India teeters on the edge of theocracy

With general elections coming up in July, the US presidential election at the end of the year and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, it would be easy for the general reader to let Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s third consecutive election victory slip beneath the radar. But we should be paying attention; his victory signifies the normalisation of Hindu nationalism in contemporary Indian politics, which is seriously damaging India’s secular democratic foundations and sliding the country further towards autocracy.

It also signals how Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are seeking to turn India into a theocracy, with a government ruled “by officials who are regarded as divinely guided”.

In the weeks preceding this year’s election, Modi pronounced he was “only an instrument through which God has decided to achieve and so whenever I do something I believe that God wants to get it done”. He also said  that he had been given a “daivya shakti” (divine power) or “ishwariya shakti’ (godly power) to rule over India (or Bharat, as it’s known by the BJP).

Such assertions echo the very definition of theocracy, in which the civil leader is believed to have a personal connection with the deity or deities of that civilisation’s religion or belief. Modi’s image as a forceful and muscular orator supports these assertions, making him a figure of reverence for hundreds of millions of Indians. As Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya, a professor of political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University said “he casts a certain messianic spell on his voters … it’s this combination of political power and perceived divinity in his persona which enables the BJP to project him as the one beyond scrutiny”.

Although the party’s seat count dropped to 240 from 303 in 2019, its share of the popular vote only marginally dipped from 37.36 percent in 2019 to 36.56 percent in this year’s election, and due to increased population growth actually grew by nearly seven million voters. Nearly all the opposition parties joined together against the BJP during the election, but the results suggests that Modi’s personal allure is far from diminished.

Towards a Hindutva India

At the heart of BJP policies is the triptych of ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan’, which aims to actively assimilate all other religious and cultural identities towards their ethno-nationalist vision. Often captured by the umbrella term of Hindutva (or ‘Hinduness’), the BJP’s fundamental aim is to restore the country to its perceived historic, Hindu-based, civilisational greatness. Ever-higher economic growth rates underpin these core Modi narratives of a resurgent India.

Since 2014, the BJP has targeted the country’s 200 million Muslims with legislation designed to inhibit their rights as citizens of India. Both the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 disqualified Muslims from the same rights enjoyed by the Hindu majority. Additional policies included the construction of gigantic camps for undocumented Muslim migrants in Assam, described some political analysts as evidence of “the stage just before genocide”. Other legislation has also aimed to block marriages among Muslim men and Hindu women (to constrain what Hindu nationalists regard as ‘love jihad‘).

The marginalisation of Muslims is evident in other political developments, such as Modi’s personal dedication of the Hindu temple Bhavya Ram Mandir at Ayodhya in 2024, which replaced a former mosque on the site. Fulfilling a long-standing manifesto promise, BJP rhetoric claimed that the dedication “has rejuvenated our society, … (leading to) a new interest in our history and heritage”. Across the country, thousands of other mosques are also being targeted by party activists for potential demolition.

There have also been attacks on civil liberties and dissent, not just Muslims, with critics of the government being called “enemies of the people” or “anti-national”. The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 2019 is being used to harass, intimidate, and imprison political opponents, and silent dissent in academia. In June 2024, the celebrated writer Arundhati Roy was charged under the Act for a remark she made in a 2010 speech that noted, “Kashmir has never been an integral part of India”.

Updated defamation laws have also aided this subjugation. Since 2014, more than 7000 people have been charged with sedition under the all-embracing Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code of 1870. And in late 2023, 146 members of the Indian parliament were suspended on apparent corruption charges and had their bank accounts frozen. The suspensions were denounced as the “murder of democracy” and as a way for the BJP to pass hardline legislation.

The mother of all theocracies

Apart from severely undercutting Modi’s assertion that India is “the mother of all democracies”, Hindutva’s normalisation and India’s democratic backslide pose major dilemmas for the international community. With the West ever-keen to use New Delhi to counter-balance Beijing, it now often disregards India’s contemporary authoritarian descent.

In these ways it seems that the West is, once again, letting its strategic and economic benefits trump any secondary concerns relating to the erosion of human and democratic rights of certain populations. Not only does this apathy embolden autocratic attacks by Modi and the BJP on their political and cultural adversaries, it may also encourage and accelerate India’s eventual theocratic descent.

Such a future would be highly negative, both for the country’s non-Hindus, but also the democratic credentials and political legitimacy of the current world order.