Yamini Aiyar1
This article draws on evidence gathered from the India Election Survey 2024, a nationally representative post-poll survey of voter perceptions, to deepen understandings of democratic resilience in contexts of democratic erosion. Drawing on survey findings, it advances the argument that India’s political culture is characterised by the prevalence of an entrenched ‘democratic sentiment’ that makes itself visible in moments of blatant democratic subversion. This ‘sentiment’ played a role in shaping the contours of the 2024 general elections in India. However, the survey also exposed several contradictory impulses in expressions of this sentiment. I theorise this as ‘limited liberalism’. Through this article, I seek to make the case for scholarship on democratic backsliding to pay greater attention to the complex and contradictory liberal impulses in mass politics. This is crucial in order to develop a more nuanced perspective on the challenges to democracy and opportunities for democratic resilience in the contemporary moment.
Liberal democracy, democratic resilience, Hindutva, unemployment, caste, federalism, techno-patrimonialism, citizenship, limited liberalism.
On 4 June 2024, voters in India took India’s politicians, including the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his party, the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP), and indeed much of India’s commentariat and pollsters by surprise. In the run-up to the election, the BJP had done everything it could to project total hegemonic control over India: centralising political power, stifling dissent, jailing opposition politicians, and silencing civil society. Its control over money and media meant that voters were flooded with only one image – that of the prime minister and his personal ‘guarantees’ to citizens.
In January 2024, the BJP hastened to fulfil its primary ideological promise: the construction of a temple at the historically disputed site in Ayodhya, Pradesh (UP), that had been at the heart of the Hindu nationalist movement. A semi-official consecration ceremony, with the prime minister officiating, was used to mobilise millions of citizens across the country in celebration of reaching the summit of Hindu nationalism. The political opposition had cobbled together a rickety coalition, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), weighed down by internal contradictions. In April 2024, as a long seven-week campaign took off, it seemed that this was going to be a one-party campaign and a one-party victory. Most polls agreed.
As the campaign unfolded, the voices of the people began to get louder. Discontentment and disenchantment on the ground became visible, and concerns over India’s democratic erosion alongside frustrations wrought by persistent unemployment, price rises, and rising inequality found their way into electoral chatter deep in the hinterlands. It became increasingly clear that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the sole campaigner of the BJP, who had mesmerised the Indian voter for nearly a decade, had lost his sheen. His charm was no longer enough for voters. Their lived realities had broken the spell.
The BJP won the election and Modi went on to create history, becoming the second Indian prime minister, after Jawaharlal Nehru, to hold the office for three consecutive terms. However, his electoral performance was underwhelming. The BJP fell short of a majority, winning 240 seats. This was a sharp decline from the 303 that it had secured in 2019. As is routine in national politics in India, the BJP had entered the election in alliance with a few regional parties across the country, called the National Development Alliance (NDA). The alliance partners, Telugu Desam Party (TDP), Andhra Pradesh and the Janata Dal (United), Bihar, added an additional 53 seats, allowing the BJP to form the government and Modi to begin his third term as prime minister.
The INDIA alliance, primarily the Indian National Congress (INC, popularly known as the Congress Party) and the Samajwadi Party (SP), pulled off a surprise performance. The Congress Party, which contested the election with 93 fewer seats compared with 2019, secured 99 seats, and improved its vote share by 9.8 per cent compared with 2019. In the crucial Hindi heartland, seats in Haryana and Bihar went up from a meagre five to 23, and its strike rate in direct contests against the BJP improved from 8.3 per cent in 2019 to 29 per cent in 2024. The SP improved its tally from 5 in 2019 to 37 in the critical North Indian bastion of the BJP, UP state.2
Since the elections, for scholars and pundits alike, the focus has been on interpreting the surprise mandate and identifying explanations for the verdict. This article attempts to go beyond explanations of the verdict to a broader examination of what can be learnt from India’s experience about democracy, its sources of fragility, and its sites of resilience. It does so in the hope of contributing to the growing body of global literature that seeks to better understand democratic erosion in the contemporary moment while simultaneously identifying sites of resilience.
Through evidence gathered from the India Election Survey, a nationally representative post-poll survey of voter perceptions,3 this article advances the argument that the source of democratic resilience in India lies in the prevalence of a ‘democratic sentiment’ in the domain of mass politics in India. This sentiment found expression in voters responding with some scepticism to the blatant subversion of democratic norms and procedures by the BJP. While this was not the only issue on which voters ultimately made their choice, nor did voters deliver a decisive mandate against democratic erosion, concerns about democratic erosion intersected with other forms of disenchantment, particularly around the economy, and played a role in shaping voter choices.
