At first glance, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s narrow 2024 general election victory—a win only made possible thanks to the cooperation of alliance partners—suggests a return to a previous era of coalition government in India. While the ruling party may be weakened, the nature of the political order has fundamentally shifted in ways that will have a lasting impact on Indian democracy. India is witnessing the dawn of a "Second Republic," an inflection point that is equal in magnitude to the constitutional moment in 1950, when India's "First Republic" was established. Several elements of the Second Republic were visible prior to these elections, and the BJP's narrow victory has not dislodged them. The nature of electoral democracy, liberal constitutionalism, national identity, secularism, and federalism have all undergone significant transformations. Yet, true to India's nature, its new political settlement cannot be readily captured using simple binary distinctions.
Just months ago, there was little doubt that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would emerge triumphant from the Indian general election that began on 19 April 2024 and ended on the first day of June with the conclusion of its seventh and final stage. For months leading up to the 2024 poll, pundits vigorously debated the magnitude of the BJP's victory, but rarely its likelihood.
While the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has captured a majority of seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha (Parliament's lower house), the NDA has vastly underperformed both its ambitious expectations as well as the predictions of most pundits and opinion surveys. Be that as it may, Modi has led his party and its allies to a third consecutive victory, an achievement last secured by the Indian National Congress (hereafter, the Congress party or Congress) under the country's inaugural prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
The BJP's maiden victory under Modi came in 2014 and signified the renaissance of a political force that many observers—including some within the party itself—believed had peaked in the early 2000s when the BJP first tasted national power. Yet the party's ability to notch a second electoral victory in 2019, after five years of incumbency and amid an economic rough patch, signaled that India was witnessing not simply a new dominant party in New Delhi, but the dawn of a new political system altogether.1
India is no stranger to dominant-party rule. From the first general election in 1952 until 1989, Congress formed the political system's beating heart. After decades of Congress preeminence came a quarter-century of coalition rule during which no single party was strong enough to form a government on its own.
That changed in 2014, when the resurgent BJP inaugurated a new [End Page 38] dominant-party system complete with several hallmarks familiar from Congress's earlier hegemony: a charismatic leader with a cultlike following, a party organization that subordinates intraparty democracy to the high command's wishes, and a desire to nationalize even the most local elections. On its face, the BJP's narrow 2024 victory suggests a return to the earlier coalition era. But while the ruling party may be weakened, the nature of the political order has fundamentally shifted in ways that will have a lasting impact on Indian democracy. We are witnessing the dawn of India's "Second Republic," an inflection point that is equal in magnitude to India's constitutional moment of 1950, when the "First Republic" was established.
Several elements of the Second Republic were visible prior to 2014, and the BJP's narrow 2024 election victory has not dislodged them. Their significance comes into sharper relief when they are contrasted with the foundational principles of India's inaugural constitutional order.
India's First Republic guaranteed universal suffrage and equal political participation, but social rigidities and socioeconomic backwardness undermined the full realization of these promises. Today, despite the BJP's political success, electoral politics remains deeply ingrained while democratic participation is more widespread than ever before.
After 1947, India codified a liberal constitutional order in law and practice. This framework, however imperfect, turned on a belief that governmental power should be subjected to a web of institutional constraints to protect citizens from state coercion. In the emerging new republic, majoritarian will is regularly invoked to attribute democratic legitimacy to all governmental actions, even when they are illiberal.
India's original constitutional settlement rejected the idea that India was an archetypal nation-state organized around a single ethnic or religious identity, instead embracing the idea that India was a federal republic that was home to multiple nations. In the Second Republic, India is envisioned as a "civilizational state" defined by the country's ancient Hindu heritage.
The First Republic embraced a distinctively Indian variant of secularism, which sought to prevent the state from privileging any one faith above others. India's current leaders embrace the notion of Hindutva (literally, "Hindu-ness"), in which loyalty to the Hindu nation is the defining virtue of citizenship.
Finally, while India's First Republic was characterized by a central government capable of asserting extraordinary powers in exceptional circumstances, federalism was a deeply embedded feature of the political order. India's current leadership, by contrast, views federalism as an impediment to national policymaking and economic efficiency.
The Second Republic paints a stark contrast to India's founding political settlement, but its emergence has also been made possible by the [End Page 39] latter's infirmities. However, the Second Republic's contradictions also point to the difficulty of developing undemanding formulations of India's political order. India today is simultaneously more participatory, in electoral terms, and less democratic, in liberal terms. It possesses a more capable state that can more efficiently deliver benefits to its citizens, but also a more coercive one that can more effectively stifle democratic rights. It is a more stable state characterized by greater political certainty, albeit one in which the whims of a powerful executive increase the degree of policy uncertainty. Finally, it is a state that international partners find more valuable yet also more difficult to relate to.
The 1950 Constitution guaranteed all adult Indians the right to vote, irrespective of their station in life. The founders believed that electoral democracy would initiate a political revolution, but knew that any such transformation would be incomplete without a corresponding social revolution. Indeed, rigid social hierarchies constrained postindependence India's democratic promise.
