Indian democracy is dying Accusations of vote theft are being ignored

India’s 255,000 panchayats, or village councils, are the plankton of the country’s democracy. Elected every five years, they allocate government money for roads, toilets and primary schools while also having limited tax-raising powers. Last month, hoping for a glimpse of democracy in action, I attended a women’s self-help meeting in a panchayat hall in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. Members of the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes — the full taxonomy of Indian affirmative action — were present. We sat cross-legged: the widows in their weeds, the married matrons with their silver toe-rings, a woman whose loose dupatta, or headscarf, pale skin and absence of a vermillion tilak between her brows proclaimed her to be a Muslim with heritage far to the north — and me, the umbrella-limbed visitor, virtually delirious from discomfort.

The head of the self-help group, a quietly authoritative woman called Manasa, explained that the village gives out interest-free loans with the aim of breaking the stranglehold of the money-lenders. One woman had borrowed 15,000 rupees — around £130 — to open a canteen that caters to pilgrims visiting the local temple; all that circumambulation is hungry work. I asked the woman with the headscarf how many Muslims live in the village. “Eighteen,” she replied, before assuring me that the Shia mourning month of Muharram is observed here with the same punctiliousness as the Hindu festivals of Diwali and Dussehra.

When I asked the women to rate the local government, all eyes turned to the sarpanch, or council president, a handsome, well-groomed man. It turned out that the panchayat scored well for improving the water supply — a rare feat in this increasingly arid part of the country — and for the village primary school, which offers a good education in Telugu and English. But the roads! “There aren’t any,” sighed one woman, by which she meant that the narrow tracks which wind between the houses get washed away by the monsoon. With a flourish, the sarpanch announced that the village would have a new road “within three months”. On this happy note, the meeting broke up and we adjourned for selfies.

As a student of Hindi in the Nineties and then as a reporter at India Today, the country’s biggest news magazine, I was in awe of India’s federal constitution and its ability to keep the country whole despite the proliferation of ethnic groups, religions and languages. The states were organised along linguistic lines; over the course of the second half of the 20th century, through the addition of new states, autonomous councils in tribal areas, and the panchayats themselves, democracy set down roots so strong that no Hindu-Muslim riot or separatist movement seemed capable of tearing them up. For all the prevalence of poverty and injustice, the crust of corruption and nepotism that grew around the “natural” party of government, the Congress, and a tradition of political assassinations that took the lives of the country’s founding father, Mahatma Gandhi, and two Congress prime ministers, Indira Gandhi (no relation) and her son Rajiv, surely Bill Clinton was justified in 1994 in describing India as “one of the world’s greatest experiments in multi-cultural democracy”.

The face of this democracy belonged to T.N. Seshan. A gloomy south Indian with a taste for Hindu philosophy, Seshan was appointed chief election commissioner in 1990, a time of spiralling “booth-capturing” — the practice by armed groups of seizing polling booths in order to stuff ballot boxes — and intimidation of lower castes to stop them exercising their franchise. On Seshan’s watch, booth-capturing plummeted, while in the run-up to the 1996 general election, he had some 300,000 known villains preventively detained. Seshan’s probity made him as famous as the national cricket captain, Mohammad Azharuddin, and the Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, both Muslims, of course — along with the chief justice, Aziz Mushabber Ahmadi, and the future president, Abdul Kalam. Here, it was argued, was the advantage that secular India enjoyed over its estranged sibling, sectarian Pakistan, where elections, as Seshan liked to say, lacked integrity.

And yet, even in its golden age, as Prem Shankar Jha, a former prime ministerial adviser, reminded me when I visited him recently in Delhi, democracy was failing to give its citizens “economic security, the rule of law, and speedy, affordable justice”. These failings prompted the emergence of “an alternative model of nationhood that despised… religious pluralism”, advocating instead “a hard Hindu nation-state”.

Advance warning came on 6 December 1992, when a mob of Hindu zealots tore down a mosque that had been built on the site — according to Hindu tradition — of the birthplace of the god Ram in the city of Ayodhya. As the lodger of a Brahmin numismatician and her daughter 140 miles away in Varanasi, I was kept indoors by my nervous hosts who taught me how to make chappatis while gangs roamed the city looking for people to lynch. Further south, Bombay, India’s most diverse and cosmopolitan city, descended into religious bloodletting that claimed the lives of 1,200 people, most of them Muslim.

