India's democracy: the arrogance of power

There is something almost theatrical about the spectacle unfolding in India. Amit Shah, the country's powerful home minister, marches through Hyderabad holding the national flag, ostensibly to save democracy. Elsewhere, Rahul Gandhi, opposition politicians and thousands of young Indians are taking to the streets carrying the same flag, demanding that democracy be saved from the very government Shah represents. Both the government and the opposition are on the streets to save democracy. How did the world's largest democracy arrive at this extraordinary contradiction?

At the heart of the controversy is an accusation that elections in India have been unfair. Rahul Gandhi has accused the BJP and the Election Commission of manipulating electoral rolls to influence election results.

Gandhi's allegations concern duplicate registrations, fictitious addresses, suspicious additions to electoral lists and the deletion of eligible voters. In Karnataka's Mahadevapura constituency, he identified more than 100,000 allegedly irregular entries. In Maharashtra, he questioned the unusually large increase in registered voters before the 2024 Assembly elections. In Haryana, he alleged that millions of votes had been compromised through electoral irregularities.

The Election Commission of India has rejected these accusations and demanded evidence. Discrepancies in electoral rolls do not, by themselves, establish that fraudulent votes were cast. Nevertheless, the allegations have brought into the open a crisis of confidence that the BJP can no longer dismiss as ordinary opposition rhetoric.

West Bengal has become one of the clearest examples of this controversy. Ahead of the 2026 Assembly elections, approximately 9.08 million voters, nearly 12 per cent of the state's electorate, were removed from electoral rolls through an exercise known as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR). The Election Commission maintained that the exercise was necessary to remove duplicate registrations, deceased persons and ineligible voters. However, serious concerns arose when independent research suggested that approximately 3.11 million of those removed were Muslims, representing 34.3 per cent of the total deletions. The impact was particularly severe during a subsequent stage of scrutiny, when Muslims reportedly accounted for nearly 70 per cent of approximately 2.7 million deletions. Critics argue that such exclusions could serve the BJP's broader political and ideological agenda of promoting Hindutva and transforming India's secular character into one increasingly defined by Hindu majoritarianism.

The BJP subsequently won 207 seats, ending fifteen years of Trinamool rule.

The more troubling development is that these controversies are occurring within a political system that has undergone a profound transformation since Narendra Modi came to power in 2014. What is being questioned today is not merely the conduct of elections but the larger political and economic narrative on which the BJP has built its authority.

The BJP has gradually created a political environment in which power is concentrated around individual leaders, religion plays a growing role in politics, and patriotism is often judged according to the party's own ideology. India, which once took pride in its religious, linguistic and cultural diversity, is now witnessing a situation in which these very differences have been turned into political fault lines.

Meanwhile, a new generation of young Indians is increasingly questioning the political system that has developed under Narendra Modi's leadership over the past decade. Having grown up under BJP rule, many are becoming disillusioned with the government's claims of transparency, fairness and democratic accountability. Their protests initially focused on corruption and irregularities in the education and examination systems, but their concerns have now extended to allegations of electoral fraud. They fear that the democratic values on which modern India was founded are being undermined and that the institutions meant to protect them are losing their independence and credibility.

This growing scepticism is not confined to politics. The BJP's claims of economic success are also being subjected to closer scrutiny. The Modi government reported GDP growth of 7.7 per cent in 2025–26 and continues to project India as one of the world's fastest-growing major economies. Yet prominent Indian economists have questioned whether the official statistics provide an accurate picture of the country's economic performance. Former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian, along with economists Josh Felman and Abhishek Anand, has argued that between 2012 and 2023, India's annual economic growth was overstated by approximately 1.5 to 2 percentage points. Their research suggests that growth averaged around 4 to 4.5 per cent rather than the officially reported 6 per cent during that period. Former Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan has raised another important question: why has such impressive economic growth not translated into stronger job creation, investment and capital inflows?

The irony is difficult to miss. A government that speaks constantly of India's democratic greatness and economic achievements now finds itself confronting citizens who question both its political practices and its claims of progress.

India's present predicament is therefore larger than the future of Modi or the BJP. It concerns the political character of a country that once derived enormous international prestige from its commitment to democratic pluralism. That reputation, however, depends not merely on the power of its government or the performance of its economy, but on the strength of its democratic institutions and the trust they command among its citizens.