What are the larger implications of Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest for India’s democracy? And why has India’s ruling regime embarked on such an extreme move?
Two things are politically noteworthy about Kejriwal’s incarceration. First, Kejriwal is not the only elected chief minister to be imprisoned. Hemant Soren, Jharkhand’s chief minister, was also recently jailed. The more important point is that other than Congress, Kejriwal leads the only Opposition party which rules in more than one state.
The AAP has won subnational elections in Delhi twice and has won power in Punjab. It has also developed a noticeable presence in Gujarat, which is the original home base of the BJP regime. Secondly, Kejriwal’s prosecution unambiguously follows a standard recent script. This newspaper has reported several times, including recently, that Opposition politicians have been targeted in over 90 per cent of the corruption-related prosecutions. Indeed, the weaponisation of corruption-probing agencies becomes even clearer when we note that corruption charges are normally relegated against those politicians who leave the Opposition and join the ruling party.
For several years, the leading democracy rating institutions of the world have been downgrading India’s democracy. But India was not the only country that was identified as going through what has come to be called “democratic backsliding”. This is important for it contradicts the notion that the rating agencies were anti-India, which was one of the arguments BJP supporters often made. Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Erdogan’s Turkey and even Donald Trump’s America were classified as democratic backsliders.
By and large, two questions have marked the international assessment of a country’s democratic performance. Is the country in question an electoral democracy? Is it also a liberal democracy? The concept of electoral democracy is episodic, covering only the elections. In comparison, the idea of liberal democracy covers not only what happens during elections, but also the conduct of a polity in the four or five years falling between two elections. If the electoral side of democracy asks whether elections are free and fair, the concept of liberal democracy adds some continuous features. Are citizens free to speak, or are they afraid to express themselves?
Is civil society, the non-governmental sphere of a polity, which includes associations and on some accounts the press as well, free or chained? Is there freedom of religious practice? Are minority rights protected? The last is important for majorities can protect their interests with the numerical power of vote in a one-person-one-vote system, but minorities won’t have the numbers to protect themselves without constitutional safeguards and their faithful implementation.
Using these theoretical foundations, democracy rating agencies in the last few years have been calling India a mere electoral democracy, with its liberalism seriously in decline. There have been various ways of putting it. Some say India has become a “flawed democracy”, others that while political freedoms exist, civil liberties have been seriously eroded. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute of Sweden, whose annual reports on democracy are very widely read, has gone the farthest. Since 2020, it has been claiming that India has become an “electoral autocracy”, meaning elections have become a sham.
Thus far, I have critiqued the V-Dem characterisation. My own argument has been that India’s electoral vibrancy remains, making it an electoral democracy, but its liberal features have declined to such an extent that it is no longer a liberal democracy. One important, though not the only, reason for making the electoral democracy claim was that nearly half of the states have been ruled by non-BJP parties over the last decade. The new developments in India’s polity, including the arrest of Kejriwal, now seriously challenge the future validity of the electoral democracy claim.
The reasons for why this is so come from the well-established and widely accepted claims of democratic theory. As seminally developed by the late Robert Dahl, electoral democracy consists of two dimensions: Contestation and participation. The former covers how freely and fairly the rulers can be contested in elections, and the latter looks at how many people can participate in voting.
India’s problem is not with participation. Both in 2014 and 2019, the turnout exceeded 65 per cent. Comparatively speaking, such numbers signal vigorous electoral participation. In some states, the turnout has been even higher.
It is on contestation that the fault lines are now clearly visible and deepening. Initially, Delhi’s axe fell on non-governmental organisations, universities, intellectuals, artists, news channels, films — all of which reduced the liberal democracy score for India. The climate of fear is now extending to electoral democracy itself. Imprisoning Opposition leaders and freezing the bank accounts of the biggest Opposition party that got roughly 20 per cent of the overall vote in the last two national elections are tactics aimed at crippling the major Opposition forces. As a result, contestation of the rulers, an essential principle of electoral democracy, can become critically less free and less fair. It is also likely to be riddled with fear, for no one can predict who will be targeted next for imprisonment. Unless some constitutionally independent agencies step in to arrest the rot, India threatens to become a democracy by fear.
Why is India’s ruling regime following this path? Only hypotheses can be presented. If India’s rulers wish to bring in a polity infused with Hindu nationalist principles, which the current Constitution does not allow, laws will have to passed, some with two-thirds parliamentary majority. That requires a minimum of 364 seats in the Lok Sabha. The much announced projection of the BJP winning 370 seats is consistent with this numerical logic. The rulers perhaps don’t wish to leave intact any possibility of not reaching that target. That Shakespearean phrase — “making assurance doubly safe” — propels them towards a strategy of maiming the Opposition and reducing election uncertainties to a minimum.
The rulers also believe that the electorate will not care for such strategies. That may well turn out to be right. Comparative evidence tells us that even democratic polities go through ups and downs in their support for authoritarianism. There are moments when public opinion can be created to buttress brutal curtailments of freedom and radical political alterations.
It used to be asked how long can a liberal democracy be throttled before electoral democracy itself comes into serious question. Short of some major surprises, which can’t be wholly ruled out, India may well be heading in that direction.
The writer is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University, where he also directs the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at the Watson Institute
