The Encroaching Threats to India's Democracy

Sixty-eight years after India’s heralded constitution came into effect in 1950, the country seems to have found its commitment to the document on shaky ground. The surprising source of this tension? A new Bollywood movie, Padmaavat.

As a movie, it’s a period drama depicting the life of a 14th-century Rajput princess. But as a political test case, the plot around the movie began last year, when it was met with fierce protests after a fringe Hindu group named the Karni Sena contended that the movie depicts the Rajput community, a powerful Indian caste, in a light it believes to be less than honorable; in the fall, the Karni Sena even threatened the movie’s director and lead actress, delaying its original December release date.

So, a fringe group didn’t like a movie and raised a ruckus. That’s not remarkable. What’s remarkable is how the Indian government reacted. Rather than prosecute the Karni Sena’s leaders for making threats, it convened a panel of historians to determine whether the movie distorts history. The panel eventually cleared the movie for release, on the condition that changes be made, including a title change. Yet, the controversy persisted. Several state leaders tried to ban the movie in their areas, forcing India’s Supreme Court to step in as arbiter. The court, in late January, ultimately ruled in favor of the movie, citing arguments for freedom of speech and expression: “When creativity dies, values of civilization corrode,” the court determined.

Even so, that didn’t stop a number of theaters from not showing the movie out of fear of riots. This uproar speaks to a key question: While the court’s order was honored in a few crucial ways, how much legal and moral respect does India’s constitution truly command? Observers have long either lionized the document as a new sacred book—a consensus of national values in a very multi-ethnic country—or condemned it as an unworkable and unrealistic social contract. But recent decades have made clear that India’s broader attachment to its national constitution has become unpredictable: People are showing an increasing willingness to latch onto certain aspects of the constitution and jettison others—all at the risk of the country’s stability.

On the one hand, the power provisions of India’s constitution are universally accepted as a sort of rulebook: They guide leaders on how to transfer power from one elected government to the next, how to distribute power between the center and the states, and how different branches of government should exercise their power to check overreach by other organs. These aspects of the constitution are largely embraced without question, and they’ve sustained decades of relatively robust governance.

The constitution’s rights provisions, however, are breached with alarming regularity and impunity. Of these, civil and political rights are easily among the most abused provisions. The constitution protects against discrimination on the basis of caste, language, religion, and gender. At the same time, though, these make up some of the most heated fault lines in Indian society. Indeed, not only are divisions based on caste and religion common features of elections, but political parties also have consistently aligned with certain subgroups. Commentators routinely praise politicians for being “astute” and “ruthless” in their messaging, no matter how divisive the message. In addition, fringe groups often chip away at freedom of speech: Padmaavat isn’t the only movie these groups have condemned, and it’s not likely to be the last. And while many leading politicians, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, have vowed to protect these sorts of rights, few have unequivocally condemned the Karni Sena.

In that, the Karni Sena episode meaningfully illustrates, among other things, the increasingly divergent ways in which India’s political actors approach power and rights provisions. Importantly, two popularly elected state governments sought to prevent Padmaavat’s release. When that effort failed, they considered banning the movie on law-and-order grounds. And when the Supreme Court ruled otherwise, these states agreed to fall in line—but then violent protests erupted, essentially forcing cinema owners to take matters into their own hands and not show the movie, as a means for squelching any further unrest. The result: no open defiance of the court, but still an effective smothering of free speech; no overt attack on the constitution, as a whole, but still, arguably, disregard for some of its most significant provisions.

What does all that mean for the state of democracy in India?

Three things. First, while the Karni Sena may be a fringe group, the government’s tepid response to it signals that political leaders believe that they have more to lose in trying to rein in the group than they do in protecting basic constitutional tenets. In other words, if the Karni Sena is a fringe group, it’s one with outsized influence.

Second, in light of the government’s relative inaction, it isn’t a stretch to see a pattern emerging in which rights like freedom of speech hold salience only when they affect a large number of people—and in an electorally significant way. In word, both of India’s main political parties strive for equality; in deed, however, their willingness to protect the rights integral to achieving this goal hinges on an issue’s ability to win votes.

And third, India appears to be witnessing repeated blows against the liberal character of its constitution. Two decades ago, Fareed Zakaria wrote an article for Foreign Affairs magazine. In it, he grapples with the threat of burgeoning illiberal democracies around the world, specifically in countries where the transfer of power takes place via elections in which civil liberties and freedoms have tenuous institutional support. Is this scenario becoming a reality for India? And, if so, how can it be reversed?

In the short run, the onus of preserving the liberal elements of India’s constitution rests with its main countermajoritarian institution: the Supreme Court. But in the long years ahead, it will depend almost entirely on the collective will of the people, and on how they choose to square long-held tensions with democratic principles.