This episode analyzes the elections in India and the trajectory of Indian democracy from the mid-seventies to today. How do voter motivations due to worsening economic conditions influence elections in the country? And how do expectations for democracy to deliver economic growth and development play a role? Listen to hear how a new alignment of parties can help the cause of democracy in Indian elections to come.
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Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to a new episode of Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna, Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
This is the fourth episode of season nine of Democracy in Question, and I'm really pleased to welcome back Yogendra Yadav, whom I had the pleasure to host three years ago in the second season of my podcast. Yogen is a man of many talents and achievements. He's not only an accomplished political theorist and an expert on elections and social movements in India, but he's also an engaged political activist himself.
He quit his academic positions eight years ago to establish the Swaraj India Party. He's a member of the Sanyukt Kisan Morcha Coordination Committee, which was involved in the successful Farmers Protest in 2021 and 2022. In 2022, he joined the Bharat Jodo Yatra, the march across the Indian subcontinent to unify the nation, led by Rahul Gandhi, in an effort at mass mobilization for national unity against a politics of hate.
We will have occasion to talk about his experiences in that march through the country. But Yogen is also a reputed psephologist. He played a pivotal role at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, where between 1996 and 2009, he designed and coordinated the National Election Studies, a comprehensive series of surveys of the Indian electorate.
In 2008, he received the Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Development Studies and a year later, the Global South Solidarity Award of the International Political Science Association. Besides being a regular contributor to the press, Yogendra is also author and editor of several books on Indian politics, including “State of Democracy in South Asia”[i]in 2008, “Electoral Politics in Indian States”[ii], 2009, “Democracy in Multinational Societies”[iii], which he co-authored with Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz in 2010. And most recently in 2020, a collection of his essays titled: “Making Sense of Indian Democracy: Theory in Practice”[iv].
The 2024 recent parliamentary elections in India have produced several surprises and upended all predictions. Yogendra Yadav was perhaps the only analyst with a dissenting opinion to the mainstream opinion polls and media. He predicted not only the relative decline of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP, which has won the elections, however, with a significantly narrower margin. We'll begin by discussing the causes and consequences of these results, situating it in the broader context of debates about changing prospects of democracy in India.
I'll ask Yogen to elaborate on his analysis and to reflect on the role of new media in lending a voice to critique, which also ultimately reshaped some political dynamics. I'll take advantage of Yogen's expertise in explaining the electoral map of the world's largest democracy in regional, geographical terms and talk to him about how it's possible that opinion polls could have gone so disastrously wrong.
And finally, I'll ask Yogen to share with us his personal experiences as a key participant in one of the largest social movements in recent years. Whether all this adds up to a robust promise of liberal democratic revival in India remains to be seen. Yogen, welcome back to the podcast. It's a real pleasure to have you with me today and thank you so much for making the time.
Yogendra Yadav (YY): Thank you, Shalini. Your listeners must be wondering if the man suffers from schizophrenia if he does all the kind of things you describe me to be doing. So, I think it's best to say that I'm a political activist who's working for restoration of constitutional values and democratic institutions. That may be a simple, shorter, and accurate description. The rest is past.
SR: The last time you were my guest on the podcast, it was in May 2021, a time when many were concerned about the future of India's democracy. Predictions abounded that it was heading in the direction of authoritarian rule, and in your remarkable book titled “Making Sense of Indian Democracy”, you use the term “democracy capture” to describe the then political situation. In June this year, 642 million Indian citizens went to the ballot boxes out of 968 million who were eligible. And interestingly, you describe the result of these elections as “a victory for democracy”. So, what has changed over the past three years? And how would you explain this partial but yet promising reversal of the trend?
YY: Partial but promising. I think that's the key word which you've picked up. We should begin by noticing something that you mentioned about our earlier conversation. After the victory of the BJP in 2014, and particularly after the second victory in 2019, it seemed that India's democratic future was certainly in danger. I was one of those who had begun to describe it as “competitive authoritarianism”. Because in the 21st century we have to go beyond simple descriptions like democracy and dictatorship. These are two ideal types, but the political systems that you get in the world are hybrids.
