CHAPTER

Facets of India’s Illiberalism 

Christophe Jaffrelot

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197639108.013.26
Published: 18 December 2023

Abstract
Since 2014, India’s illiberalism has found expression
in the authoritarian politics of the Modi government.
Since then, checks and balances have declined,
dissenting voices have been repressed, and the
concentration of power (including economic power) in
the hands of a few people has increased. This new
orientation relies on an ethno-nationalist ideology,
Hindutva, that is embodied in a century-old movement,
the RSS, which has developed a huge network across
society (including a student union and a labor union).
This network comprises vigilante groups that—backed
by the ruling party, the BJP—routinely target
religious minorities, including Muslims. Anti-
individualism, the social dimension of the Hindu
nationalist brand of illiberalism, translates into
hierarchies inherited from the caste system. Gender
relations are also articulated in a traditionalist
manner. Society being seen as a living organism, the
state is not supposed to play a major role in this
brand of illiberalism.

Keywords: ethno-nationalism, Hindutva, Modi, BJP, India

Subject: Comparative Politics, Political Theory, Political
Institutions, Politics
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online
Liberalism has many faces (or facets). Politically, it
implies a strict separation of power, constitutionally
guaranteed, which recognizes the independence of the
judiciary and free and fair electoral competition (there is
no political liberalism without democracy, but the power of
the demos has to fit into a certain constitutional order).
Socially, it relies on the defense of individual rights and
even on individualistic values, such as liberty and
equality—two pillars of most of the pioneering liberal
revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Culturally, it goes together with tolerance and toleration,
promotion of diversity in terms of race, religion, gender,
and so on. Economically, it is based, nationally, on
competition between economic actors and, internationally,
on “laissez-faire.” These four sets of criteria are never
fully fulfilled, but they represent ideal types on the
basis of which the trajectories of different countries can
be analyzed.
Postcolonial India adopted several key features of
liberalism, some of them inherited from the Raj (Jaffrelot
1998). The 1950 Constitution drew its inspiration
explicitly from political liberalism, as evident from the
power enshrined in the judiciary (Mehta 2005). The Supreme
Court, in particular, enjoyed formidable independence,
which enabled Indian justices to resist pressure from the
ruling party and even to limit the government’s power.
Socially, the caste system and gender inequality were very
resilient, but the Constitution favored individualistic
values in a long series of “Fundamental Rights” and
systematized the policies of positive discrimination that
had been introduced by the British in order to promote
equality. Culturally, Jawaharlal Nehru and most of his
successors tried to implement the motto of the Indian
Republic, “Unity in Diversity,” which, inherited from
Mahatma Gandhi’s ideals, recognized all the religious
communities on a par. Linguistic groups also gained
recognition when the map of the states of the Indian
federation was redrawn in the 1950s according to the
linguistic criterion. The Indian Constitution not only
lists 22 languages as official and “secularism” as its
“creed” (according to an amendment passed in 1976), but
it also makes minorities’ educational institutions
eligible for state subsidies. Economically, while the
government of Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi,
nationalized several enterprises and regulated the private
sector in a strict manner, this sector remained dominant
and liberalization policies gained momentum after 1991.
These four pillars of India’s liberalism—which had been
unevenly observed since the inception of the Indian
Republic—have been under attack since the rise to power of
the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This
trend is inherent in the party’s ideology, which rejects
cultural diversity as well as individualistic values in the
name of ethno-religious nationalism (part 1). Besides, the
equality-oriented social pillar of the Indian Republic is
also badly affected by the dilution of positive
discrimination, a policy reflecting the elitist and
conservative overtone of Hindu nationalism (part 2). Third,
political liberalism is a victim of the increasingly
authoritarian style of the government of Narendra Modi
(part 3). Last, the concentration of power is also taking
place in the economic domain, where the making of
oligopolies directly connected to the ruling party has
gained momentum at the expense of market rules and
“laissez-faire” (part 4).

Hindu Rashtra vs Individualism—and

Universal Citizenship

India’s ruling party, the BJP, is the political wing of a

larger movement that is best defined by its ideology, Hindu
nationalism. This “-ism” crystallized in the 1920s, when
V. D. Savarkar published the book Hindutva: Who Is a
Hindu?, which defined the identity of India’s majority
community on the basis of three main criteria. First, for
Savarkar, the Hindus form a people descending from the
first inhabitants of the land, who followed the Vedas, an
ancient text that is probably 4,000 years old. Second, they
are linked to a sacred territory, where the Vedic rituals
were first performed and where numerous pilgrimage sites
continue to create a very specific geography. Third, Hindus
have inherited from their rich past a culture that is
epitomized by their traditional idiom (or the language of
their traditions), Sanskrit—and the vernacular language
that derives most directly from it, namely Hindi.
This definition—in which history plays a key role
(Chaturvedi 2022)—grants primacy to the Hindus not only
because they claim to be the sons of the soil, but also
because they represent the vast majority of society—about
80 percent today. By contrast, some minorities are
perceived as strangers. Muslims—although most of them
descend from Hindus who converted to Islam hundreds of
years ago—are a case in point. Savarkar accused them of
paying allegiance to Mecca, and the Hindu nationalists came
to express even more overtly the suspicion that they were
“anti-national” following the creation of Pakistan. Even
before 1947, however, Muslims were perceived as posing a
threat to Hindus.

