In 'The Dismantling of Indian Democracy', Prem Shankar Jha traces the roots of what he sees as India's democratic collapse.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakrabarty.

Prem Shankar Jha’s latest offering, The Dismantling of Indian Democracy, is a forensic autopsy of democracy in India which started dying even as the Constitution inaugurated it. Jha puts this pithily in an early chapter headed, “Where did disenchantment begin?” And gives the short answer, “At the very beginning.”

But before the gloom set in on the “dismantling of democracy”, he is at pains to describe the global setting in which democracy came to India through a “Westernised educated middle-class” that regarded “freedom and self-government” as “synonymous” and, therefore, had no hesitation in founding independent India through a Constitution that was imbued with democratic principles and sought to provide fundamental rights and good governance through democratic institutions, checking and balancing the powers of the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, supplemented by a free press, but all four wedded to a democratic ethos, notwithstanding the evident fact that India’s “traditional cultural norms” included “an inordinate respect for age and hierarchy within families” undergirded by the “ritualized oppression of the lower castes”.

What was “unique” about India embracing universal suffrage and affirmative action towards its “depressed classes” as the fountainhead of electoral democracy was that the comparatively tiny European ethnic nation-states had only slowly evolved to universal suffrage and refrained till much later in taking “affirmative” action in regard to historically disadvantaged sections of society. We plunged into both revolutionary measures notwithstanding nearly “ninety percent” of India’s adult population living in villages with poor or no literacy and woefully lacking in even elementary education. Moreover, we, uniquely, embraced diversity as the best guarantee of national unity and thus avoided the European disease of regarding uniformity as the bonding adhesive of national unity.

A non-starter?

Instead, however, of building on these distinctive national attributes, Jha is of the view that we failed democracy from the start by falling short on three fronts: “economic security”; “the rule of law”; and “speedy, affordable justice”. As a result of this “failure, which deepened with every passing year”, the nation turned in 2014 to “an alternative model” of narrow nationhood that “despised ethnic diversity and religious pluralism” and advocated “the transformation of India into a ‘hard’ Hindu nation-state similar to the unitary nation-states of Europe”. The author finds the roots of “disenchantment” in “83 percent of the labour force – those between fifteen and thirty – having no employment whatsoever” in 2024; the “complete breakdown” of “India’s legal system” with cases remaining to be adjudicated requiring 120 years to be disposed of; and the police “stretched to breaking point”. Poor infrastructure and poisonous pollution are added to define what Jha sees as the “all-pervasive failure of administration” creating the disenchantment which has eventually led to the 11-year-old Modi  government that “has all but succeeded in destroying the independence of the four pillars upon which peoples’ freedoms rest in mature democracies” – the legislature, the executive, the judiciary and the media.

This reviewer has italicised “eventually” in the previous paragraph because Jha’s case is that the “transformation” did not suddenly begin in 2014 with the election that brought the BJP to power on its own. He traces the political failure (building on other failures) to the 1973-75 period when Indira Gandhi rose to unprecedented heights of personal power. With the essentially democratic PM declaring the notorious “national Emergency” after the Allahabad high court passed a judgment in June 1975 that, in her eyes, could have had the consequence of pushing her “out of office”, leaving a “vacuum at the centre”. Jha notes that the Emergency “saw a severe curtailment of democratic rights”.  The proclaimed Emergency of 1975 prepared the ground for the undeclared Emergency that has, 50 years later, overtaken our benighted land.

Jha further believes passionately that the founders of our Constitution naively trusted the extension of universal suffrage to automatically result in the election of candidates who would serve the people rather than feather their nests. He holds that the blind incorporation of British experience in a non-comparable situation where Indian constituencies are far more populated and geographically widespread and thus add significantly to campaign expenses, poses an ethical issue peculiar to India’s democracy: election funding.