These concerns slowed down but have not eliminated India’s authoritarian slide. As Yadav, Sardesai and Shastri (2024) noted, voters withheld iqbal, a sense of moral authority or legitimacy, from the Modi government. However, the survey also exposed several contradictory impulses in expressions of liberal democratic sentiment. I theorise this as ‘limited liberalism’ and argue that, limits notwithstanding, it offers hope in this moment of democratic erosion. The challenge lies in nurturing this sentiment. Through this article, I seek to make the case for scholarship on democratic backsliding, to understand and engage with these complex and contradictory impulses in mass politics. I argue that this is critical in order to develop a more nuanced perspective on the challenges to democracy and opportunities of democratic resilience.
Section 2 of this article presents a descriptive account of India’s democratic backslide. Rather than a laundry list of evidence, already recorded in the scholarship, I take the argument forward by focusing on the technologies through which the authoritarian proclivities of BJP are changing India’s body politic. Next, in Section 3, I turn my gaze to voter perceptions and seek to better understand the complex dynamics of liberal democratic culture and how it unfolds in the arena of mass politics. In Section 4, I explore the concept of limited liberalism as a theoretical framework within which to locate the tensions and contradictions within the democratic culture that I identified in Section 3. Section 5 concludes.
India’s brush with democratic erosion is recorded in several globally recognised indices. In 2018, V-Dem downgraded India to the category ‘electoral autocracy’. In March 2024, it characterised India as one of the ‘worst autocratisers’ in the world (The Hindu 2024). Freedom House reclassified India as partly free, and the Economist Intelligence Unit moved India into the ‘flawed democracy’ category (Freedom House n.d.). These indicators have their limitations4 and have, unsurprisingly, been contested by the BJP. Regardless, they offer a useful measure of Indian democracy’s relative standing, both globally and against its own past performance.
Moving beyond indicators and their limits, Varshney (2022) makes an important distinction between electoral and liberal aspects of democracy. Electoral democracy refers specifically to competitive elections and the routine transfer of power. This is recognised as the minimal condition of democracy (Przeworski et al. 2000). Liberal democracy refers to a fuller more substantive democracy that puts constraints on governmental power between elections and nurtures democratic norms within a polity. Civic and political freedoms, protecting minority rights, and institutional checks and balances are the minimal criteria of what constitutes liberal democracy. Historically, Varshney (2022) notes, India’s performance has been considerably better in the realm of electoral rather than liberal democracy. This persists in the contemporary moment, with deficits in liberal democracy widening sharply. There is, however, one important caveat.
On the eve of the 2024 elections, electoral democracy looked fragile. Cases against opposition politicians had risen from 60 per cent (2004–14) to 95 per cent by 2022 (Tiwary 2022). These miraculously disappeared when politicians switched parties, causing an exodus of opposition leaders to the BJP – the BJP ‘washing machine’, the joke went.5 In late March, days before the official campaign, the principal opposition, the Congress Party, announced that several of its bank accounts had been frozen. A key opposition leader, Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), was jailed. Weeks before, the chief minister of Jharkhand was also jailed. During the campaign, the Election Commission, the independent arbiter of the election process in India, was repeatedly accused of bias towards the BJP and its candidates. Intriguingly, there were two recorded instances in two electoral constituencies (Surat, Gujarat; and Indore, Madhya Pradesh) where candidates from the political opposition withdrew their nominations and switched parties to the BJP.
That said, the final mandate was accepted by all political parties. Arguably, therefore, India’s elections are less competitive (in that conditions for free and fair political contestation are constrained); however, the election did lead to a reconfiguration of power and the ruling party did not challenge the results, despite losses suffered. Moreover, India has not witnessed forms of political violence that several other fragile democracies, including the United States, have confronted. In this sense, India continues to meet the minimalist conception of democracy.6
It is on liberal aspects of democracy where scholarly attention is focused. Evidence of India’s growing liberal deficits has been widely recorded (Khaitan 2019; Ganguly 2020; Tudor 2023; Vaishnav 2024; Varshney 2022). Rather than repeat facts well established in the scholarship, in this section, I offer a brief overview of the mechanisms through which the authoritarian project has seeped into everyday governance and administration. I make the case that India’s democratic backslide is not typical, and not merely achieved through the suspension of liberal norms; rather, this is being intertwined with a careful effort to engender a fundamental shift in statecraft.