India was definitely beginning to look like one where elections were held regularly, but everything in between two elections was beginning to resemble an authoritarian regime in terms of suppression of free media, assault on all political opponents and dissenters, serious curbs on judiciary use of all state machinery in the aid of the ruling party.
And frankly, even a couple of months before election, it was very hard for anyone to say that the ruling party will not get a thumping majority. As a matter of fact, the prime minister in his supreme confidence had announced it on the floor of the house that his party this time was going to get 400 plus seats in a 543-member lower house of the Indian parliament, which is Lok Sabha. Now 400 out of 543 was the target, which was duly and obediently amplified by the Indian media.
So, the overall context of the election was that, all right, BJP is not only going to get its third clear majority. This time it's going to be a record-breaking majority. And expectations set by pre-election forecasts was that BJP alone would get something between 300 to 350, and with their allies, they could indeed touch the magic 400 figure. It's in the context of that, that we must see the election outcome. It's difficult for anyone to get a third term anywhere in the world. And 240 is not bad.
The ruling party losing 63 seats coming down from 303 to 240 was nothing short of a political earthquake in India. So that’s what was reported as electoral setback. But if you were sitting in India, this was an earthquake, an earthquake, which was not anticipated even a few hours before the election, because as you mentioned, every single exit poll dutifully reported that Mr. Modi and his allies were set to get 370 plus. Finally, with all his allies, he ended up with 290. So, there was a big earthquake. The reason we call it partial is that the long-term trends that have come to compromise the quality of Indian democracy have not disappeared. Some of the attacks on civil society, on political dissenters and on minorities continue. And it is yet to be seen whether the government would begin to understand and follow the democratic norms that it is expected to. So, in that sense a reversal, but a partial reversal.
SR: Yogen, you've struck another note of caution in your recent article in The Print[v]. You argue there that these results are, of course, welcome as they reflect the defeat of a strong man personality cult. But you caution against reading these election results as a strong endorsement of either secularism or also of liberal democracy by Indian voters. You have an intriguing formulation there that I'd like you to elaborate on. You write that the positive aspects of the 2024 results are, and I quote you, “the consequences of the verdict, not necessarily the intentions of the voters”. Could you explain why you think that?
YY: I suspect my social scientist is sort of speaking through me, the political activist. You see, the problem is that we tend to read from consequences back into intentions. The problem is that if something really helps the cause of democracy, we begin to imagine that voters must have voted for, with democracy in their heart and mind. The problem is that if something helps constitutionalism, we imagine that voters must have had the copy of the constitution in their head. Now, the trouble is that consequences and intentions are somewhat different. There is absolutely no doubt that this election is a very important break for the kind of decline that we were witnessing.
So, in that sense, of course, it's a victory for democracy, for secularism, for constitutionalism, but it would be premature. And that's very important to understand because I see many friends prematurely celebrating what's happening. It is important to understand that this need not be what the voters had in their mind. To my mind the voters’ choice was mediated by above all, by their economic conditions, by their livelihood situations. The conditions of ordinary Indians have been bad. Unemployment has been one of the highest ever recorded in the history of India. People's purchasing power has been low. Inflation is what the economists measure, and price rise is what the people feel. So, when you go to Indians and say, what's your problem? They say price rise. And you say, but inflation is only 3 percent. What they are saying: I cannot afford the things I really want and need to have. So, they're talking about lack of purchasing power. People felt that they could not afford to get things that they really wanted to have. The condition of the farmers has been very poor and the government hasn't done very much for the farmers. Livelihood conditions were very bad for the people.