RSS, a Disciplined “Hindu Rashtra in Miniature”

The Hindutva ideology has been embodied in a movement since
1925, when a follower of Savarkar, K. B. Hedgewar, created
the Rashtriya Swayamasevak Sangh (Association of National
Volunteers, RSS). This organization was born in central
India but has spread nationwide, while remaining weak in
southern states like Tamil Nadu. Its modus operandi has not
changed for almost a century: the Swayamsevaks of a village
or of a given neighborhood in a town or city meet in their
uniform every morning or evening for physical-training
sessions and ideological lectures. Today, the RSS has about
50,000 branches and probably over three million members.
The RSS is at the center of a galaxy of organizations,
including a student union, a labor union, a peasant union,
and a political party (the BJP). At the helm of each
offshoot of what constitutes the “Sangh Parivar” (the
family of the Sangh, i.e., the RSS), there are always
cadres trained in the mother organization (pracharaks) who
give their life to this institution and therefore do not
marry or take any other job. Narendra Modi became a
pracharak after joining RSS in his home state, Gujarat,
when he was seven years old.
RSS’s standard practice is to recruit children at a young
age in order to reframe their mindsets according to the
movement’s worldview. The organization is therefore
illiberal in the sense that it does not recognize the
personal character of individuals. The second RSS chief, M.
S. Golwalkar, claimed that these specificities were
“angularities” that should be subsumed by the totalizing
unity of the organization—the great whole into which
1
Swayamsevaks should merge. Moreover, dissent is not
tolerated. In fact, the discipline applied by the RSS
echoes the modus operandi of traditional Hindu sects
whereby disciples obey the guru, an authority figure that
is in the RSS embodied by the saffron flag.
Hedgewar defined the RSS as “the Hindu Rashtra in
miniature” because of this homogeneity, which was intended
to transcend caste and class differences: in the shakhas
(the local branches) of the RSS, everybody was supposed to
be equal and even the same. Though the movement was for
decades dominated by upper-caste people (specifically by
Brahmins)—and to a large extent still is—it claimed to
represent the nation in its entirety and to reject social
discrimination (hence the uniform that every member had to
wear).

Muslims as Second-Class Citizens

The Hindu Rashtra that the RSS has tried for almost a
century to build is not for minorities—as evidenced by the
fact that there are no Muslims in the shakhas. In parallel
with the social homogeneity mentioned above, RSS promotes
cultural homogeneity. For the Hindu nationalists, their
community embodies India; minorities may remain Muslim or
Christian in the private sphere but must pay allegiance to
Hinduism in the public domain or else become invisible
(Andersen and Damle 2018).
After Modi took power in 2014, this agenda translated into
campaigns targeting Muslims. First, Hindu nationalists,
often in vigilante groups patrolling university campuses,
attacked Muslim men who had allegedly tried to seduce,
marry, and convert Hindu girls in the name of what the RSS
mouthpiece, the Organiser, called “love jihad.” Second,
Muslims and Christians found themselves on the receiving
end of a movement for reconversion to Hinduism called ghar
vapsi (homecoming). Third, an even larger campaign of cow
protection resulted in attacks on—and in some cases the
lynching of—Muslim farmers accused of taking bovines to
slaughterhouses. In addition to all this, there were
sporadic incidents intended to counter what Hindu
nationalists call “land jihad”—namely, attempts by
Muslims to rent or buy apartments or houses in Hindu-
dominated neighborhoods. Similarly, Muslims were prevented
from offering namaz in public in places (like Gurgaon)
without a mosque (Hansen and Roy 2022).
The architects of this new version of cultural policing are
vigilante groups more or less closely linked to the RSS,
including the Bajrang Dal, a youth organization created in
1984 and headed by pracharaks ever since. These vigilante
groups work in tandem with the police, especially in BJP-
ruled states, since the police are employees of the state.
In some cases, the state police delegate missions such as
cow protection to vigilante groups. In others, such groups
have been recruited by the state itself and given a degree
of official recognition—and even uniforms. The growing
osmosis between the police and vigilante groups, at the
expense of the rule of law, has resulted in the
construction of a “vigilante state” (Jaffrelot 2021). Its
muscle power has contributed to transforming Muslims into
de facto second-class citizens, as they have withdrawn even
more into ghettoes following intimidation efforts that
resulted in violent incidents.
Besides the physical erasure of Muslims from the public
space, which has fostered the construction of a de facto
Hindu Rashtra, some state-sponsored reforms have redefined
citizenship de jure. In 2019, the Citizenship Amendment Act
made religion a criterion for becoming an Indian citizen:
only non-Muslim refugees from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and
Afghanistan are considered eligible for Indian citizenship.
Other laws at the regional level in BJP-ruled states have
also created new religion-based forms of discrimination. It
has, for instance, become very difficult to marry someone
from a different religious community or convert to another
religion. At the local level, some cities scrutinize—and
require official authorization of—any attempt to sell
one’s property to someone from a different community
(Tejani 2023).
Thus, the liberal-democratic values espoused by the Indian
Constitution—including the notions of secularism,
multiculturalism, and universal citizenship—are rapidly
eroding, not only de facto due to the growing influence of
Hindu vigilantes but also de jure. A similar combination of
sociocultural and state-sponsored transformations is also
at work behind the rise of inequalities and social as well
as cultural conservatism.