Crony capitalism has long been a feature of India’s political economy. However, in the past decade, structures of cronyism have changed. In the post-1991 era, cronyism was decentralised. Liberalisation coincided with the rise of regional parties that began to play a role in national politics, ushering in an era of coalition politics. The presence of regional parties in national governments provided the impetus to small-time regional capitalists to expand their businesses at national scale, aided by regional parties (Damodaran 2020). Large-scale corruption coexisted with significant regional diversity amongst big capitalists in the first two decades after liberalisation.
Since 2014, this decentralised cronyism has been replaced by corporate consolidation and economic centralisation. In 2020, 65 per cent of all profits accrued to the top 20 firms, compared to a profit share of less than 50 per cent in 2011. Even this is concentrated in a few large corporates. According to the 2024 Forbes list7 of India’s ten richest people, the owners of India’s two largest conglomerates – Ambani and Adani8 – have a combined wealth of about US$200bn against a total combined wealth of India’s top ten richest of about US$406bn!
The national government’s ties to these two massive conglomerates have driven out most regional players, many of whom have gone bust, while the favoured have thrived, shoring up assets from these bankrupt businesses and the state. New capitalists have emerged primarily in the start-up, e-commerce, and fintech sectors. But in infrastructure, telecoms, and natural resources sectors, the favoured few dominate. From ports to airports, telecoms, coal and renewable energy, key sectors of the economy are now controlled by two or three conglomerates (Damodaran 2020).
As Sircar (2020) has argued, corporate consolidation and political centralisation are incentive compatible. Large firms with national demands prefer to negotiate with a strong national government rather than a fractured coalition. In turn, the desire for political centralisation creates incentives to restrict political favours to a small group of loyal corporate actors. This serves to centralise power by undermining regional capitalists and thus undercutting political funding to regional parties.
The BJP is India’s wealthiest political party. One illustration: in the 2024 general elections, the BJP spent roughly three times more than its closest rival at the national stage, the Congress Party (Nath 2025). The BJP’s unprecedented wealth has enabled it to regularly induce political horse-trading, thus capturing power even in states where it has lost elections by inducing defections. Crucially, it has used its enormous control over wealth to control the media and dominate the public sphere, enabling the creation of the personality cult of Prime Minister Modi. This in turn has shifted accountability dynamics, as we discuss next.
Federalism is inextricably intertwined with India’s democratic project. Federal principles have enabled India to hold together, creating a nation that has accommodated linguistic, regional, and ethnic assertions by offering varying degrees of autonomy within the nation-state framework. Stepan, Linz and Yadav (2011) conceptualise this as a ‘state-nation’ model of nation-building, in opposition to the European, homogenising nation-state model.
Hindu nationalism is impatient with the principle of federal accommodation. Pluralist expressions of identity are the antithesis of its monistic vision. On consolidating power at the centre, the BJP thus set about slowly dismantling India’s federal settlement. The most dramatic shift was the abrogation of Article 370,9 the constitutional provision that afforded greater autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir. Beyond the immediate context of Kashmir, the abrogation reopened settled compromises within the Indian constitution about the institutional mechanisms for credibly mediating India’s multiple ethnic and regional identities. In the years since, the BJP has been careful not to overtly upset the foundational basis of the ‘state-nation’ settlement – linguistic and ethnic identity – however, its ideological proclivities push it to occasionally flirt with ideas such as ‘one nation, one language’ (Hindi imposition), which have widened the trust deficit with regional parties, particularly in states such as Tamil Nadu where subnationalism is a strong form of political mobilisation.
Moreover, the process itself introduced insidious new tools of political centralisation. Typically, union governments have invoked emergency powers under Article 35610 to dismiss state governments and impose their mandate via the position of the governor (the constitutionally appointed representative of the union government at the state level).11 However, in the instance of Jammu and Kashmir, the union used Parliament to strip the state of its powers by downgrading it to the status of union territory. The constitutionality was upheld by the Supreme Court (whose capitulation has been widely documented in the literature on India’s democratic backsliding) in 2023. A similar strategy was deployed, this time overruling the Supreme Court, in the city-state of Delhi.