Jha is convinced the answer lies in State funding of candidates’ election expenses to reduce financial reliance on transactional corporate funding. He deplores Indira Gandhi’s ban on company donations and abolition of the erstwhile princes’ privy purses after the Congress party’s declining fortunes were unveiled in the 1967 elections. He thinks this action was taken principally to “cripple a rising threat” to the Congress party’s “dominance of Indian politics and economics” by denying sources of corporate and royal house finances to the Swatantra Party and the Bharatiya Jan Sangh. Jha’s faith in state funding of elections is touching but the US example, above all, shows that politicians accept state funds as a basis, but not an alternative to humongous funding by billionaires and trillionaires and the business empires they head in return for state patronage. I am sceptical of Jha’s panacea as one who has fought seven Lok Sabha elections at a tiny fraction of the cost usually attributed to election expenses of candidates.

While I might be sceptical about the “alternative” of “state funding” that Jha commends, I cannot but agree with his description of democracy’s descent in India into a “clientelist democracy” that has resulted from  a business oligarchy exchanging largely illegal money for political favours to strengthen their booming businesses. Interestingly, the author points to local political leaders creating their own “clientelist” networks, thus spinning control of the party out of the hands of the central high command and devolving real power to a localised nexus of financiers and criminals capturing local levers of real power. They assert this in their individual political clout when it comes to ticket distribution.

In consequence, argues Jha convincingly, the criminalisation of politics has transformed into criminals in politics by criminals putting themselves forward as candidates, instead of, as earlier, sponsoring their henchmen. In consequence, the Association of Democratic Reforms, has unearthed the disturbing fact that the 2024 elections returned “46% MPs” who have “criminal cases registered against them”. To this fundamental distortion have been added other contributory factors such as the Commonwealth Games fiasco, the 2G scam allegations and the incompetent handling by Dr. Manmohan Singh’s ruling party of Anna Hazare’s “India Against Corruption” movement. That, “(f)or many, marked the end of faith in incremental reform and the beginning of a search for stronger, more decisive leadership”. These “many” thought they had found their hopes for strong leadership in Narendra Modi as PM. Is his government “fascist”?

Jha answers by beginning with a general discussion of “fascism”.  After examining various interpretations of European fascism, Jha opts to base himself on a 1965 publication by a University of Michigan political scientist, A.F.K. Organski, who famously located the impulse to fascism in disharmony between the pace of “economic development, political modernisation, and social adjustment”. When these three get “far out of line with each other”, fascism arises from society’s attempt to “bring the three back in line” by electing authoritarian regimes that rely on:

• extreme nationalism,
• demonising minorities, and
• strong men to bring back harmony in society.

This scholarly chapter is well worth mulling over.

Jha applies this theory to India refracted through the prism of his understanding of the period from Rajiv Gandhi to V.P. Singh (1985-1990) when powerful political forces were unleashed to transmogrify Indian constitutional democracy into “fascism clothed in saffron”. He traces the roots of saffron fascism to Tilak’s Hindu revivalism, but much more to V.D. Savarkar, who defined Indian nationhood as comprising three key elements: a common nation (rashtra); a common race (jati) and a common culture (sanskriti), Jha underlines that this foreshadows the Nazi definition of Germany as ein volk (one people), ein reich (one nation), ein Fuehrer (one leader). Golwalkar, who reigned supreme in the RSS from 1940 to 1973 hailed Hitler’s race theories for they reflected the RSS view. However, these remained arguments in the air because the masses were more concerned with securing Independence under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership. Emphatically, neither Savarkar’s Hindu Mahasabha nor Golwalkar’s RSS participated in the Freedom Movement. This crippled their political ambitions despite Savarkar earlier and Jinnah later endorsing the “two-nation theory” of Hindus and Muslims comprising not separate and irreconcilable communities, but two distinct nations. Partition was born in a welter of bitter bloodshed and forced migration of millions. For the saffron forces, says Jha, it was not this human suffering they regretted but India’s refusal to make India a “Hindu nation” as a just counterpart to Pakistan being proclaimed as the “homeland” for the sub-continent’s Muslims, later formalized as an “Islamic Republic”.