Congress was a case in point. Having emerged from the British Raj as both the most important party and most crucial political institution in India, Congress was a catchall organization that aspired to represent all Indians from all walks of life. Reality fell short of aspiration and the early Congress leadership—dominated by an upper-crust, Brahmin elite—did not fully keep its promises. A privileged few ruled the corridors of power, women were politically invisible, and local notables regularly dictated how ordinary citizens would vote.
In the late 1960s, Congress's stranglehold on power began to loosen. The party kept its monopoly on the central government in New Delhi, but the states became seedbeds of regional and caste-based political movements that challenged Congress's claim to represent the range of diverse identities and interests found in such a vast and populous country. These movements, though narrowly drawn on identitarian lines, nonetheless helped to bring new communities onto the playing field of electoral competition. While Dalits and Adivasis (known in official parlance as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, respectively) benefited from progressive affirmative-action policies, the large community known as Other Backward Classes (OBCs)—comprising nearly half the populace—enjoyed no such assistance. Yet the largely agrarian OBCs were prime beneficiaries of India's encounter with the "Green Revolution" in agricultural methods and technology that began in the late 1960s. As citizens, they stood at the forefront of what Yogendra Yadav has called the "first democratic upsurge."2
The second such upsurge took place in the early 1990s following three nearly simultaneous shocks. The first was a Hindu mob's 6 December [End Page 40] 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid, a mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya that Hindus had long claimed sat atop the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. The second was a wave of protests against the Mandal Commission's recommendation to extend public-employment and higher-education quotas to the OBCs. The third was the end of the "License Raj" (the labyrinth of government regulations that stifled markets and private enterprise) and the launch of dramatic economic liberalization.
These events, plus a pair of constitutional amendments that mandated decentralized local self-governance across India's villages and towns, reshuffled Indian politics. Congress's hold on national power gave way to the "coalition era" wherein states became the key sites of political contestation. As voter participation rose, India experienced the "creolisation" of democracy, transforming the demographic composition of the country's political elite.3 This political churn manifested itself in greater electoral volatility, a norm of "anti-incumbency," and a surge in political contestation.
Since the BJP's return to power in 2014 after a decade in opposition, India has experienced a "third democratic upsurge," with political engagement reaching new heights. The 2019 general election boasted record voter turnout of 67.4 percent, slightly besting 2014's previous high mark of 66.4 percent. Turnout in the 2024 election exhibited some mean reversion, although the share of voters exercising their franchise remains elevated, in historical terms. Between 1961 and 1967, the era of the "first democratic upsurge," average voter turnout in state elections had been 61 percent; from 2021 through early 2024, it has averaged a whopping 76 percent.
Not only has engagement risen, but its composition has changed as well. For decades, male turnout had exceeded women's participation by eight to ten percentage points. In 2019, women's turnout outpaced men's for the first time. In state-level contests, higher women's turnout has become the norm.
Long tagged with the label of being a "Brahmin-Bania" party that appealed mainly to upper-caste Hindus and merchants (the Bania are a mercantile caste), the BJP under Modi has broadened its base significantly. In the 1996 general election, the party gained 35 percent of upper-caste votes but lagged among other Hindus. In 2019, it won a majority of upper-caste voters and a plurality of all other Hindu groups including Adivasis, Dalits, and OBCs.4 The BJP's appeal straddles socioeconomic classes and rural-urban divides. Its ability to bridge multiple social gulfs has allowed it to "strategically situate itself as the new party of the middle."5
Development gains and the related rise of digital technologies have further fueled political mobilization. Between 2008 and 2023, mobile-phone subscriptions more than tripled to about 1.2 billion. Slightly more [End Page 41] than half of all Indians now have internet access, their share having more than doubled in just three years. A decade ago, less than a seventh of the populace had smartphone access; today more than two-thirds do.
There are several implications of this democratic churn. First, every party now grasps that women are a vital constituency. Keys to the BJP's electoral success include the party's commitment to "pro-women" welfare schemes and its political mobilization of women through the concept of seva (selfless service).6 To cement this advantage, Parliament passed a 2023 constitutional amendment that reserves a third of all state and national legislative seats for women, though implementation of these new quotas is delayed.
The second implication is the electoral irrelevance of Muslims. They have always been underrepresented, making up 14 percent of the populace but on average less than 6 percent of Lok Sabha members elected between 1952 and 2024.7 In the past, however, most governments needed Muslim votes to manufacture successful electoral coalitions. This is no longer the case. In 2019, only 8 percent of Muslims voted for the BJP (preliminary estimates suggest this number has likely not risen in 2024), and the 240 BJP members elected to the Lok Sabha in 2024 do not include even a single Muslim. The invisibility of Muslims in the electoral arena is but one mark of the deepening marginalization of this community—the third-largest group of Muslims inside a single set of national borders anywhere in the world—across public, political, and cultural life.8
A third ramification is that voters are better able to distinguish between state and national elections. When Congress was dominant, it was said that Indians voted in state elections as if they were electing the prime minister. In the coalition era, this formula was inverted: Indians voted in Lok Sabha elections as if choosing a state government.9 But now, voters pay more attention to national factors when filling the Lok Sabha, and typically heed local matters first when choosing their respective state governments.
Despite three straight BJP victories at the national level, state-level dominance has eluded the party. Roughly half the 66 state elections held since 2014 have led to the BJP forming a state government. The party has made substantial inroads in areas beyond its traditional bailiwick, but subnational political competition remains robust and the BJP's electoral mastery incomplete.
