibit using religion in electoral campaigns, the commission is simply ignoring them along with hate-speech complaints that have been lodged against the prime minister. At the same time, a submissive judiciary says there is nothing that can be done about it.

The Election Commission has also ignored repeated complaints by opposition parties and civil-society groups about the reliability of electronic voting machines and the absence of a matching paper trail to cross-check votes. Precisely because they are not considered fully secure, no other major democracy relies solely on electronic voting.

As the seven-phase election proceeds, the commission’s actions have continued to raise questions. The BJP has already won two seats without a vote, because the opposition candidates left the race. One simply dropped out, and while it is widely assumed that pressure had been brought to bear, the commission has made no inquiry into the matter. There are also widespread reports of Muslim voters being removed from electoral rolls, as happened in the 2019 elections. And adding to the fears of vote rigging, the commission has been inexplicably slow in releasing voter turnout data; and even when it does issue figures, they are incomplete and suspiciously incongruous.

An election watchdog manifestly beholden to the incumbent government raises serious questions about the validity of the process, especially when seen in conjunction with the flagrant use of other governing institutions to fortify executive power. Federal agencies have been routinely harassing opposition figures with raids, detentions, and interrogations until they fall into line, leaving opposition parties splintered and their leaders silenced or forced to switch allegiances. Two opposition chief ministers have even been thrown in jail over unproven charges, making elections in these two states not too different from the sham elections seen in countries like Bangladesh.

In a functioning democracy, the media would have shone a spotlight on such grievous violations of democratic governance. But the media is among the institutions that Modi has tamed the most. Once a riotous lot that aimed to outdo one another in exposing government failures, much of the mainstream media – especially national-level news channels – now compete for the government’s affections.

Known collectively as the godi (“lapdog”) media, these outlets have ceased to be a watchdog, and instead dutifully churn out pro-government messages. The smallest of Modi’s events are broadcast live, while the biggest opposition rallies sometimes receive no coverage at all. Mainstream outlets also enthusiastically spread hate against Modi’s chosen enemies – Muslims, the opposition, and liberals. They mock opposition figures, heap praise on Modi’s every act and utterance, and cheer whenever non-violent dissenters are thrown in jail.

As in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, this comprehensive transformation of India’s media landscape has been achieved partly by having cronies and sympathetic tycoons buy up the big publishers, whose newsrooms are duly purged. The government also uses its status as a major source of advertising revenues and business favors to keep media companies in line. Indeed, some of the biggest buyers of electoral bonds were media companies with other business interests.

Bombarded by the media’s pro-Modi spin, and high on public incitement against minorities, a sizeable share of India’s electorate has come to see Modi as a national savior. Modi’s control over this base of voters is as complete as his grip on big business and democratic institutions.

With many of the institutional checks and balances that one associates with democracy fundamentally weakened, India has become what Thomas Jefferson would call an “elective despotism.” Power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the (technically) elected political executive. While some of India’s democratic shortcomings predate Modi’s rule, they have worsened significantly under the BJP. For example, there is effectively no internal democracy within the political parties, because anti-defection laws allow parties to exercise absolute control over legislators. As a result, a ruling party with enough seats – like the BJP – can ram any law through parliament without debate or deliberation, making the legislature redundant. Last December, BJP-nominated House speakers suspended 141 opposition lawmakers from both chambers of Parliament and then legislated unopposed for the remainder of the session.

While oversight institutions – such as the higher-level bureaucracy and investigative and regulatory agencies – never had very much autonomy, they no longer even pretend to respect democratic norms and conventions. A regime bent on transforming the very nature of the Indian state has no time for gentlemen’s agreements. Even the relatively independent judiciary has been forced to take the path of least resistance.

The concentration of political power under the BJP coincides with a concentration of economic power, with each feeding off the other. The market share of the five biggest conglomerates has doubled since the 1990s, while the share of the next five big business groups has halved. Like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the Indian market is evolving into an oligopoly as Modi’s government showers favors on select firms.

India is no longer the model free-market democracy that Westerners spent years imagining, encouraging, and touting. Both its markets and its politics are becoming less free – and ever more entwined. This election is yet another manifestation of this drift. Free and fair elections are the most basic criterion of democracy. Modi’s India falls far short of meeting it.