Moreover, when the Mahatma was assassinated by fanatics originating in the saffron brotherhood, they lost what little political capital they had as their favourite Congressman, Sardar Patel, proved his secular credentials by banning and cracking down on the RSS and its cadres. And India that is Bharat showed how secularism was woven into the warp and woof of Indian nationhood by effectively boycotting the political face of Hindutva for five long decades. How then did this national consensus on regarding all Indians, whatever their creed, unravel, unravelling along with it our democracy that half a century of constitutionalism had led us of Jha’s and my generation to think of as immutable?

This brings us to the heart of Jha’s analysis. We have already seen Jha’s theoretical construct of fascism in any country rearing its ugly head when disjunction grows between political development, social change and economic justice. In India, this disjunction had set in even as we drafted and adopted our Constitution. We have also seen Jha arguing that the seeds of the dismantlement of this democracy had been sowed, without the nation recognizing it, at the very start of our life as an independent nation, greatly accelerated by the wholly illegitimate (if not illegal) Emergency invoked for two dreadful years, 1975-77.

However, the proximate causes identified by Jha for the saffron wave slowly drowning our democracy from 1985 to 2014, and its acceleration over the last 11 years that Narendra Modi has been prime minister, constitutes the kernel of his book.

Finding the roots

Jha begins his penetrating analysis of the rise of fascism by devoting an entire and erudite chapter to examining the “Economic Roots of Fascism in India”. He traces its beginnings to the economic reforms initiated in 1978 which achieved huge momentum under Rajiv Gandhi’s sweeping measures of liberalisation that “turned the seemingly solid ground.. created (through controls) for the small-sized, owner-managed enterprises into quicksand”. The “socialist” controls, initiated by the Nehru-Mahalanobis Second Five Year Plan (1956-61), was taken far further by Indira Gandhi banning in 1970 company donations to political parties. This totally transformed the earlier “cosy co-operation” between big business and the Congress, dating back to the freedom movement, into “unconcealed hostility” between the Congress and corrupt, hegemonistic capitalists. While big business turned against Indira Gandhi because they could not easily circumvent her ban on company donations that had hitherto given them the political heft to exponentially increase their hold on the economy, the Congress found in the “new, intermediate bourgeoisie” a nexus with small business that massively profited from economic controls and was uninhibited in giving “clandestine donations”. This, Jha convincingly argues, led to the newly nurtured intermediate business class converting “its growing economic power into political power” by spinning centralised power into a network of clientelist networks at local levels.

However, Rajiv Gandhi’s much hailed impetus to the “freeing of the economy”, later given unprecedented momentum by Dr Manmohan Singh as finance minister and prime minister, had the (perhaps unintended) consequence of bringing back professionally managed big business to the fore, thereby causing the drifting away from the Congress of the intermediate petite bourgeoisie as the principal financiers of political parties. This disaffected class largely left the Congress camp for the saffron brotherhood, taking with them the “clientist” networks that had so largely benefited the Congress. This, argues the author, brought about over the next three decades the fall of the Grand Old Party and the political rise of the ‘Saffron Brotherhood’ – the Sangh parivar.

Having identified “root causes”, Jha proceeds to identify the three fundamental political developments, from Rajiv Gandhi’s time to V.P. Singh’s (1985-90), that, in the author’s view, played out the decline of the Congress and the corresponding rise of Hindutva as the governing philosophy of a once secular India that is Bharat: the Shah Bano case; the Babri Masjid dispute; and V.P. Singh’s championing of the Mandal Commission’s recommendations on reservations for the Other Backward Classes. I differ on details but broadly endorse his analysis.