To my mind what really worked in this election was, number one, people went back to normal politics. People asked questions of their representatives. What have you done in the last five years? Where were you? Why did I not see you when the roads were not there, when there was no water, no electricity or education? Hospitals were bad. People started asking questions of the government about their livelihood conditions. As I mentioned, inflation, unemployment, farmers conditions. The ex-untouchable community, which is now called Dalits, they started wondering if the government was up to some deeper mischief of amending the constitution, which would deprive them of the affirmative action provisions that they have enjoyed over the last seven decades. So, all these things came together to produce a verdict which deprived the BJP of what it wanted. However, Mr. Modi continues to be the most popular public figure I think about 15, 20 points ahead of his nearest competitor.
So, in that sense, I had said that we should not assume that that democratic secular India is safe. We just have got a foothold. But it's a long-term challenge. You know, apart from all those surveys, etcetera, I traveled very, very extensively during this election.
And what I did was just to go and speak to very ordinary people in their natural, normal settings, in their homes, in the places where they get together for gossip. And one thing I realized was that the seven decades or at least first six decades of functioning of democracy has led to a certain democratic temperament. It has kind of sedimented in popular consciousness. When people cannot comprehend something, they can still smell it. They can smell that something is wrong, exactly the way they did in 1975-77 during the Emergency, which was India's first serious encounter with the authoritarian regime.
At that time, it was the Congress party. At that time, it was Mrs. Indira Gandhi. She had used constitutional provisions to essentially suspend democracy for a period of 19 months. People did not quite understand the constitutional impropriety of what she was doing. But at the end of that 19 months, when Mrs. Gandhi assured that she was going to win the election, held an open democratic election, partly to convince the rest of the world that she was not the dictator that she was being made out to be, the results were absolutely stunning. The Congress party was defeated in every single constituency across North India. I detected something similar this time. Traveling across cities, traveling across villages, speaking to ordinary people. There was an unease about what was being done.
So, in that sense, I would agree that in some ways it is the sedimented consciousness of democracy, which Indians have started taking as their political common sense. At the same time, it would be premature to assume that liberal democracy is safe. Therefore, my broad conclusion is: yes, we have gained a foothold, let us say to fight for constitutional values, to struggle for democracy. We have something positive on secularism as well. But all these battles have just begun. It's going to be a very, very long battle.
SR: One question about the discussions you were having with people in villages and in towns, which would interest me, is the economic question. Did you have the sense that people were disappointed by the failure of the promise of inclusive economic development, on which Mr. Modi came to power in 2014? And they have been waiting for economic growth, which is inclusive, which provides jobs, which is able to ameliorate their condition. And what they have seen is that the richest 1 percent in India owns more than 40.5 percent of its total wealth and 800 million Indians still depend on grain in the public distribution system. And malnutrition is what has killed two thirds of the babies in the country who died last year before their fifth birthday. Did that come up as a problem that people think democracy has not delivered the economic goods?
YY: People would not put it as democracy versus economic performance. In fact, the manner in which people understand democracy in India is precisely its promise of public welfare. Both these things are integrated. So, unlike the West, we don't have a formal notion of democracy simply as democratic procedures in South Asia, not just in India. We have had a substantive notion of democracy where people expect democracy to deliver welfare outcomes. In 2014, the Congress regime was perceived, and presented as a very corrupt regime, a regime which had actually initiated some deep pro-people reforms. Mr. Modi came with the promise of Ache Din, which would translate (as) “good days”. And people's real-life experience has simply not lived up to that. That came up (in conversations) again and again. In fact, the 800 million food scheme that you mentioned actually has worked for Mr. Modi. This is interestingly a scheme started by the regime prior to Mr. Modi. In 2013 when Congress was in power, they came up with a pathbreaking legislation called the National Food Security Act, which mandated the government to provide a certain minimum of food grain, mainly either rice or wheat to two thirds of Indian population.