To legitimise centralisation, the BJP has propagated the view that federalism is an impediment to economic and administrative efficiency. To accelerate development, the argument goes, India must become ‘one nation’, governed by a ‘double engine’ (to borrow the BJP’s slogans); that is, BJP governments at the central and state levels (Aiyar and Tillin 2020). The consequences of this approach are visible both in the fiscal and administrative realms, and are reshaping everyday governance.
In the fiscal realm, the union has routinely sought to squeeze revenue out of states to fund its own expenditure. A specific tax provision – cess and surcharges – that is not shareable with state governments has been deployed to ring-fence finances and reduce the overall share of taxes devolved to states (ibid.). The Goods and Services Tax (GST), adopted in 2017, was widely recognised as a grand federal bargain where states willingly gave up fiscal autonomy for the GST. Squabbles have been witnessed between the centre and states over commitments such as the timely payment compensation that was baked into the GST compact (Drabu 2023).
Undergirding this is an administrative culture designed to further the personality cult of the prime minister. Normalisation of this culture has altered the administrative principle of dual accountability (to the centre and states) embedded in India’s federal bargain. In the guise of efficiency, the Government of India has taken an increased role in directly monitoring state cadres. Video conferences with district magistrates and meetings with chief secretaries to directly monitor central government schemes are routine today.
However, this bypasses the dual accountability structure that mandates involvement of the state executive, including elected representatives.12 Further, it entrenches a culture in which bureaucrats are expected to function as active political propagandists of the union government. The best illustration of how this works in practice was the issuance of government notifications in the run-up to the 2024 elections, designating select central government officers as rath prabharis (nodal officers) charged with publicising union government schemes (Aiyar 2023).
With Hindu nationalism in ascendency, the constitutional notion of equal citizenship has been challenged. ‘Othering’ the Muslim is at the heart of the Hindu nationalist project. Once in power, it deployed tools of the state, making it complicit in demonising Muslims, bulldozing their homes, and promoting anti-Muslim laws, while consciously infusing statecraft with a Hindu character exemplified in the prime minister’s presence at the temple consecration ceremony in Ayodhya in January 2024. The passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019 (BBC News 2024) marked the first formal, legal change to the constitutional ideal. The Act formally introduced religion as a marker of citizenship, fundamentally altering what it means to be Indian (Jayal 2013, 2019). While the consequences of Hindu nationalism and equal citizenship have been at the centre of the debate, another aspect of citizenship, socioeconomic rights, has also undergone significant shifts in the past decade. This trend has received limited scholarly attention.
One of the most widely publicised ‘governance’ achievements of the BJP era has been the scale-up of technology-enabled welfare delivery via direct benefit transfers (DBTs). Widely acclaimed for improving delivery, what is less understood is how significantly the DBT structure has altered the terms of the social contract and accountability structures at the grass roots. The appeal of technology lies in its capacity for disintermediation, removing the need to depend on state bureaucracy and local leaders for delivery. This has enabled a direct, emotive connection with recipients built around the cult of the party leader. Control over money and media has allowed for a unique form of political branding aligned to the party leader that accompanies delivery. Embedded in this is a subtle shift in the social contract. Rather than a moral obligation of the state to rights-bearing citizens, welfare in this framing is positioned as a ‘personal’ guarantee of the leader who remains the sole benefactor to the beneficiary or labharthi.
In a functioning democracy, citizens seek accountability and demand welfare services through local state actors, both politicians and bureaucrats. When welfare delivery is centralised in the persona of the party leader, not only does this fundamental accountability relationship break down, but it also legitimises the authority of the leader to centralise power within his/her persona and carry out all functions of the state in their name. Citizens are not active, rights-bearing, claim makers but passive recipients of government largesse. This is one of the most profound ways in which technologies of political centralisation have eroded fundamental democratic norms of accountability in contemporary India.
Stripping welfare delivery from rights has enabled the recasting of state–society relations via the construction of a new political category of citizen, the labharthi varg, the beneficiary class. The labharthi varg allows the BJP to transcend the traditional logic of political mobilisation – caste, class, religion – and to establish a grammar of political mobilisation via the beneficiary. This has been a critical mechanism through which the BJP has sought to paper over other identity claims, particularly caste, in its pursuit of a unitary Hindu identity. In a co-authored paper, Sircar and the author have characterised this form of welfarism as ‘techno-patrimonialism’ (Aiyar and Sircar 2024). It is a powerful tool in entrenching the project of political centralisation and Hindu majoritarianism.