In the wake of colonial rule and the horrors of the 1947 partition (which brought an estimated one-million excess deaths and sudden refugee flows totaling millions more10), India's leaders believed that the country required a strong central government, but one which was [End Page 42] subject to robust checks and balances lest strong governance veer into authoritarianism. India's constitutional drafters borrowed from previous British blueprints such as the 1935 Government of India Act while adding their own innovations. The drafters broadly agreed that political order in newly independent India should be imbued by a spirit of liberal constitutionalism, with checks and balances on each branch of government, separation of powers, the impartial rule of law, and protections of individual freedoms. These liberties were guaranteed by an elaborate bill of rights codified in Articles 12 through 35 of the 1950 Constitution.11
India would struggle to live up to these lofty ideals.12 While there was unanimity concerning the principles of electoral democracy, many elites harbored doubts about unfettered civil liberties. The First Amendment, enacted just a year after the 1950 Constitution came into force, declares that "reasonable restrictions can be imposed" on the "freedom of speech and _expression_" guaranteed by Article 19. Colonial-era provisions including a stringent sedition law were not only retained, but routinely embraced by politicians eager to squelch dissent. To keep order in "disturbed areas," the military received special authorities that often served as cover for human-rights abuses.
Institutional checks and balances have hardly been sacrosanct either. When the Congress party was supreme, its control over judicial appointments kept the courts in line while senior bureaucrats were rated on political loyalty more than professional competence. Even a rupture as egregious as Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's mid-1970s imposition of emergency rule encountered little real pushback from institutions. Instead, voters had to face it down via the March 1977 general election when they kicked Gandhi's Congress party out of office. Today's BJP has also tamed accountability institutions. In many instances, the executive interferes with their operations or lets them wither by failing to fill vacancies. More perniciously, many "referee" institutions now routinely avoid contentious issues lest they run afoul of a popular ruling dispensation. Various democracy indices confirm the perception that in India, dedication to electoral democracy has exceeded adherence to basic tenets of liberal constitutionalism. The truth is that devotion to the latter has been contingent on two factors. The first is the distribution of political power. When a dominant party (Congress then, the BJP now) asserts control, liberal principles lose ground. During the coalition era, the inability of a single party to win and keep power gave institutions [End Page 43] of restraint greater room to maneuver. Thus, the Indian case suggests a paradox: Institutional checks and balances have worked best when least needed (when the party system is fragmented) and have been least effective when most needed (when one party achieves dominance).13
The other factor is political leaders' self-restraint. As Ashutosh Varshney argues, India's founding elites felt a commitment to liberal tenets which, though qualified, was genuine. Later elites have honored these tenets more in word than in deed. The coalition era's political uncertainty aided liberal constitutionalism since elites—even if they did not value liberalism sincerely—could nonetheless see that it often served their interests.14
Today, neither the values nor the interests of the BJP and the larger Hindutva ecosystem suggest an embrace of liberal principles. The Hindu-nationalist movement is wedded to electoral democracy by simple arithmetic: Hindus are 80 percent of the population; uniting them means lasting electoral hegemony.
But this embrace of elections is infused with a brute majoritarian logic: The will of the majority is considered, by definition, democratic. Popular legitimation through the ballot box gives the government carte blanche to govern as it wishes. Indeed, "the focus today is exclusively on the source of power (popular authorization), rather than on a classical-liberal concern with how power is used (in ways that respect and promote freedom rather than baffle or override it)."15
This explains why BJP leaders' interpretations of democracy downplay liberal fundamentals. As one cabinet minister puts it: "Our yardstick for judgement are [sic] the integrity of the democratic processes, the respect and credibility that they command with the people, and the nondiscriminatory delivery of public goods and services."16
Today, even the veneer of liberal constitutionalism has been effaced. While the BJP's predecessors authored the legal playbook that is being used to throttle democracy, the intensity with which the plays are being executed is unprecedented.
For instance, in 2002 Parliament passed the draconian Prevention of Money Laundering Act. This law, expanded three times between 2005 and 2012, allows suspects to be arrested and jailed without due process. From 2014, when the BJP took power, through September 2022, there was a fourfold increase in cases brought against politicians by the Enforcement Directorate, India's premier agency for fighting economic crimes. In 95 percent of these cases, the target was an opposition figure.17 Shortly before the 2024 election, the chief ministers of Delhi (National Capital Territory or NCT) and the state of Jharkhand were arrested and jailed on corruption charges. Convictions under this law are vanishingly rare (0.5 percent of individuals charged18), but the process becomes the punishment.
Another example is the law governing cybercrime and electronic commerce. A 2008 amendment to the Information Technology Act [End Page 44] grants the central government virtually unlimited powers to block electronic content if officials believe that the interests or security of the state are threatened—a provision that has habitually been used to quash dissent. Recently, the government amended the act's implementing rules to tighten restrictions on social and digital media.
Regulatory scrutiny of civil society's funding is a third example of government control. Indira Gandhi's government originally enacted the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA) in 1976 to curb "foreign meddling" in Indian politics. Parliament has since expanded the law to encompass any activities pertaining to the "national interest."19 In recent years, the BJP has pushed through still more stringent FCRA amendments, with the predictable result that many fewer local organizations have access to monies from abroad.