Social and Cultural Conservatism

Ascriptive groups, including castes, have remained strong

in India, a country where revolutionary ideas have
traditionally been marginal: Indian elites have been adepts
not of revolution but of reforms (Jaffrelot 2017). These
reforms have resulted in a democratization process that has
culminated in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries in the mobilization and relative emancipation of
plebeian groups, including lower castes, because of
policies of positive discrimination that have helped lower
castes (known as Other Backward Classes) and ex-
Untouchables (who call themselves “Dalits,” meaning “the
oppressed”) to generate a small bourgeoisie from among
their ranks and find a common cause around which to
coalesce. In reaction, the upper-caste middle class has
rallied around the BJP, which combines cultural and social
conservatism, including strong reservations vis-à-vis
positive discrimination.

The Resilience of Organicism and Hierarchy

From the social point of view, the illiberalism of Hindu
nationalism finds expression in its defense of non-
individualist values. This dimension of Hindutva harks back
to its Brahminical origins: while the RSS welcomes people
from all castes, it cultivates Hinduism’s high tradition
and encourages lower castes to adopt this lifestyle—
sometimes including vegetarianism.
This Brahminical view of society implies a certain
attachment to the matrix of the caste system that was the
ancestral Varna vyavastha. This social arrangement is
presented in the Vedas, the most ancient texts of Sanskrit
literature, in the form of a cosmogony. Indeed, the Rig
Veda explains that society was born from the sacrifice of a
primeval man, the Virat-Purush, whose dismemberment
resulted in the making of four classes constituting the
social body: the Brahmin proceeded from his mouth, the
Khastriya (warrior) from his arms, the Vaishya (artisan)
from his thighs, and the Shudra (servant) from his feet
(Rig Veda 10.90). These four categories (varna) are
organized hierarchically according to several criteria,
including ritual purity. According to Hindu nationalist
ideologues, the varna over time were subdivided into a
myriad of endogamous jati, leading to the division—and
weakening—of the Hindus. Confronted in the nineteenth
century by the egalitarian values of Westerners—including
Christian missionaries, whose religion appeared very
attractive to low-caste Hindus—these ideologues
rationalized the varna system. One of them, Dayananda
Saraswati, a Brahmin from Gujarat who created the Arya
Samaj in 1875, maintained that jati (the hereditary,
endogamous, and hierarchical castes copiously criticized by
Westerners) did not exist in the Vedic times and that the
prevalent mode of social organization at that time was the
varna system. Not only did Dayananda describe these four
Vedic “classes” as born out of the collectivity’s needs
in terms of socioeconomic complementarity, but he claimed
that hereditary distinctions were late accretions. He
contended that originally children had been placed in each
varna according to their individual qualities (Dayananda
1981, 115; Jordens 1978, 116). With such reasoning,
Dayananda substituted the prevailing jati system, which was
illegitimate by Western standards, for the more prestigious
varna system, the reinterpretation of which enabled him to
rehabilitate a social system of ritual hierarchy (a pillar
of Hindu cultural equilibrium), as it compared favorably
with the individualistic values on which Europeans prided
themselves (Jaffrelot 1995).
In the twentieth century, this ideological legacy
prospered: the ideal society, for Hindu nationalists, had
to return to the varna system—often rechristened the
“Chaturvarna vyavastha” to emphasize the fact that there
2
were only four (chatur) social categories to begin with.
The ideologue-in-chief of the Sangh Parivar, Deendayal
Upadhyaya, opined in 1965 that “society is ‘self-born’
and forms an ‘organic unity’” inherited from a caste-
based antiquarian arrangement that should not be disturbed:

In our concept of four castes, they are thought of as

analogous to the different limbs of Virat-Purusha….
These limbs are not only complementary to one another,
but even further, there is individuality, unity. There
is a complete identity of interest, identity of
belonging.