Democratic erosion in India under the BJP follows the playbook deployed in many other contexts where democratic means – elections, the law – have been deployed to subvert democracy. The tools are familiar: packing and weaponising courts and other neutral agencies, buying off media and the private sector, and rewriting the rules to tilt the playing field against opponents (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). But as I describe here, the BJP has deployed this model to subvert democratic culture by altering the terms of citizen–state relations and democratic accountability through entrenched political centralisation. This formed the backdrop of the 2024 general elections. The democratic stakes were high. India’s democratic resilience was being put to the test.
The Constitution protects our fundamental rights. It ensures equality between castes and communities.
A young Other Backward Caste farmer, Mohanlalganj, UP
The media only speaks for one side (the BJP).
BJP supporter, Mohanlalganj, UP13
Early in the 2024 campaign, some BJP leaders made the claim that total electoral dominance would empower the BJP to change the constitution. In the UP state, which along with Hindutva was also home to the emergence of caste politics on the national stage in the 1990s, this casually presented possibility brought the authoritarian consequences of BJP dominance to the fore. Hindu nationalism has long had an uncomfortable relationship with caste politics, which it believes undermines the cause of Hindu unity.
For Dalit and Other Backward Caste (OBC) voters in UP, the possibility of constitutional change raised alarm bells. They interpreted the demand for constitutional change as the tool the BJP would deploy to strip them of constitutional protections, particularly related to affirmative action (or reservations). The INDIA alliance capitalised on this sentiment and made ‘saving the constitution’ central to its campaign. But it was voters who made the connection between rights, equality, and the constitutional promise of affirmative action. This intersected with concerns about democratic backsliding. Tanashahi (dictatorship), media control, and institutional manipulation, the features of BJP’s authoritarian rule previously described, found their way into the arena of mass politics.
These were not stray comments. The India Election Survey captured the widespread presence of a democratic commitment that recognised and questioned the BJP’s authoritarian overreach. When asked about democratic preferences – a democracy with a strong leader versus a democracy in which elected leaders take collective decisions – a significant 75 per cent of respondents expressed a preference for the latter. Voters also displayed an acute recognition of democratic backsliding, as described in Section 2. This is captured in Table 1. For the first two questions, respondents were asked whether they agreed according to a four-point Likert scale (strongly disagree, somewhat disagree, somewhat agree, strongly agree). The electoral voting machine (EVM) question was a simple yes/no/cannot say answer.
Table 1 Voter perceptions on democratic erosion
| Agree (%) | Strongly agree (%) | Disagree (%) | Strongly disagree (%) | Cannot say (%) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Media dominance of BJP | 41 | 16 | 18 | 5 | 19 |
| BJP will change constitution | 37 | 15 | 18 | 7 | 23 |
| Fairness of electoral voting machines | 62 | 22 | 16 |
Source: India Election Survey (Data Action Lab 2024).
Crucially, the survey highlights an acute awareness of rights. When asked if citizens have a right to demand welfare services from government, 88.4 per cent agreed. When asked why they think the constitution matters, 73 per cent said that it matters because it protects fundamental rights. Moreover, there was broad alignment with constitutional values. A total of 79.5 per cent affirmed that India is a secular country, where all citizens are equal regardless of religion. Fifty-six per cent believed that it is the government’s responsibility to protect minorities and a further 18 per cent strongly agreed.
Citizens also believe in the importance of dissent and contestation. Since 2019, citizen dissent has been mobilising in India through large-scale protests against two key government policies: the Citizenship Amendment Act and the farm laws (IDR 2020) (designed to de-regulate agriculture markets). A set of survey questions, sought to probe citizen perceptions about these protests with a specific focus on farmer protests. Seventy-two per cent of respondents said they had heard of the farmers protests, of which an overwhelming 86 per cent said they supported them.
These findings align closely with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) Lokniti Post-Poll Survey.14 Seventy-seven per cent of respondents upheld the idea that citizens have the right to oppose decisions taken by the leader, and 68 per cent responded in favour of institutional checks and balances. Taken together, this data points conclusively to the prevalence of a robust, liberal, democratic culture and commitment to democratic procedures amongst Indian voters.
The extent to which it influences voter choices is a complex question to answer. Voting is an outcome of an interplay of factors – interests, beliefs, gender, identity, and economic realities. However, we do find evidence that concerns about democratic backsliding intersected with a broad dissatisfaction with the economy and influenced voting behaviour.