In sum, India has transitioned from a limited government that protects all citizens' equal rights to an absolute government that points to electoral majorities as its justification for any and all state actions. The return of coalition government might nudge the pendulum in the opposite direction. But the truth is that India's regional parties, on which the BJP's governing majority now relies, have hardly been paragons of democratic virtue in their own states. This suggests there are limits to the degree to which they will recoil from a heavy-handed central dispensation, especially if they are given a free hand in their respective states.
Almost eight decades ago, the question of national identity faced newly independent India with a stark choice: Follow a route like the Islamic Republic of Pakistan's and insist on the congruence of political and cultural borders, or take a more challenging road that would allow multiple nations, languages, and faiths to coexist within a unified, democratic political framework. Underpinning the latter "idea of India" was the audacious belief that Indians could attain unity only by embracing their unprecedented diversity.
India's leaders, cognizant of their country's immense heterogeneity and democracy's fragile nature, chose the less trodden path, building what scholars have called a "state-nation" rather than a "nation-state."20 This decision, radical in hindsight, placed a premium on flexibility, accommodation, and protections for minorities. Constitutional provisions outlined an asymmetric federalism in which certain states, such as Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir or the tribal-majority states of the Northeast, enjoyed greater autonomy. This arrangement also embraced the idea that Indians could have multiple, complementary identities, allowing linguistic pluralism to flourish among India's diverse states.
The Hindutva movement never made its peace with the sui generis path that India pursued after 1947. In contrast to the pluralist, syncretic vision [End Page 45] offered by Nehru and his compatriots, Hindu-nationalist ideologues such as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar preferred a more nativist vision encapsulated by the slogan "Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan." They believed that India's social cohesion depended on commonality of language, cultural identity, and religion, and saw India as a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation).
The "idea of India" animating the Second Republic rejects both the state-nation and nation-state formulations, preferring a third alternative: India as a civilizational state. India's current rulers believe that state-nation policies undermine national unity, while the classic nation-state pays undue obeisance to outmoded European constructs of nationalism. Instead, the idea of a "civilizational state" is inspired by a much older lineage, harkening back to a lost Hindu "golden age" that pre-dates modern forms of political order.
Therefore, the current nationalist project is preoccupied not with building something new, but rather with recovering an identity believed to have suffered unfair erasure by centuries of foreign rule. Indeed, the BJP's increasing resort to India's alternate name—the Sanskrit-origin "Bharat"—points to a broader rise of civilizational discourse. This has several features worth noting.
First, making India's "brand" that of a restored civilizational state flips the script on Western critiques. The BJP can then claim that the global conversation about liberal democracy has nothing to do with the political regime the party is building. As Modi often notes, Bharat's democratic traditions are older than their Western analogues, making India the true "mother of democracy," with credentials that cannot be externally appraised.
Second, the civilizational-state ethos relies on a narrative of victimization, or what Modi terms "twelve centuries of slavery." This includes not just repeated Muslim invasions and extended British colonial rule, but also the inauthentic social mores of the Nehruvian era. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta has noted, this conception uses Hindutva to construct a unified ethnic identity of "Hindus" in a way that reconfigures traditional, decentralized notions of Hinduism.21 Defenders of this paradigm posit that Hindutva does not seek to impose a monolithic view of a Hindu India inimical to cultural, linguistic, or ethnic diversity. Rather, it seeks to "protect this diversity from the threat of homogenising Abrahamic constructs."22 But perpetual victimhood requires the presence of some "other." In the story of India that Hindu nationalists narrate, this "other" is the country's religious minorities—especially Christians and Muslims—for whom India is their fatherland but not their holy land. Thus, the construction of a civilizational state is promoted as a bulwark against internal disunity as well as external threats.
Third, the notion of a civilizational state is a useful tool through which foreign policy can be championed as a domestic political issue. Indeed, a key trope of India's current foreign policy is the concept of India as vishwaguru, [End Page 46] or "teacher to the world." In this account, India's civilizational state pioneered the concept of democracy, and hence is obliged to share its moral and cultural superiority with the world. It follows that India's renewal at home must be matched by a renaissance on the global stage, where the country's importance has often been undervalued.23
This helps to explain why Modi's government has worked tirelessly at soft-power campaigns to win UN backing for the "International Day of Yoga" and the "International Year of the Millet," a cereal crop with ancient Indian roots. But it also clarifies India's vociferous desire to secure recognition of its hard power. Seen in this light, India's recent presidency of the G20 is not simply a rotational formality, but a sign that the country is reclaiming its rightful place in the ranks of great powers.
In line with the state-nation motif, a key tenet of the First Republic was a firm commitment to secularism. Early proponents of the secular-nationalist vision argued, quite apart from secularism's importance to individual freedom, that trying to privilege any one religion above others would risk further social and territorial rifts. Instead, India's early leaders strove for a legal and constitutional framework that would ensure each of the country's myriad ethnic and religious groups an equal claim to be at home within the new republic.
Unlike some Western versions of secularism (French laïcité, for example), India's model explicitly recognized religion and religious differences. Rather than embracing a strict separation of church and state, India adopted the notion of maintaining a "principled distance" between religion and the public authorities.24 In other words, the state was empowered to intervene in religious matters—by subsidizing religious pilgrimages, passing laws to redress illiberal religious customs, or aiding educational institutions run by religious orders—but it was required to do so on an evenhanded basis.