Mr. Modi is an enterprising politician, as he has managed to put a personal stamp on it. And frankly, everyone in India, rural India believes this was Mr. Modi's scheme. which it never was. It was a Congress government scheme. In the National Food Security Act there was a very notional payment. So, you could get one kilogram of rice for rupees three. It'll be maybe five cents, something of that kind. So, you had to pay something of that kind for one kilogram of rice. Mr. Modi reduced it to zero. He said it's free. Now, mind you, the payment earlier was also negligible. It was nothing compared to the market price of food grain, but Mr. Modi had the political brilliance of converting that negligible into zero. Traveling through the villages, the one thing that people credited Mr. Modi was with about five kilograms per person free food grain that you get, which in rural India can be a substantial help.
You mentioned inequality. Now, the way in which ordinary people experience this inequality is through the fact that real rural wages have fallen in the last few years. After COVID, a very significant proportion of India's labor force shifted from urban areas back to rural areas. never to come back again to urban areas. So, the proportion of people who were unemployed, but invisibly unemployed increased. The proportion of India's working population itself declined. People who said that they were available to work themselves are less. People in rural areas experience it (inequality) through difficult access to education and health. The last couple of decades have seen a very sharp privatization of both these facilities and it's becoming simply unaffordable. But apart from that, there was also the question of a government which was increasingly seen to be unaccountable.
SR: Let me turn to another thing which you mentioned at the beginning, which is the mainstream media. But what's interesting is the role of the alternative media in these elections. And it seems there was a noticeable turn away of viewers from private TV channels. And the popularity of young commentators, both in Hindi and in English, who were using X, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, increased significantly. So, could you say something about the role that these independent, critical voices played? Were they really effective in reaching large audiences, rural audiences? Or were they restricted to the middle classes?
YY: Allow me to say something about the mainstream media first, because it's a fact that must be recorded and placed on record as it were. India has a very vibrant media in terms of its sheer reach. All over the world, the subscription of print media are declining. In India the circulation of print media is going up. Newspapers have higher circulations than before. And in Hindi language, there are at least five or six newspapers, which have a circulation that exceeds one million. Television now is a household commodity. About 80 percent of Indians have access to television and two thirds of Indiana reported watching news on television on a regular basis. So, it's a very deep penetration of media. This mainstream media has been completely captured by the ruling party.
Was there an alternative? Yes, of course. That is the story of the election. That YouTube, above all, has opened up a channel. It has opened up a channel partly because YouTube allows monetization. So not only does it provide an avenue for free expression of opinion, it also provides you with an economic model. And so many journalists who were left with no jobs, who were thrown out of all these mainstream media organizations because they were not willing to toe the line took to YouTube, some of them with spectacular success. I can easily think of about at least 10 YouTubers, each of whom have a subscription base of a million or plus.
I somehow used to believe Instagram is very elite and English, but I was wrong. YouTube and Instagram are a big hit. And because of this, the message reached so widely. In the course of elections, I was so fed up with what mainstream media was doing. And the impression that they were creating as if the election was a done deal. They had started saying it six months before the election. The election was a done deal. Mr. Modi was coming back. The only question was of how many more seats than 300 he would get this time. I was so fed up that I actually made a formal forecast. I had given up this business about a decade ago, but I thought it was absolutely important because psephology was becoming a tool for perpetuating political dominance.
People like to go with the perceived winner. And because Mr. Modi was consistently being projected as the perceived winner, I went back to my psephological self and actually made a forecast for this election, putting my entire reputation at stake. And then all the alternative channels picked it up; mainstream media also picked it up not so much to broadcast my views, but to broadcast someone else's counter to my views. The impact of alternative media was strong I would still say that alternative media was no match to the sheer footprint of mainstream media. So, in the last instance, having registered and celebrated the success of alternative media, I would still say mainstream media drowned it.
SR: This was an election in which very small numbers played a huge role, a 1 percent point difference would have made a significant difference to the kind of government which would have been formed, but you also made a point about regional differences. So let me ask you about the north-south divide, which a lot of commentators had said would show the BJP dominating the Hindi heartland, and it would at best make modest inroads into the southern states. (It) did work out quite differently from those predictions with significant losses for the ruling party in the North Indian states, which very few people except for yourself had predicted. So, the election result seems to have complicated the assumptions about the divide between North India and South India.