The Gujarat years

We then come to the author’s brilliant peeling of the fascist onion, layer by layer, from the Gujarat riots of 2002 to the present. Jha tells a gripping story of how, from the “laboratory” of Gujarat to the national laboratory, saffron fascism has led to “The Dismantling of India’s Democracy”. His command of the narrative is impressive; the detailed recall stunning in its deeply researched authenticity; the exposition clear and disturbingly convincing. Step by step, he leads the reader through the fog of what actually happened at Godhra on February 27, 2002 and the State-supervised “pogrom” that overtook Gujarat between February 28 and March 10. He says that  to label the pogrom as “a riot is to deliberately describe a tiger as a tabby cat”.

Jha sketches the rise of Modi through the ranks of the RSS to the top post of chief minister, with a strong affiliation to the Viswa Hindu Parishad, principally “by making political speeches reeking of animosity towards Muslims and towards Pakistan”. He then leveraged his office “to galvanize Hindu chauvinism and use it to shore up his hold on power”, even if this meant, or even if this particularly meant, that many hundreds (perhaps up to 2000) innocent Muslims who had nothing to do with Godhra were brutally slaughtered in the ten-day Muslim pogrom of Feb-March 2002 in Ahmedabad and elsewhere in Gujarat. The slaughter is recorded by Jha in horrific if painful detail. PM Vajpayee was “outraged” but moderated his horror when confronted with the “hero’s welcome” Modi received at the Goa convention of the BJP on April 10, 2002. “Narendra Modi demonstrated that he had all the traits needed for becoming the Supreme Leader of an authoritarian party that held democracy in contempt; the decisiveness required for taking difficult decisions; the determination needed to see them through; and the demagogic power needed to make the masses believe anything he wanted them to.”

That is the background to a story of administrative bullying, mass massacre, murders, and no less than “twenty-one police ‘encounters’” between 2003 and 2006 that mark the milestones of the rise of the BJP from unbridled state power in Ahmedabad to unbridled national power in Delhi.

It has to be emphasised that most of the cases cited by Jha have reached courts at different levels and Modi-Shah have been judicially exonerated of any wrong-doing. Public support for Modi-Shah in Gujarat has been phenomenal and largely similar in the Gangetic plains (if not in the Gangetic delta). Still, the stories bear repetition.

Prem Shankar Jha has been eminently fair to those he exposes. He meticulously summarises the official version, often endorsed by the courts. He then, one by one, assiduously picks the holes in the official version through media and court records. His horror grows as he moves from the vicious persecution of honest, humane, conscientious administrators and police officers in contrast to the protection given and rewards in promotion and extensions given to more “cooperative” officers.

The stage was set for this notorious form of administration by the Pakistani terrorist attack on the Akshardam temple in Ahmedabad, and one co-conspirator’s claim that “Modi had been its original target”. Thereafter, the template was set to brand every terrorist attack as directed by Pakistan essentially at CM Narendra Modi which “burnished”, says Jha, “his image as a fearless leader of the Hindu race”.

The author particularly highlights the “independent report” on the post-Godhra pogrom commissioned by the Gujarat high court from the chief metropolitan magistrate of Ahmedabad, the exceptionally brave and dedicated judicial officer, S.P. Tamang. His report ran to 243 pages, written in long-hand because he could not find a trusted stenographer. When the Gujarat high court then ordered the Gujarat government to set up a Special Investigating Team, the SIT endorsed virtually all of Tamang’s findings. The Gujarat high court judgement acted on those findings.

When the Gujarat government appealed to the Supreme Court, the SC’s duly appointed amicus curiae, Raju Ramachandran, reinforced the Gujarat high court’s judgment. However, instead of basing itself on the findings of its own amicus curiae, the SC set up yet another Special Investigation Team under a retired DG CBI, R.K. Raghavan. He reversed the findings of earlier SITs and claimed there was no “prosecutable evidence” against the CM or other ministers. The SC agreed with Raghavan. Did this have anything to do with Narendra Modi having, in the meanwhile, become PM with Amit Shah as his Union Minister of Home Affairs?