This delicate balance proved difficult to maintain. First, as the majority religion, Hinduism was the main target of legal reform, reflecting the government's political calculation that it had to go the extra mile to reassure minority faiths that their rights would not be trampled. Second, there was no universal yardstick by which the state's relative "distance" from a given faith could be measured. The state was enjoined to play a role in religious affairs, but to what extent, in which areas, and in what sequence relied on human judgment. Third, secular politicians exploited the ambiguity inherent in India's secularism by pandering to religious communities when doing so seemed politically advantageous.
For example, after the Supreme Court ruled in 1985 that Indian civil law superseded sharia, the Congress party government of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi made a clumsy attempt to reassure its Muslim supporters by [End Page 47] hastily rewriting the law on Islamic divorce. When this move fomented a Hindu backlash, the same government sought to appease Hindus by giving them access to the contested Babri Masjid complex, thereby setting the stage for the mosque's 1992 razing by a BJP-affiliated mob. Shortsighted political maneuvers concerning sectarian matters led to Hindu-nationalist jibes that Congress's version of secularism was "pseudo-secularism" or "minority appeasement."
With secularism's demise (and before that the failure of its proponents to reform its practice), organized pushback against the Hindunationalist ideological project has been limited. At its core, the Second Republic reflects the belief that Indian culture is synonymous with Hindu culture.
The legal and constitutional manifestations of Hindutva's ideological ascendancy are evident. Laws and regulations governing citizenship have moved away from a framework of jus soli (citizenship based on whether one was born within the borders of India) and toward one of jus sanguinis (citizenship based on one's bloodline). The 2019 passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) marked a watershed. This law lays down a fast track to Indian citizenship for a range of undocumented religious minorities with roots in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, or Pakistan who sought refuge in India prior to 2015. Muslims are notably left out on the mistaken premise that they cannot be persecuted in Islamic countries, a myth belied by the open targeting of Pakistani Ahmadis and Shia Hazaras in Afghanistan. The CAA is the first law to name religion as a formal litmus test for determining Indian citizenship.25
Citizenship is not the only arena where the politics of the "civilizational state" are crowding out liberalism. Twelve of the country's twenty-eight states have passed laws criminalizing religious conversions. The ostensible goal is to ban forced conversions, but the implicit motive is to curb voluntary conversions and even interfaith marriage.26
Sometimes it is not about the laws on the books, but the practical unavailability of legal recourse. For instance, authorities in many locales have met allegations of Muslim rioting with the summary and wholesale demolition of Muslim neighborhoods. This "bulldozer justice" is carried out on the grounds that the homes were built illegally. By the time courts can weigh in against the destruction (if they ever do), it is too late. Mohsin Alam Bhat calls this an example of "irregularization," a process through which minority citizens are persistently made vulnerable, with meaningful legal redress beyond their reach.27
The preeminence of Hindu nationalism has still other ramifications that stem from the BJP's organizational character. The party is the political arm of more than three-dozen affiliated Hindu-nationalist groups. This means that, at the center and in the states in which the BJP holds power, it not only controls the state apparatus, but can also call on a vast swath [End Page 48] of civil society groups to impose Hindu-nationalist demands and dogmas. Affiliates of the BJP have on multiple occasions pressured universities about hiring decisions, carried out vigilante campaigns against individuals suspected of cattle smuggling, and spread the "love jihad" conspiracy theory which claims that Muslim men are systematically seducing and converting Hindu women.
State power and a massive civil society presence give Hindutva a one-two punch—in the halls of government and on the streets—that is transforming India. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta has written, "the project of Hindu Rashtra [nation] is articulated, enforced, and propagated through the aegis of the State [rajya]."28 Conversely, the policy priorities of the rajya are furthered by a Hindu-nationalist civil society complex that is invested in a Hindu rashtra.
Federalism was an intrinsic feature of the First Republic, although this federalism's precise nature eluded simple description. Centralizing constitutional features tilt the playing field in favor of New Delhi and against the state capitals. For instance, the central government can unilaterally change any state's borders, enjoys wide powers to dismiss democratically elected state governments, and collects the vast bulk of tax revenues.
Notwithstanding these features, institutional mechanisms were set up to reinforce the spirit of federalism. The center and the states have day-to-day governance responsibilities that overlap. The national civil service assigns entrants to state-specific cadres, dividing their careers between jobs at the center and posts in their respective states. This system of "dual control" is meant to make bureaucrats responsive not only to New Delhi but to state capitals as well. Most tax monies flow to New Delhi, but an independent commission sets the formula that determines how much the center devolves to each state.
How far and how readily the federal spirit is embraced often depended on the political balance of power and the precise character of the party system. At the apex of the Congress era, Indira Gandhi routinely misused the center's prerogative to dismiss democratically elected state governments, even targeting uncooperative chief ministers from her own party. The coalition era gave states more room to make their own policy choices since governments at the center relied on state-based partners for their majorities.