Ayodhya brought violent Hindu chauvinism into the mainstream. It gave an emerging nationalist politician called Narendra Modi, who in 2002 became chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, licence to sit on his hands while more than 1,000 Gujaratis — two thirds of them Muslim — were killed in a communal firestorm in the same year.

In 2014, Modi became prime minister. Since then, he has striven to turn secular, multi-lingual India into a Hindu supremacist state whose lingua franca is no longer English, but Hindi — a north Indian tongue rejected by many in the south — and defined by its enmity for Pakistan, against which it fought a short, inconclusive war this spring. In 2019, Modi fulfilled a long-cherished nationalist dream by ending the autonomy that Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, had enjoyed since independence. And last year, he inaugurated a huge temple complex on the site of the demolished mosque at Ayodhya before a crowd of billionaires, cricketers, politicians and actors. Shah Rukh Khan was nowhere to be seen.

My research in India this autumn took me to Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Mumbai (as Bombay was renamed in 1995), Madhya Pradesh and the southern city of Chennai. During the Diwali holidays I was in Orchha, a once-sleepy town in Madhya Pradesh that has over the past decade or so become a popular destination for visitors to the town’s Ram temple; on the day I was there, the streets were full of double-decker buses debouching jovial pilgrims and stalls selling temple oil and marigold garlands. According to KPMG India, religious tourism accounts for more than 60% of travel in the country and by 2028 will be worth $59 billion. At Khajuraho, also in Madhya Pradesh, I visited 10th-century Hindu temples famed for their carved depictions of lovemaking inaccessible to the umbrella-legged. That India’s medieval Muslim invaders included spirited iconoclasts was evidenced by the fact that perhaps a fifth of the temples’ sandstone figures had been beheaded.

All the while, as my Hindi came back, chatting to people in fields, markets, temples, trains and rickshaws, I was reminded insistently of two things. The first is that the failure of the old India to provide “economic security, the rule of law and speedy, affordable justice” is being perpetuated by the new India under Modi. The second is that, while their efforts may have yet to bear fruit in the panchayats of Andhra Pradesh, Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are diligently undermining democracy while turning the country’s 200 million Muslims from partners in a collective endeavour to a polluting enemy within.

For all Modi’s claims to be moving swiftly towards a “Developed India”, and the high-profile investments that have been made by tech firms such as Foxconn, the world’s biggest iPhone producer, the average growth rate in recent years of less than 6% is far short of the 10% that China achieved when its economy took flight between 1980 and 2015. So precarious is life for urban labourers, and so filthy the air they breathe — eight of the world’s 10 most polluted cities are in India — that many of the farm workers I met in Madhya Pradesh had returned to their villages after abortive moves to the city. Rather than take the government’s claims to have all but eradicated poverty at face value, Subhash Chandra Garg, the former top official at the finance ministry, presented me with a comparison of average per capita incomes. “In 2024, it was $13,660 in China and $83,660 in the US. In India it was $2,650.” He winced. “We’re 140th in the world.”

In the old days of socialist central planning, government statistics could be trusted. No longer. According to Reuters, 37 out of 50 independent economists disbelieve the official unemployment rate of 5.6%; alternative estimates range as high as 35%. More than half the population — which currently stands at 1.47 billion and is expected to peak at 1.7 billion in the early 2060s — is under 25, and each year between seven and eight million people enter a jobs market that cannot accommodate them. Stagnant wages and private sector lay-offs only heighten the allure of a job for life in public service — no matter how lowly the role. In 2024, 46,000 graduates and postgraduates applied for jobs as road sweepers and rubbish collectors in the state of Haryana. In the same year, Indian Railways received 19 million applications for 64,000 vacancies. As Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, the IT minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, told me, “the demographic situation is beginning to swamp us”.