Moving from the pogrom of February-March 2002, Jha covers in equally pernickety detail, the “fake encounters” in which the Gujarat police successively killed Ishrat Jahan, an innocent 19-year-old girl; Sohrabuddin Sheikh, a small time crook and his wife, Kausar Bi, the following year; and an associate of theirs, Tulsiram Prajapati, another small-time criminal, along with two alleged Pakistani terrorists who were described as ‘fidayeen’ recruited by Pakistan’s ISI and sent to Gujarat in a round-about way to kill Chief Minister Narendra Modi – a murky tale through which Jha relentlessly reveals all that the authorities were at pains to hide.

He then takes up the murder of Haren Pandya, a prominent BJP MLA from the Ahmedabad assembly constituency of Ellisbridge that was a saffron stronghold from which Modi had sought (unsuccessfully) to oust Pandya when he had to find a safe seat after being nominated chief minister by the BJP high command in 2001. Told with Jha’s penchant for the least detail and reading between the lines with great felicity, Jha punctiliously recounts the official version  before taking his magnifying glass to the whole tragic incident of Pandya’s “murder”. Pandya’s guilt lay in warning the RSS and BJP leadership that Modi “would destroy the party and the Sangh for his personal gain”; had objected in cabinet to Modi’s decision, at the VHP’s behest, to bring the bodies of the Godhra victims to Ahmedabad; “deposed secretly” to the Concerned Citizens Tribunal; and given Outlook magazine brutally frank interviews that indicted CM and his team.

Pandya was found shot dead in the Law Garden Lane in his parked car, with six or seven bullets of different calibers, one of which had travelled from his scrotum to pierce his abdominal wall. “[T]here can be little doubt,” writes Jha, “about who gained the most from his death” – pointing to chief minister Modi.  The CBI investigation, conducted patchily and wrapped up in six months, focused on a Hyderabadi gun-for-hire, Asghar Ali, who, it was alleged, had received a supari for the contract killing of Pandya.

Jha shows that although the Pandya murder took place at 7.20am on March 26, 2003, the police say they got to know only some three hours later and then took a fourth hour to get to the spot. He questions how such a well-known, repeatedly elected public figure in his own constituency could not have been identified earlier by local passers-by for such a long time on so busy a street. He wonders whether the inordinate delay in someone reaching the spot from the police station ten minutes away was on account of contradictory orders coming from high up; and he questions the CBI version, upheld in the trial court, that a hired Muslim assassin shot Pandya in revenge for the  Muslims killed in the 2002 pogrom, underlining: “the three-hour delay in the police getting to Law Garden; its insistence[,] in the face of strong forensic evidence that at least two guns had been used[,] that there had been only one assassin, Asghar Ali; and its sole reliance for this claim on the word of (a vendor, Anil) Yadaram, who would have been too terrified of the police to do anything but endorse its version of the murder”. The author considers as more credible the hypothesis that Pandya was kidnapped, shot dead elsewhere, and brought back to the car, and his dead body splayed. Bullets from a second gun were then pumped into the dead body, which accounts for bullets of different calibers being found in the autopsy. Jha’s finger points to the notorious team of ‘encounter specialists.’

On August 29, 2011, Jha recalls, “the Gujarat High Court threw the trial court convictions out with anger and contempt”, holding that “the investigating officers concerned ought to be held accountable for their ineptitude”. However, extraordinarily and with “no precedent”, the Supreme Court on 5 July 2019, “reversed’ the Gujarat High Court’s acquittal of the 12 persons charged by the CBI.

Although the author does not explicitly say so, it seems to this reviewer that this case, in which the judiciary’s controversial final conclusion came 16 long years after the murder, perfectly illustrates Jha’s basic thesis that the law’s inordinate delays and ‘perverse’ court decisions have contributed significantly to the dismantling of our democracy. (Elsewhere in the book, on pp. 297-298, the author shows that in May 2022, “41.4 million cases were pending in the Indian judiciary”, of which “three-quarters” were pending criminal cases, including 5.2 million ‘pending’ for 5-10 years; 408,000 for 20-30 years; and “more than 73,000 not decided even after 30 years of litigation.”)