Despite violations of the federal compact, there remained an overriding belief that the center and the states were joint sovereigns, as the "Father of the Constitution" himself, B.R. Ambedkar, had insisted during the Constituent Assembly debates. The dominant trend now, however, is recentralization under a series of "One Nation" policies which question the fundamental premise that India is, as Article 1 of the Constitution [End Page 49] makes plain, a "union of states." Modi's government cites various grounds for these policies—economic efficiency, social cohesion, national political identity, and territorial integrity.29 Hindutva ideology's emphasis on cohesion, strength, and uniformity fits seamlessly with the idea of a more unitary state.30
In 2016, Parliament passed the Goods and Services Tax (GST), moving significant indirect-taxation powers from the states to a new intergovernmental body that they control jointly with the center. The GST effort—dubbed "One Nation, One Tax"—was a milestone on the path to making India an integrated common market and came only after years of painstaking consultations with the states.
Other momentous changes to India's federal structure have transpired without such dialogue, however. In August 2019, the central government unilaterally abrogated a constitutional provision that had granted the state of Jammu and Kashmir a semblance of autonomy. At the same time, Parliament cut the state in two and downgraded each segment to the status of a union territory (an administrative unit controlled by the central government). This happened not only without Jammu and Kashmir's consent, but while local opposition figures were detained and the state's internet access was shut down for a prolonged period. In 2023, Parliament passed a law stripping Delhi NCT's elected chief minister of the power to oversee local administration. It is no surprise that this official, Arvind Kejriwal, also heads the Aam Aadmi Party, a leading opposition force. He is one of the two chief ministers who were charged with corruption and subsequently jailed in early 2024.
Two more changes were being prepared for Modi's third term, but the BJP's diminished strength makes them less likely, at least in the imminent future. The first is "One Nation, One Election," a series of constitutional amendments that would replace the current system of staggered voting for national, state, and local offices with simultaneous polls. Given Modi's unmatched popularity, the BJP has an incentive to nationalize elections across all tiers of government. But the initiative aligns uncomfortably with India's parliamentary design: If a government were to fall without a new governing coalition forming to replace it, a snap election would be ordered, yet the new government would be restricted to serving out the remainder of the failed government's term, after which still another election would have to take place.
The second proposed constitutional change, the introduction of a Uniform Civil Code (UCC), is even more contentious. India has no single set of personal laws. Instead, in a setup held over from colonial times, matters of marriage, divorce, inheritance, maintenance, and adoption are governed by a clutch of faith-specific laws. India's postindependence leaders left this diversity of personal laws in place for fear of upsetting the young nation's delicate religious balance. Even so, however, they made sure to include constitutional language (Article 44) mandating that [End Page 50] "the State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India."
The BJP has long campaigned for a UCC ("One Nation, One Law"), calling the status quo unequal, harmful to national unity, and too prone to deliver minorities special treatment. Many liberals also support a UCC, arguing that the time has come to create a common law for people of all faiths. The debate, of course, is about what kind of UCC should emerge: a law that elevates the most progressive elements of existing personal laws while curbing their worst excesses, or a common law peppered with Hindu characteristics.
The BJP state government in Uttarakhand recently enacted its own UCC and the results are instructive. The code contains many progressive elements—such as ending discrimination against children born out of wedlock—but it also possesses some notable gaps. The code is silent on the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, fails to address tribal Indians' customary practices, and introduces intrusive new measures such as the mandatory registration of all live-in relationships. Pointedly, the law also exempts from its purview the "Hindu undivided family," a legal entity (typically consisting of a multigenerational extended family) that allows Hindu taxpayers to claim exclusive benefits.
While signs of creeping centralization are palpable, the precise balance between the states and the center that will emerge under the Second Republic remains to be determined. The critical factor that will shape it is the political makeup of India's states. Prior to 2024, the BJP's reach into southern India was limited. The latest general-election results, however, show that the party has increased its presence—in terms of votes if not necessarily of seats—in areas where it had previously been a nonfactor. Regional parties in southern and eastern India have been the staunchest foes of many "One India" policies. If the BJP's southern march gathers pace, subnational opposition could lose steam. To be sure, a motley coalition of opposition parties joined hands and successfully challenged the BJP nationally in 2024, but their ability to set aside parochial disputes in service of developing a larger political platform after these elections is an open question.
A second consideration is how the problem of political malapportionment is to be resolved. After 2026, India will see the expiration of the current constitutional freeze on the reapportionment of legislative seats across states. If the "one person, one vote" principle carries the day, the more populous northern states stand to gain at the expense of southern states where fertility levels have long been declining. Given South India's [End Page 51] relative prosperity and outsized contributions to national coffers, the issue is a political powder keg.
The third and final consideration is the states' collective-action potential. Somewhat counterintuitively, many state-based parties have not been reliable defenders of states' rights. The Aam Aadmi Party, which runs the governments in Delhi NCT and Punjab, backed the center's 2019 decision to scrap Jammu and Kashmir's special status. In an ironic twist mentioned above, Delhi NCT's own status would in just a few years be altered to hem in the elected state government.
The dawn of the Second Republic signals a basic shift in our conceptualization of the world's largest democracy. The 2024 general-election results raise doubts about the durability of the BJP's electoral hegemony, but its rise to power has been propelled by structural shifts in India's polity which it has further perpetuated and which show no immediate signs of abating. Yet, true to India's nature, its political order cannot be readily captured using simple binary distinctions. Instead of having just one face, it often displays two at the same time, like the Roman god Janus.