YY: First, the regional thing. India has about 40 percent population which is Hindi speaking, which is concentrated in Northern Indian states. BJP as a political force has its origins in this region. And there was a moment in history, when BJP was known as Hindi-Hindu -Hindustan party, which is to say a party which wanted India to be dominated by Hindi speaking Hindus, (the) religion would be Hindu, language would be Hindi. BJP has tried seriously to outgrow that image.
So, from that Hindi speaking North India, BJP expanded to West India and has largely been a party which is very weak in the south and in the eastern coastal region of India. In the south, you have states like Kerala dominated by the Left for a very long time, (a) large state like Tamil Nadu, which has seen Dravidian politics, very intense regional politics, which would not bow down to any nationalist party, any centrist party. States of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana on the eastern coast, which have been dominated by regional political parties and the coastal state of Orissa, dominated by one more regional party, the BJD. And finally, the state of West Bengal, Indian counterpart of Bangladesh on this side of the border dominated by TMC, another regional party.
Now, BJP has been very weak in all these areas. And one of the most significant obstacles the BJP faced in its rise was its inability to penetrate this region. BJP's game plan in this election was that they would, of course, again, sweep the North and West of India. And in addition, they would increase their strength in the southern and eastern coastal belt. What happened in reality was that BJP did succeed in increasing its presence in the southern and eastern coastal region.
However, the region that it took for granted, North and West India, that is where they faced very serious reversals. Now what does it mean? First of all, it's important to note that this election signifies the return of state politics. BJP’s rise to power in 2014 and (20)19 was characterized by primacy of national politics. So, the message was, forget your province. Forget your city. Forget your village. You are voting for the nation, you're voting for Prime Minister (Modi). So, privilege that consideration over everything else. 2014 saw that for one reason, 2019 saw a repeat of that for a very different reason. 2024 was not a repeat at all. Provincial politics mattered. And this was in some ways a throwback to the politics of 1990s where state politics was the most prominent consideration. The best way of understanding both the BJP success and its failure is to see it in the context of a vote against establishment. The BJP represented the political establishment in a very large part of the country. Now, wherever the BJP represented (the) political establishment, it suffered reversals. But in the southern and eastern coastal belt, BJP was anti-establishment. BJP could present itself as the challenger.
India is almost a continent. And you cannot think about what's happening here without looking at those regional dimensions. The one significant thing that we must note is that as a result of this BJP, which used to be a party, which was regionally very uneven has become more even than ever before. And BJP today has more of a national footprint. There's virtually no state of the Indian Union where BJP is not at least in double digits. So, BJP has its footprint in every part of India. It is the kind of national footprint that only the Congress party used to enjoy in India, which it does not enjoy anymore.
SR: So, taking my cue from that, the rise of, or the resurgence of, regional party politics of the 1990s once again. This time, however, it means that that Mr. Modi's government will be highly dependent on these coalition parties, (that of) Chandra Babu Naidu and Nitish Kumar. How stable do you think this NDA, National Democratic Alliance coalition will be despite all the differences? And what compromises do you think the BJP will be forced to make in order tosustain this coalition?
YY: Frankly, my view has been that the BJP being forced to enter into a coalition is not going to make a dramatic difference to the way it governs. Two or three things. Coalitions have generally been fairly stable in India. Coalition politics is not new to India. I actually have been saying for quite some time that India has always been governed by a coalition. From 1952 to 1977, the name of the coalition was Indian National Congress. I mean, it operated as it called itself a political party, but it was truly a coalition. But that aside coalition governments have been pretty stable. In a federal polity with a strong financial clout with the central government, there are many ways of keeping your allies in check. Both the two parties that you mentioned, Mr. Chandra Babu Naidu's party, which is now also the ruling party in the state of Andhra Pradesh and the JDU which is the ruling party in Bihar. Both of them would be dependent on the center. And I'm sure some liberal financial grants to the state and some ministries in the center, which are known to be say financially generously endowed, these things are usually good enough to keep your allies in check. My own sense, therefore, is that either in terms of stability or in terms of checking the democratic and secular credentials of the government, I would not depend so much on the allies and the coalition equation.