Eighty-five per cent of all respondents agreed that inequality had increased in India. When asked what the biggest failure of the BJP government was, as many as 60 per cent of voters cited increased unemployment. Thirty-four per cent of the sample stated that Modi was not a good leader for India. Of these, 24 per cent cited the inability to provide economic growth and jobs in India, and a significant 34 per cent cited anxieties around mistreating Muslims. In both instances, vote choice was overwhelmingly for the opposition (94 per cent). Interestingly, the caste breakdown skews towards a higher number of general caste and OBC (41 per cent) relative to Dalit and Scheduled Tribe respondents, who cited mistreating Muslims as a reason for considering Modi not to be a good leader for India.
The caste dynamic shifts in a different direction on a critical question related to electoral processes. Eighty per cent of respondents who believed the EVM process was unfair voted for non-BJP parties. Perceptions vary by caste. Of those who believed the EVM process is unfair, there was a five percentage point difference between Dalit (25 per cent) and a 3 per cent difference between OBC (23 per cent) and general caste (20 per cent) respondents. Similarly, the BJP vote share drops to 32 per cent amongst respondents who agree that the media is dominated by Modi, compared with 54 per cent amongst those who disagree with this statement. There is no significant caste variation in this data.
As this data highlights, perceptions of democratic backsliding correlate with reduced support for the BJP. We take this as further evidence of a ‘democratic sentiment’ in the arena of mass politics. We also find some evidence of this sentiment intersecting with broad-based pessimism about the state of the economy and possibilities of addressing critical issues such as jobs. Caste-based disaggregation of perceptions on the fairness of EVMs best illustrates this phenomenon.
Moss, Fung and Westad (2024) describe democratic sentiment or democratic culture as intangible and difficult to measure, but it is an essential feature of what enables democracies to endure, despite moments of erosion. It is, they argue, visible in a deep cultural commitment to democracy, including electoral participation; respect for civic institutions, laws, processes, and norms; expressions of faith in democracy and democratic process; willingness to compromise; respect for minority rights; honouring of fair electoral outcomes; and peaceful transitions of power.
Scholarship on democratic backsliding in the twenty-first century has grappled with the question of the roots of democratic breakdown. Broadly, scholars accord, with differing priority, a critical role to the democratic commitment of political elites, while others argue that political leaders will adhere to democratic norms only if these pervade through the citizenry. The arc of India’s democratic history offers a useful contribution to this literature. Varshney (2022) argues persuasively that India’s democratic foundations entrenched their roots entirely due to a deep commitment amongst India’s political elite to democratic values in the nation’s founding moment. These values formed the bedrock of India’s democracy, which persisted despite the breakdown during the emergency. In the contemporary moment, however, the political value system has shifted. Hindu nationalism prioritises Hindu supremacy over freedoms enshrined in the constitution. And it is this change in elite values, Varshney argues, which explains India’s democratic decline in the present moment.
However, what this argument does not engage with is the presence of democratic sentiment within the arena of mass politics, which the data from the survey highlights. At India’s founding moment, B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian constitution, expressed concern over the absence of democratic culture within India. ‘Democracy in India,’ Ambedkar argued, is ‘only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic’ (Rodrigues 2004: 484). Ambedkar invoked Groete’s notion of constitutional morality in his speeches in the 1940s to argue that ‘constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realize that our people have yet to learn it’ (ibid.). At its founding moment, India’s political elites, while committed to democratic values, remained uncertain about their diffusion within society. Seventy-five years later, it is India’s ‘undemocratic soil’ that has absorbed the democratic culture, even as its elites are seeking to undermine it.
On one level, the enthusiastic participation of citizens in elections is indicative of the diffusion of democratic culture in India’s undemocratic soil. As Banerjee (2014) powerfully observed, the act of voting is the one moment when the realities of inequality and injustice give way to a collective expression of democratic values, of citizenship, equality, and accountability The data on voter perceptions presented here deepens the argument. It shows that Indian voters are broadly committed to liberal democratic norms and recognise when they are being undermined.