First, India is simultaneously becoming both more democratic and more illiberal. On several measures, democracy is deepening. India's elected leaders are more representative of the population, ending the monopoly of a narrow band of English-speaking elites. A more diverse swath of citizens is taking part in politics, lending greater democratic legitimacy to electoral verdicts. The BJP's vote-getting juggernaut has been painstakingly built around a Hindu core to the exclusion of most religious minorities, but it is a base that is remarkably inclusive of India's diversity of castes and socioeconomic classes.
While participation is expanding, illiberalism is growing. India's liberal commitments have always been qualified but what distinguishes the Second Republic is not only the disregard for constraints on state power, but also the narrowness of the ruling dispensation's vision for the nation. Moreover, while it might pain liberals to admit it, this vision has popular traction. The degree to which this is driven by political supply rather than popular demand remains an open question. Has the BJP pushed the median voter rightward, or has it merely proven better at exploiting a conservative shift in the electorate? Empirical evaluations of this question are lacking, but the BJP has clearly managed to claim the political "middle" in a way that has turned "fringe" elements and ideas into mainstream concerns.31 Robust electoral competition and the weakening of liberal freedoms will coexist, albeit uneasily. As the political scientist Vinay Sitapati observes, "There is no Hindu rashtra down the road from here. It has already arrived, invited by democracy."32 [End Page 52]
Second, the Indian state has emerged as a more capable entity but one that also wields greater coercive might.33 The centralization of authority in the executive and the subordination of subnational interests to federal imperatives has allowed the government to implement wide-ranging welfare schemes. These have put large sums of public money plus Modi's name behind the targeted distribution of goods and services—modern flush toilets and household water hookups, for example—that directly improve the lives of private citizens. The shift in public spending toward large capital-investment projects has not only expanded the state's writ, but has also led to a sharp rise in connectivity. The physical manifestations of integration have digital analogues: The combination of universal biometric identification (Aadhaar numbers), smartphones, and electronic banking constitute a new foundation for digital public infrastructure. That will have positive long-run effects.
Centralization, however, not only means a government with greater means of efficiency but also one with greater coercive powers. Under the garb of decolonization, Parliament enacted three new laws in 2023 to replace India's largely inherited criminal-justice framework. This exercise has wrapped a façade of legitimacy around highly illiberal provisions that are in some ways even more draconian than their colonial predecessors. For example, a new criminal code expands the circumstances under which bail can be denied to individuals awaiting trial. Over the past decade, India's investigative agencies have been deployed with greater alacrity to clamp down on the political opposition in the name of anticorruption. These law-enforcement bureaucracies have long served the interests of those in power: Indeed, the Central Bureau of Investigation—the country's premier law-enforcement agency—was nicknamed the "Congress Bureau of Investigation" because the Congress party used it so often as a political cudgel. But under the BJP the misuse of the coercive apparatus has plumbed new depths.
Third, after 2014, the BJP's national electoral dominance offered political stability, yet its unbridled power also increased policy uncertainty. Even amid its 2024 underperformance, the BJP notched a vote-share advantage of roughly fifteen percentage points over its closest national rival, the Congress party. Private investors and foreign governments have been comforted by this continuity because they believed it minimized the risk of political instability.
If the absence of competitive pressure promoted political stability, it also raised the risk of policy uncertainty. As economists Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman have noted, the government deserves high marks for its investments in the country's economic "hardware"—physical and digital infrastructure, reform of indirect taxation, efficient welfare provision—but that same government has lagged in equipping India with vital "software" such as regulatory certainty, an impartial rule of law, and a level playing field for domestic and foreign capital.34 The government's [End Page 53] quixotic 2016 gambit to "demonetize" 86 percent of Indian currency, the botched second covid lockdown during the first half of 2021, and multiple flip-flops on trade policy are examples of capricious policies imprudently pursued by an unconstrained executive. One silver lining of coalition government returning to India could be the constraints it might place on impulsive policymaking.
Finally, the India that is emerging will be more valuable to foreign partners but also more difficult to relate to. The gauzy "India story" practically writes itself: the world's most populous country, the fastest growing major economy, a frontline state in the fight against Chinese expansionism, and a critical player in multilateral negotiations on issues from climate change to cross-border terrorism. But the shedding of its liberal image and corresponding indifference to aspects of the liberal international order render India a complex partner. India's unwillingness to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the government's alleged involvement in carrying out targeted assassinations of foreign nationals on democratic soil suggest that its approach to statecraft will be unsentimental and untethered to classical liberal concerns.
The nature of India's democracy is too complex to be subject to a summary judgment. The 2024 election notwithstanding, however, any objective assessment turns up ample reason for concern. India's democratic travails did not begin in 2014, but they have undoubtedly intensified since then. The precepts of India's Second Republic presage a state that is less restrained, a political system that is more centralized, and a culture that is more uniform. To what extent coalition government centered around a solid BJP core will reverse those trends remains to be seen. At first glance, these attributes may for a variety of reasons appear alluring. But if some of the domestic transformations outlined here are brought to their logical conclusion in a country as diverse as India, they risk consolidating a political order whose gains will ultimately prove illusory. This will strike a blow to the cause of global democracy, but above all will imperil the values of justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity that the Constitution pledges to secure for all of India's citizens.