My own hope is from the Opposition, which is more strident, which is more self-confident, which is more assertive as we have seen in the recently concluded parliamentary session, the very first session of the new parliament. And above all, my hopes lie in protests, movements of resistance of which India has very many. And frankly, in the last five years, The real resistance to Mr. Modi's regime came not so much from parliamentary opposition, but from the street protests by the Muslim minority, protests by farmers, protests by unemployed youths. This civil society and movement sector is very vibrant in India.
SR: You are the founding president of Swaraj India, which has campaigned on many, many issues concerning ordinary citizens, but you also joined the Bharat Jodo Yatra, as I mentioned, led by Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition. This was a long march in which you traversed the entire length and breadth of the country interacting with people from all walks of life. And I think that's when you began probably also to see the writing on the wall about the election predictions, which you made so correctly, but also articulated so courageously, in the face of a really hostile and biased media environment, which you've described. What were the main lessons that you drew from this unique experience of walking several months through the country?
YY: This Bharat Jodho Yatra literally a walk across the country to unite India had two phases. First one was from the southernmost tip of India, Kanyakumari to the north of India Kashmir Valley, Srinagar. This was from September 2022 to end of January 2023. And we walked 4,000 kilometers. This was on foot. The second one was from the northeast of India, Manipur to the western coast, Mumbai. This was another 4,000 kilometers, but mainly on vehicles. Now, when the yatra began, when the first one began, the political climate was very bleak. The BJP had just scored a spectacular, unbelievable victory in the state of Uttar Pradesh, which is seen to be the political barometer for the entire North India. And all political commentators had started saying, (20)24 is a done deal. It was a very, very tough time.
You noted that we had a different party, Swaraj India, a small experiment in alternative politics red and green, and blue in the Indian context, because it represented also the politics of the disadvantaged. We took an unusual decision. We said we would practically suspend our own political party and for the next two years, we shall simply support mainstream opposition political parties because this was not an ordinary situation. This was a situation for protecting the very foundations of our Republic. And it makes no sense for us to try and strengthen our own party. So, we suspended, we practically froze our political party, and we joined the opposition, and we decided that any effort made by mainstream opposition party with all its limitations, they are the principal carrier today of opposition and our historic responsibility is to strengthen their hands.
I must confess this was not easy because people like me have been brought up in an anti-Congress context. If you've grown up in India in 60s and 70s and 80s, which is when I was growing up, Congress was the establishment and all of us were anti-establishment and anti-Congress. And as I mentioned earlier my interest in politics, in democracy, political science, everything began in 1977 when Mrs. Indira Gandhi and Congress were defeated in a dramatic electoral turnaround. So, for someone like me to then say, we need to strengthen Congress, this was a very painful and difficult decision. But it was clear as daylight that if there was any chance of saving democracy in the country, we could not sidestep the existing opposition and we had to work with the opposition.
And since the Congress party had decided upon this initiative, we said our job now is to gather forces outside the Congress party to strengthen this march. The march was initially seen as a marginal effort. Frankly, no one in the media believed that Mr. Rahul Gandhi would actually walk 4,000 kilometers. The day before I was to leave to join the march at the starting point, some well-wishers came to me and said, Yogen, you are putting your life's reputation at stake for a march. And I can tell you what's going to happen. You would be stranded on the road and these fellows will take a helicopter. And you old style political activists would be standing on the road at that point. Such was the deep cynicism with which this march was greeted. But the march did something spectacular. And I think principal credit for that should go to Mr. Rahul Gandhi, the leader of Congress party. He showed a certain resolve, which is extraordinary. And in the midst of a country which was turning majoritarian, he picked up the courage to talk about love, Mohabbat.
