Towards a ‘National’ Democracy and an Anti-liberal Political Discourse: The Hindu-Right Government and Democratic Backsliding in Contemporary India

In 2014 the right-wing Hindu nationalist party, BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), won the general elections in India with a thumping majority, and then again repeated this electoral success in 2019. The BJP is expected to return to power a third time in the 2024 general elections. As a coalition government in power – the BJP led NDA government enjoys popular support of the masses like no other previous governments. Riding on popular support both inside and outside the parliament, the BJP has managed to bring "gradual" and "systemic" transformation to India’s constitutional democracy (Khaitan 2019, 2020). Today Indian democracy is witnessing growing authoritarianism from with the liberal constitutional democratic framework, such that the current system is being variously described as "democratic authoritarianism" (Hansen and Roy 2022), a "majoritarian" democracy (Chatterji, Hansen, and Jaffrelot 2019), and most recently as an "executive" democracy (Bhatia 2023). How do we understand India’s democratic backsliding? In this paper, by focusing on prime minister Narendra Modi’s speeches and specific policies and programmes introduced by the Modi-led NDA government between 2014 and 2023, I will demonstrate how the current Hindu nationalist government is transforming the discourse surrounding democracy. I will firstly argue how the BJP has transformed the idea of democracy itself, where in the current political discourse democracy signifies only electoral success, which is unrelated to questions of proper political representation. In the current popular(ised) discourse, the BJP’s electoral success is equated with the success of the nation itself and therefore the triumph of a democracy which is not just majoritarian but also "national". Secondly, since this Hind nationalist government came to power in 2014 there has been a shift in the governmental discourse from a liberal rights-based to a non-liberal discourse of social justice and duties of the citizen. When this shift in the governmental discourse is seen in the context of rising popularity of Hindu majoritarianism, it shows how this predominantly non-liberal discourse of social justice and duties of the citizen has aided the current ruling dispensation to systemically hinder or weaken civil and political rights in order to realize the anti-liberal and exclusionary political project of an authoritarian Hindu nationalist state.