Undoing national institutions

The Gujarat model was brought to the national capital when Modi won a stunning general election victory in 2014. His continuous 11-year rule till 2025 and beyond has marked what Jha calls “The Maturing of Indian  Fascism”, during which the ‘Bharatiyata’ of the Vajpayee years was replaced by the ‘Hindutva’ of the Modi era. Constitutional democracy has been “hollowed out”, not by replacing the Constitution but by suborning each of its pillars.

The media was the first to have its freedom curtailed by the expedient of withdrawing the Press Information Bureau card “which allowed special correspondents and other senior journalists to visit ministries and talk to civil servants without having to reveal their own or their host’s identity”. Besides, Big Brother watched all entrances to ministries through CCTV cameras. Then came the turn of the audio-visual media. By getting advertisers to desert privately owned channels, notably Prannoy Roy’ s immensely successful NDTV, and then having the channels taken over by favoured big business houses, private TV channels increasingly became “a mouthpiece of Modi’s budding fascist regime”. Inevitably, social media and modestly funded podcasts, which are difficult to control, have become the principal source of independent news and comment. Doubtless, the Modi machine is seeking ways of discipling them.

The next target was the judiciary. By the sleight of hand of offering judges lucrative post-retirement assignments, says Jha, after the early age at which Indian judges retire compared to their counterparts in developed democracies, the judiciary has been compromised and turned into a handmaiden of the executive. How this has been done is detailed by the author and strikingly illustrated by the case of Supreme Court Justice A.M. Khanwilkar. He was a remarkable judge who wrote 226 Supreme Court judgements and was part of 817 benches during his six years in the Supreme Court but turned in his last two years from a liberal, far-sighted judge into a compliant one by the prospect of retirement into obscurity. Jha finds the dangling before his eyes of the prospect of being named Lokpal (Ombudsman) in return for compliance, as the only credible explanation for Khanwilkar rejecting all 240 petitions against Modi’s 2018 amendment of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) which “reversed the burden of proof” by making “indicted persons prove their innocence”. He then upheld the amended Foreign Contributions (Regulation) Act that virtually cut all foreign funding to think-tanks and human rights organizations and NGOs seeking environmental protection, followed by “peremptorily” dismissing Begum Zakaria’s appeal against an earlier court judgement that had exonerated everyone of complicity in the murder of her distinguished husband at Gulberg Society in the 2002 pogrom. The author considers these judgements to show that Khanwilkar “moved steadily further and further into Modi’s political orbit” as his date of retirement drew near. He also mentions in passing the similar subversion of a slew of other Supreme Court justices, including at least two chief justices.

The hollowing out of institutions has been carried further forward by giving unfettered powers to the Enforcement Directorate. As against 112 cases launched by ED in the nine years from 2005 to 2014, it has “launched 5310 cases between June 2014 and the end of March 2022, conducted 3086 searches, attached over Rs 1,O4,700 crore worth of assets .. and filed 880 charge sheets” but “in this entire time the ED was able to secure only twenty-three convictions”, that is “less than four in every thousand indictments”. This shows the purpose of unleashing the ED was harassment, principally of Modi’s political opponents, securing convictions being only a secondary objective.

Meanwhile the Electoral Bonds scheme, later held to be violative of the law, was launched. According to a report in The Hindu of 21 March 2024, says Jha, the scheme raised “donations of Rs 2592 crores” from 41 companies which “had been raided” some “56 times”. Of this sum, Rs 1853 crores had been donated “after the raids against them” (author’s italics). This shows, argues Jha irrefutably, “the true extent to which the BJP had used extortion to garner funds for itself”.

Jha then turns the lens on the reforms undertaken by Modi-Shah of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) dating back to the third quarter of the 19th century, then overhauled post-Independence by the Congress government in 1973. The new Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita, read with the Bhartiya Nagrik Suraksha Sanhita and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, not only replace the fancy Latin words of the IPC with fancy Sanskritised Hindi, they “have  turned India’s criminal justice system into a reign of terror” by adding 20 new crimes to the criminal code and increasing the punishment sentence by 33 additions to the earlier list. More ominously, “any police officer” can “arrest and incarcerate a citizen on suspicion” and repeatedly, over a ninety-day period, “bring him back from judicial to police custody” without “having to bother with such democratic obstacles as bail and habeas corpus”.

