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The Crisis of India's Parliamentary Democracy

The hollowing out of parliamentary democracy in India can only be checked and reversed by a successful electoral challenge to the Modi personality cult.

By Sumantra Bose, 360info
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Parliamentary democracy in India

The crisis of India's parliamentary democracy | India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi performing a Hindu ritual, 'Bhoomi Pujan', at the foundation stone laying ceremony of the country's new parliament building | Press Information Bureau, Government of India

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The crisis of India's parliamentary democracy

A remarkable fact about Indian politics since independence is that no party, or pre-poll coalition, has ever won a majority of the nationwide vote in the 17 national elections between 1951-52 and 2019. 

Even the Indian National Congress fell short of the 50 percent threshold in the country’s first post-Independence poll, despite its powerful legitimacy from the freedom struggle and organisational advantage over all rivals. A majority (55 percent) of Indians who voted in the founding election of India’s parliamentary democracy supported an assortment of opposition parties. 

The plurality-based electoral mechanism gave the Congress party three-quarters of the seats, 364 of 489, in the first Lok Sabha. Under a proportional representation system, the Congress would have secured only 220 seats and been compelled to look for post-poll allies to form a coalition government with a working majority.

India’s political system largely replicates the model of Britain, its colonial ruler. It is a parliamentary democracy, with cabinet government headed by a prime minister which is constituted from the majority party or coalition in the legislature. The prime minister is accountable to parliament.

How India’s parliament is elected is also copied from the British prototype. The Lok Sabha (House of the People) consists of members elected from 543 single-member constituencies across the country, and the candidate who wins the single largest share (plurality) of the votes polled is elected from each constituency.

The Congress’s dominance of India’s polity lasted four decades, until the end of the 1980s. Its highest share of the vote in nine national elections during that period was 48 percent in December 1984, which gave the party a brute parliamentary majority—nearly four-fifths of the Lok Sabha.

This system has usually yielded decisive legislative majorities for the frontrunner party which wins the single largest share of the popular vote, even when that share is a relatively slender plurality.

This makes India’s democracy vulnerable to the proverbial “tyranny of the majority” — not the tyranny of the popular majority per se, but of whoever has the parliamentary majority.

In India’s 16th general election, which swept Narendra Modi to power in May 2014, his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (‘Indian People’s Party’, BJP) ran candidates in 428 of the 543 constituencies. 

The majority threshold in the Lok Sabha is 272. The BJP won in 282 constituencies, mostly in northern and western India, and achieved an outright majority in the directly elected chamber of India’s parliament,  the first time any party had done so in 30 years since Congress last did in 1984 (the year it achieved its largest share of the popular vote).

The BJP’s nationwide vote share, which yielded a slim majority of 52 percent in the Lok Sabha, was 31.3 percent (small BJP-allied parties got another 6 percent of the popular vote). 

In 2019, the BJP vote share rose to 37.4 percent from the 437 constituencies it contested and Modi returned to power with a modestly enhanced majority of 303, while small BJP-allied parties polled another 8 percent of the popular vote.

When Modi arrived, after winning the 2014 election, at the stately, imposing 1920s New Delhi building constructed by the British which housed independent India’s parliament until 2023, he touched his forehead to the threshold and hailed it as a “temple of democracy”.

The record of the last ten years shows that Modi has no more than an instrumental relationship with parliamentary democracy

The creature who paid docile obeisance at the temple of democracy was fully exposed once Modi was resoundingly returned to office in May 2019.

In six months following that return, the second Modi government, flush with victory, railroaded two major and highly contentious legislations in brute-majoritarian style through parliament: the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act (August 2019) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (December 2019).

The decline of the centrality of parliament to India’s political edifice pre-dates Modi’s election as prime minister, but since 2014, and especially during the second Modi government (2019-2024), parliament has been systematically emasculated in a way unprecedented in India’s bumpy journey as a parliamentary democracy.

Its role has been reduced to ramming through a variety of contentious laws using brute majorities, and celebrating Modi’s purportedly visionary leadership.

The sittings of parliament’s two chambers have been curtailed to a bare minimum, and complaints by opposition members that they are not allowed to raise issues and properly interrogate the government have proliferated, culminating in the mass suspension of 146 opposition members in December 2023.

The Decline of Parliamentary Democracy in India

India has had leaders autocratic by disposition at the helm before. 

Indira Gandhi was one. But she was driven by a desire to concentrate power in her person and ensure dynastic succession.

Modi is driven not just by craving for personal glory but by the ideological project of the “family” of Hindu nationalist organisations led by the Rashtriya Swaya

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