Now speaking about love looked like a very unpolitical activity, looked like a weird sort of thing. But I can tell you it was an act of courage in that context to stand up and say India does not stand for division. This kind of hatred is unacceptable to us. We are a country that must treat everyone equally; diversities must be respected. So, the first march managed to do two or three things. Number one, it reignited hope in a situation where everything looked bleak; where no one thought the opposition had a chance. Number two, it legitimized a vocabulary of love, of peace, which had become almost ridiculed.
You know, so people started thinking, all right, there is someone other than Mr. Modi on the horizon. This was the achievement of the first yatra and at the end of it, Congress scored two very important electoral victories and there was a possibility of an alternative. The second yatra took place in the backdrop of another set of electoral setbacks for the Congress, which happened in December 2023. BJP won three of the North Indian states.
The real achievement of that second yatra was that it managed to put on agenda, the word Nyaya, which translates into justice and which in the context of India was a talking about justice in terms of economic inequality, something that you mentioned earlier: justice for farmers, justice for women, justice for the ex- untouchables, all the disadvantaged communities, and justice for poor. So, it broadly put the issue of caste, class, and gender inequalities in India on the burner as it were. And Congress took a sharp position on that. The other thing that both these yatras achieved was that it brought the opposition closer to civil society. In India, forces that are that are committed to defending democracy are largely outside the mainstream political parties. And the last two years were about all these movements coming together. And the platform with which I was associated, Bharat Jodo Abhiyan was simply a platform which brought all such forces together to align with the opposition coalition, which was smartly given an acronym where no one remembered the original name. It's the acronym INDIA that mattered. So, everyone came together with INDIA to oppose the BJP. So as a result, there were two kinds of forces. There were the opposition parties, which were doing their best, which had broadly come together, but they were also civil society organizations. So, there was a kind of historic bloc for reclaiming the republic.
Therefore, what was at stake in this election was not merely who would get the majority; who would form the government. What was at stake in this election was the very possibility of India remaining democratic, the foundations of our constitution and indeed the foundations of our republic. And in that sense, I think the two yatras that you mentioned these two yatras, Bharat Jodo Yatra and later on the larger campaign of bringing civil society to work with political parties has created a political force for the defense of the republic. I would still not be complacent and say, well, we've managed to reclaim the republic. No, we have not. BJP is still in power. But there is a rediscovery of a democratic consciousness that provides the foundations. There is an alignment of non-party political formations, trade unions, movements, protest movements, resistance movements, civil society organizations, human rights organizations, in a sense that entire sector of public activity, which has been created by the long shadow of India's freedom struggle that has awakened. And that to me provides reasons for hope.
I would still not say that India has ceased to be a competitive authoritarianism, although this election has underlined the competitive nature a little more and has perhaps put some brakes on the authoritarian part of it. But the battle to reclaim the values of Indian Constitution, values of liberty, of equality of justice, which are inscribed in the preamble to Indian constitution is going to be a long battle. It is not merely an electoral battle. It's going to be a deeper political battle. And in the last instance, it's a cultural, ideological battle to recover and re-enchant the idea of India that was articulated by Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Babasaheb Ambedkar, that struggle continues. But at least now we can say the struggle need not take the form of underground resistance. We can now say that democratic means can still be employed that (the) public in the last instance can be mobilized to reclaim the Republic.
SR: Thank you so much, Yogen, for this really incisive analysis, not only of the elections, but also of the trajectory of Indian democracy over the period of your and my socialization, our political socialization from the mid-seventies to today, and for the spirit of hope with which you've ended our conversation. Thanks for this fascinating conversation.
YY: Thank you. Like last time, it's a conversation that allows us to go beyond the headlines, beyond temporary anxieties into something longer and deeper. Such a pleasure!