The latest blow has been the subversion of the Election Commission. To illustrate how new legislation, bulldozed through Parliament, has worked out on the ground to “consolidate fascism” and promote an “electoral autocracy”, Jha meticulously records raids, arrests and jail for Sanjay Raut, deputy chief minister of Maharashtra and Anil Deshmukh, Home Minister. “As the 2024 Lok Sabha elections approached and Modi’s paranoia increased”, says Jha, “he began to use the ED and the PMLA with greater and greater abandon”. This is well-illustrated by the “defamation of Arvind Kejriwal and the destruction of the AAP” and then “stealing” the Delhi election of 2025 by imprisoning the AAP leaders, conducting a “smear campaign” against them, and opening the way to the Election Commission winking at massive manipulation of electoral rolls by mass deletions amounting to 69,330 voters through the misuse of Form 7. Thus, the BJP won “forty-eight assembly seats…with slivers of votes that added up to 1.9.per cent of the vote share percentage”. (Note: This was written and published well before Rahul Gandhi took the country by storm over ‘vote chori’ in in one assembly segment in Bengaluru)

Electoral fraud has happened essentially by the castration of the Election Commission through passing an amendment to the law on the appointment of the Chief Election Commissioner and his cohort, which replaced the Chief Justice of India by a minister of the government in the three-member committee that selects the Chief Election Commissioner and his two commissioners. The new CEC’s excesses resulted in two Commissioners, Ashok Lavasa and Arun Goel, resigning rather than compromising their conscience. Contemporary readers are more than aware of this outrage and there is, therefore, no need to burden this review with the details beyond citing Jha’s summary of:

“the transformation of constitutional provisions into instruments of suppression, the weaponization of investigative agencies, and the hollowing out of the Election Commission itself, reveal not just a political strategy but a coldly planned, systematic demolition of democracy from within, brick by brick.”

The way out

Is there a way out of this electoral autocracy? Yes, says the author in his Epilogue, provided his favourite fix, abundant state funding of elections, is undertaken and ‘syncretism’ instilled through education. The question of who will bell these cats while the BJP is in power are left open although Prem Shankar Jha, somewhat pathetically, quotes stray sentences from Mohan Bhagwat’s speeches and Vajpayee’s ‘musings’ to “show that the syncretic impulse has not completely died out even within the RSS”, because “the guiding philosophy” of India that is Bharat  “is not secularism but dharma”.

That is where this reviewer parts company from the author. Jha despairs that Opposition unity is a chimera. He does not mention that, notwithstanding the patchy, ad hoc throwing together of several regional parties with the Congress in the INDIA bloc, INDIA parties together were only six short of the BJP’s tally in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Now, the frightening but real prospect of ‘electoral autocracy’ has, at long last, galvanised the Congress and several of its partners, particularly M.K. Stalin’s DMK, Tejaswi Yadav’s RJD and Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, not to forget Mamata Banerjee’s repeatedly victorious Trinamool Congress, among others, to mount a determined challenge to the BJP in assembly elections leading to the general elections of 2029 – or perhaps even earlier given the schisms opening up in the Sangh parivar which the author has chosen to ignore. I am confident democracy will be saved at the precipice.

I end commending this insightful book to every English-speaking citizen of India and expressing the hope that the  publishers will get it translated into as many Indian languages as possible. It is the least they can do to save India’s democracy and the values on which constitutionalism has been built from December 9, 1946, when the drafting committee first convened (and, coincidentally, the very day Sonia Gandhi was born!) to that dreadful day in May 2014 when Prime Minister Modi took office.

Mani Shankar Aiyar is a former Union minister and civil servant.