Economic worries need a scapegoat. Addressing a large rally before this month’s assembly elections in the poor, populous state of Bihar, Modi inveighed against Muslim “infiltrators” from Bangladesh. The previous month, Medha Kulkarni, a senior BJP politician in the state of Maharashtra, led a delegation to sprinkle cow urine on a patch of ground where Muslim women had been spotted praying, thereby purifying it. Also in October, Pragya Thakur, a former BJP member of parliament, who was once arrested on suspicion of involvement in a wave of bombings against Muslims — she was freed for lack of evidence — proffered stern advice to any Hindu whose daughter has the temerity to fall in love with a Muslim. “If our daughter does not obey us,” she said, “if she goes to the house of a non-believer, spare no effort in breaking her legs.”

Long gone is the ecumenical India of the late president Abdul Kalam, whose father made a living by ferrying Hindu pilgrims to a popular shrine on his boat. As is the Bombay of the late musician Zakir Hussain, whose morning routine as a child in that once-tolerant city consisted of Muslim ghazals at home followed by ragas at a Hindu temple and mass at his Catholic school. It is hard to imagine another Muslim president, chief justice or national cricket captain in the world’s third-biggest Muslim country. When India’s Muslims are not being abominated, hectored or lynched, it is as if they do not exist at all: not in the speeches of Modi and his ministers, nor in the 12,000 schools catering to 32 million children that are administered by the BJP’s militant feeder organisation, the RSS, nor in the numerous Hindu holidays whose observance, once a matter of personal preference, have been inked into the fabric of the state.

Most ominous of all, the Election Commission, citadel of T.N. Seshan, may have been captured by the government. In August Rahul Gandhi, the Congress’s most prominent leader, gave a detailed press conference in which he substantiated longstanding suspicions that the BJP’s narrow victory in the 2024 general election was achieved fraudulently and in collusion with the commission. In the southern electoral ward of Mahadevapura, he said, some 40 party workers had spent six months sorting through mountains of voting records and turned up more than 100,000 “fake” votes that were cast by means of invalid addresses, invalid photos, bulk voters at one location, voters who had cast ballots at several different booths, and “first-time” voters in their sixties and seventies. “This is happening across the country,” Gandhi said. “There is a huge criminal fraud being perpetrated.”

On 5 November, the day before the Bihar polls opened, he presented evidence for an even bigger “vote theft” in state elections held in Haryana last year, claiming that no fewer than 2.5 million votes — one in eight — were cast there illegally. Gandhi showed a photo of a hairdresser from Brazil that had been downloaded from the internet and appeared 22 times on the Haryana electoral rolls.

The Election Commission rejects Gandhi’s allegations, and has refused to hand over the electronic voting records that would enable the Congress — or anyone else — to conduct a nationwide audit of past elections. The Supreme Court has rejected petitions that it launch an investigation of its own. And in Bihar, the decisive defeat in November’s state assembly elections that Congress and its allies suffered at the hands of the ruling coalition, of which the BJP is a part, suggested that for voters the issue of vote theft isn’t as important as the state government’s promise to create 10 million jobs.

This is how democracies die. And while Modi’s contribution has of course been outstanding, Gandhi’s must also be acknowledged. The leader of the opposition is the son of Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of Indira Gandhi, great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and the great-great grandson of Motilal Nehru, a Congress president before independence. Far from nobly shouldering an inherited responsibility to save Indian democracy, the princeling is part of the problem. And yet neither he nor other members of the Gandhi clan will step away from the family firm, while no other party exists that can challenge the BJP nationally.

India’s last big spasm of communal violence came in the winter of 2019-2020 when Muslims in Delhi who were protesting against a discriminatory asylum law and measures to weed out “infiltrators” were attacked by Hindu zealots abetted by the police, leaving at least 54 dead. India has known periods of bigotry before, as the decapitated carvings at Khajuraho demonstrate, and recovered. For the moment, however, for India’s Muslims, it’s a question of keeping one’s head down and one’s sangfroid intact. Lunching at Bagdadi, a legendary Muslim-owned canteen in Mumbai, my eye was caught by the item “Beef Fry” on the antique menu board. When I remarked to the owner that eating beef is enough to get you killed in today’s India, he replied with a smile, “we keep the original menu board because our customers like it. But we haven’t served beef in years. It’s buffalo meat and we have the laboratory analysis to prove it.”

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