SR: As we heard from Yogendra Yadav, who predicted with exceptional accuracy the results of the 2024 Indian elections, the ruling BJP party may have lost around 20 percent of its parliamentary seats as compared to 2019. But together with its allies, it has still secured the majority required to stay in power for a third successive term. Nevertheless, this result also has a symbolic significance. It provides a much-needed morale boost for liberal democratic forces and could partially reverse some illiberal tendencies in Indian politics.
But Yogen also cautioned against celebrating the outcome of the elections as an outright victory for democracy, secularism, and constitutionalism. Ordinary voters, in his view, were primarily motivated by worsening economic conditions, such as declining livelihood standards, high unemployment, rising prices. Thus, the partial shrinking of the ruling party's vote may have more to do with this widely shared, though somewhat fuzzy, general discontent with the incumbent government and its local representatives, rather than with a conscious collective effort to protect the principles of constitutional secular democracy.
As Yogen explained, the prevailing popular conception of democracy in South Asia can't be limited to abstract principles or formal rules. It also encompasses a substantive understanding of democracy as providing welfare. Democracy should deliver economic growth and development. So, the expectation. However, many Indians have by now acquired also a sound democratic temperament or common sense, which informs their overall political outlook and also gives hope, therefore, to anyone interested in a longer-term strategic project to reassert and strengthen the ideals of secularism and the values of the Indian constitution.
While this culture of democracy can be and has in fact been manipulated by mainstream media, alternative critical voices have succeeded in getting their message across through new digital media conduits. YouTube, for example, has been extremely effective in countering the self-fulfilling prophecies made by experts in the service of the state propaganda apparatus. This doesn't mean, however, that the latter's monopoly over the asymmetrical flow of information should be ignored but considering the scathing criticism that some of my recent guests on this podcast have made of the new social media and its corrosive effect on democracy, it's certainly refreshing to hear that these media can also play a positive role towards more progressive ends.
Another surprising aspect of the 2024 Indian elections that Yogen has drawn attention to is the changing preference of voters in terms of regional distribution and blocs. Quite unexpectedly, the ruling party lost many voters in parts of the country, but it used to command a quasi-hegemonic majority in North India, in Uttar Pradesh for example, while in some of the southern states where it was never that popular or even in power in the state legislature, it has now benefited from protest votes against the local establishment. It's thanks to such differential shifts in the regional balance of power that the BJP has become a more evenly dominant political force nationally than it was before.
Concluding on a personal note, Yogen has shared with us his recent experience with large scale socioeconomic mobilizations that depended on setting aside old animosities to forge novel connections between civil society and opposition parties. The two yatras, countrywide marches, that he participated in, along with prominent leaders of the main opposition coalition, have not only rearticulated fundamental ideas about rural justice, for example, but have also brought together a wide range of actors invested in the revitalization of democratic ideals and aspirations. This new alignment of parties, as well as trade unions, protest movements, civil society organizations, will undoubtedly help the cause of democracy in elections to come.
This was the fourth episode of season nine. Thank you very much for listening. Join me again in September after we take a short summer break in the month of August. Please go back in the meanwhile and listen to any episode that you might have missed And of course, let your friends know about this podcast if you've been enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy.
[i] de Souza, P. R., Yadav, Y., & Palshikar, S. (2008). State of democracy in South Asia: A report (H. Sethi, Ed.). Oxford Univ. Press.
[ii] Shastri, S., Suri, K. C., & Yadav, Y. (2010). Electoral politics in Indian states: Lok Sabha elections in 2004 and beyond. Oxford University Press.
[iii] Stepan, A. C., Yadav, Y., & Linz, J. J. (2011). Crafting State-Nations: India and other multinational democracies. Johns Hopkins University Press.
[iv] Yadav, Y. (2020). Making sense of indian democracy: Theory in practice. Permanent Black in association with Ashoka University.
[v] Yadav, Y. (2024, June 17). 2024 results not a ringing endorsement of secularism, democratic india. here’s why. The Print.