However, India’s commitment to a democratic sentiment is peppered with contradictions, visible specifically on the question of Muslims and minority rights. During fieldwork, both Hindu and Muslim voters spoke of their concerns regarding the erosion of democratic norms and a fear of constitutional change. But they drew on a very different vocabulary. Lower-caste Hindu voters spoke of bhed bhav (discrimination), while Muslims used the word bhaichara (brotherhood, coexistence) when describing their concerns. What was significant is that the phrases never intersected. As the campaign wore on, the rhetoric became extremely polarised as the BJP, including the prime minister himself, sought to counter the re-emergence of caste coalitions with the constitution as its centrepiece, with a strong anti-Muslim narrative. However, the caste and constitutional discourse stubbornly refused to engage with India’s secular identity. These silences are perhaps a consequence of many contradictory impulses on the secular question, visible in the India Election Survey. The BJP’s ‘othering’ project has exploited precisely these contradictions and in doing so has deepened societal fissures.
When asked whether the Muslim community had been victimised under the BJP, 36 per cent of respondents agreed and another 14 per cent strongly agreed. Note that the survey sample (80 per cent) was overwhelmingly Hindu. Yet, an equally significant 50 per cent agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that Hindus have historically been victimised in India, a framing that is at the heart of Hindutva mobilisation. Further, even as 74 per cent agree or strongly agree that it is the government’s responsibility to protect minorities, defending the interests of Hindus in India was the most popular (36 per cent) of all options given by 66 per cent of respondents, who said that Modi was a good leader. Finally, in responding to the question on one of Hindutva’s key mobilisational planks – temple building where mosques stood – 44 per cent of respondents agreed, while 11 per cent strongly agreed.15
Securing and protecting minority rights is at the heart of the liberal democratic project, and specifically for India, the cornerstone of the modern nation-building project which adopted secularism as a key constitutional ideal. The BJP rose to power challenging precisely this secular ideal. Undermining minority rights through claims of Hindu victimisation and retribution via temple construction are core to Hindutva politics. The survey data demonstrates that these beliefs are now entrenched and have popular legitimacy. Indians thus demonstrate a weak commitment to the secular ideal.
The political opposition did not counter this reality with a renewed vision for secularism. Their strategy was to operate within the contours of Hindutva, seeking to broaden their Hindu voter base, while focusing on the economy and caste fissures. Consequently, the share of Muslim candidates fielded by the Congress Party fell to an all-time low of 6 per cent, as did the share of Muslim candidates fielded by the SP, a key member of the INDIA alliance (Allie 2025).
Does this weak commitment to the secular principle undermine India’s broader democratic sentiment as previously described? To interpret these contradictory impulses, I draw on David and Holliday’s (2018) conceptualisation of limited liberalism. In seeking to understand Myanmar’s democratic transition, David and Holliday advance the notion of limited liberalism as an enduring property of the country’s political culture. Limited liberalism speaks to the presence of liberal values in one aspect and illiberalism in an adjacent aspect. The concept encapsulates contradictions in political beliefs and allows for analytically engaging with the different ways in which citizens imbibe liberal democratic norms and express their political choices. David and Holliday posit that limited liberalism plays a role similar to that of swing voters in elections. Political parties draw on these differing impulses to polarise and consolidate support aligned with their ideological proclivities, and voter responses traverse this complex terrain.
In the 2024 election, limited liberalism enabled the political opposition to tap into anxieties about democratic processes, where the BJP was unable to credibly signal its ability to deliver economic benefits and respond to anxieties of caste and inequality. In the same vein, in 2019 the BJP effectively polarised the electorate and consolidated a Hindutva coalition. The hope, and indeed challenge, for Indian democracy going forward lies in the political opposition’s ability to counter Hindutva by nurturing sites of liberalism amongst the masses and offering a more robust alternative.
Indian democracy remains vulnerable in the present moment. The abandonment of liberal democratic values by the political elite has seeped in deep and insidious ways into the body politic, transforming the political and administrative culture in India and, most crucially, reshaping the terms of citizen–state dynamics. However, one of the greatest achievements of India’s founding moment and the leap it took in institutionalising democracy has been the entrenchment of a democratic sentiment within the citizenry. It is this sentiment that has repeatedly shown resilience to the blatant undermining of democratic norms in India, visible in the 1977 election, after the emergency declared by the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, and in the 2024 general elections. This sentiment has caveats, particularly on the question of minority rights and religious equality. This limited liberalism offers some insight into where sites of resilience to democratic backsliding may emerge. However, much will depend on the formal political opposition to nurture the democratic sentiment. For the moment, its ability to do so remains an open question.
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