Milan Vaishnav is senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C.
1. Christophe Jaffrelot and Gilles Verniers, "A New Party System or a New Political System?" Contemporary South Asia 28, no. 2 (2020): 141–54.
2. Yogendra Yadav, "Electoral Politics in the Time of Change: India's Third Electoral System, 1989–99," Economic and Political Weekly 34, nos. 34–35 (21–28 August 1999): 2394.
3. Yadav, "Electoral Politics in the Time of Change," 2397.
4. Data from the National Election Studies conducted by the Lokniti Programme for Comparative Democracy of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, https://lokniti.org/national-election-studies.
5. Suhas Palshikar and Jyoti Mishra, "Caste, Class and Vote: Consolidation of the Privileged and Dispersal of Underprivileged," Studies in Indian Politics 11 (December 2023): 272.
6. Anirvan Chowdhury, "How the BJP Wins Over Women," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 26 April 2024, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/04/how-the-bjp-wins-over-women?lang=en.
7. Adnan Farooqui, "Political Representation of a Minority: Muslim Representation in Contemporary India," India Review 19 (March–April 2020): 153–75.
8. Only Indonesia and Pakistan have more Muslims than India.
9. Yadav, "Electoral Politics in the Time of Change," 2399.
10. Tim Dyson, A Population History of India: From the First Modern People to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 189.
11. Madhav Khosla, India's Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020).
12. Tripurdaman Singh, "The Authoritarian Roots of India's Democracy," Journal of Democracy 34 (July 2023): 133–43.
13. Milan Vaishnav, "Backsliding in India? The Weakening of Referee Institutions," in Rachel Beatty Riedl et al., eds., Global Challenges to Democracy: Cross-Regional Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
14. Ashutosh Varshney, "India's Democratic Longevity and Its Troubled Trajectory," in Scott Mainwaring and Tarek Masoud, eds., Democracy in Hard Places (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 34–72.
15. Madhav Khosla and Milan Vaishnav, "The Three Faces of the Indian State," Journal of Democracy 32 (January 2021): 123.
16. "Secretary Antony J. Blinken and Indian External Affairs Minister Dr. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar at a Joint Press Availability," Washington, D.C., 27 September 2022, www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-and-indian-external-affairs-minister-dr-subrahmanyam-jaishankar-at-a-joint-press-availability-2.
17. Deeptiman Tiwary, "Since 2014, 4-fold Jump in ED Cases Against Politicians; 95% Are From Opposition," Indian Express, 21 September 2022.
18. "Only 23 Convicted in 5,422 Cases Under PMLA Till Date: Govt to Lok Sabha," Hindustan Times, 26 July 2022.
19. Nick Robinson, "The Regulation of Foreign Funding of Nonprofits in a Democracy," Virginia Journal of International Law 64 (2024), forthcoming.
20. Alfred Stepan, Juan J. Linz, and Yogendra Yadav, "The Rise of 'State-Nations,'" Journal of Democracy 21 (July 2010): 50–68.
21. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, "Hindu Nationalism: From Ethnic Identity to Authoritarian Repression," Studies in Indian Politics 10 (June 2022): 31–47.
22. Abhinav Prakash, "India Is Not a Nation-State, or a State-Nation. It Is a Civilisational-State," Hindustan Times, 19 December 2019.
23. Kate Sullivan de Estrada, "What Is a Vishwaguru? Indian Civilizational Pedagogy as a Transformative Global Imperative," International Affairs 99 (March 2023): 433–55.
24. Rajeev Bhargava, "What Is Indian Secularism and What Is It For?" India Review 1 (January 2002): 1–32.
25. Niraja Gopal Jayal, "Reinventing the Republic: Faith and Citizenship in India," Studies in Indian Politics 10 (June 2022): 14–30.
26. Luke Wilson, "Issue Update: India's State-Level Anti-Conversion Laws," U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, March 2023, www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/2023%20India%20Apostasy%20Issue%20Update.pdf.
27. M. Mohsin Alam Bhat, "'The Irregular' and the Unmaking of Minority Citizenship: The Rules of Law in Majoritarian India," Social and Legal Studies, 13 April 2023, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09646639241238427.
28. Mehta, "Hindu Nationalism," 41.
29. K.K. Kailash, "'One Nation', New India and the Hollowing Out of the Federal Idea," India Forum, 17 February 2021, www.theindiaforum.in/article/one-nation-newindia-and-hollowing-out-federal-idea.
30. Yamini Aiyar and Louise Tillin, "'One Nation,' BJP, and the Future of Indian Federalism," India Review 19, no. 2 (March–April 2020): 117–35.
31. Suhas Palshikar, "Understanding the Nature of Party Competition and Politics of Majoritarianism," Economic and Political Weekly (Engage) 56, no. 10 (6 March 2021): 5.
32. Vinay Sitapati, "Election Is the Ideology," Indian Express, 28 May 2019.
33. Devesh Kapur, "Why Does the Indian State Both Fail and Succeed?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 34 (Winter 2020): 31–54.
34. Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman, "India's Stalled Rise: How the State Has Stifled Growth," Foreign Affairs 101 (January–February 2022): 139–50.