(Upadhyaya 1965, 43)

Here, Upadhyaya employs the same kind of organicism as

Golwalkar (mentioned above), but the unit of analysis is
not the individual—who is requested to merge into the
Sangh—but the varna, which is described as the building
block of a harmonious society. Liberty is no longer at
stake; here, the number-one casualty is equality. Indeed,
this social harmony is necessarily hierarchical, as evident
from the reference to the Virat-Purusha: all metaphors of
the body reflect a hierarchical form of social organicism
(Schlanger 1971).
Hindu nationalists long did not dare to defend any
dimension of the caste system: such anti-progressive
discourse would have been so illegitimate that nobody
articulated it. But things have changed since Modi’s BJP
took power in 2014. The BJP Speaker of the Lok Sabha, Om
Birla, went one step further in 2019, eulogizing the
Brahmins in a way that came across as a defense of the
caste system:
 [The] Brahmin community always works towards guiding
all other communities, and the community has always
held a guiding role in this nation. It has always
played a role in spreading education and values in the
society. And even today if just one Brahmin family
lives in a village or a hutment, then that Brahmin
family always holds a high position due to its
dedication and service … hence, Brahmins are held in
high regard in society by the virtue of their birth.

(Khan 2019)
Until then, Sangh Parivar ideologues had been reluctant to
attribute Brahmins’ superiority to their birth. They
usually claimed—using the vocabulary they had inherited
from reformists and revivalists like Swami Dayananda—that
if Brahmins were at the top of society, it was because of
their qualities (gun). Birla was saying something
different. In the same vein, he also—logically enough—
defended caste endogamy as the best way to sustain the
social order and unity. Speaking on the occasion of a
Brahmin “Parichay Sammelan,” a meeting of Brahmins meant
to help them to choose Brahmin spouses for their sons and
daughters, he added: “If we want to bind the society
together, then there is only one arrangement today; like
our ancestors used to forge alliances for marriage, we
today have parichay sammelan, and if we want to save the
society, then this is the lone alternative” (Khan 2019).
In Om Birla’s view, societal unity in India can only come
from the caste order—therefore it must be hierarchical.
Along similar lines, BJP leaders have displayed caste-based
observances that reflect their belief in the Dalits’
impurity. For instance, after Yogi Adityanath was elected
Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Hindu priests “made
elaborate arrangements for sacred purifying rituals at the
sprawling chief minister’s bungalow” (“Purifying
Rituals” 2017), which had been previously occupied by
Akilesh Yadav, Mayawati, and Mulayam Singh Yadav. Similar
rituals were also organized in Udipi by a Sangh Parivar-
affiliated group in the environs of the Sree Krishna
temple, which “alleg[ed] that it was rendered ‘impure’
due to the presence of Dalit” demonstrators
(“Purification Ceremony” 2016).

A Counter-Revolution Against Positive

Discrimination
This discursive rejection of social mobility translated
into policies. Affirmative-action programs were targeted
first. Such programs had been initiated during the colonial
era after the British realized that the lowest-caste group
—the Untouchables—would never experience any upward
social mobility if the state did not do something special
for them. They introduced quotas for these social
categories, now called “Scheduled Castes,” in the
education system, the bureaucracy, and the elected
assemblies. These reservations became proportional to the
population of the Dalits (“the oppressed,” the name that
Scheduled Castes prefer to use today) and were expanded to
cover other low castes (also called Other Backward Classes,
or OBCs). In 1990, the government imposed a 27-percent
quota in the public sector and the administration for the
OBCs, who made up a large fraction of the Shudras.
Upper castes resented this policy, which reduced their
share of government jobs, while Hindu nationalists feared
that it was exacerbating the division of a community they
were trying hard to unite and destabilizing the social
order in which they believed. When on August 7, 1990, Prime
Minister V. P. Singh announced he would implement the
recommendations of the Mandal Commission, including a 27-
percent quota for OBCs in the public sector, the RSS
reacted vehemently. Its English-language weekly magazine,
the Organiser, condemned the measures as a reactivation of
the “caste war” that was a source of division in a nation
that the Sangh was striving to unify over and above caste
and class differences. One editorialist even wrote: “The
havoc the politics of reservation is playing with the
social fabric is unimaginable. It provides a premium for
mediocrity, encourages brain drain and sharpens caste-
divide” (“Editorial” [Organiser] 1990, 15). The
Organiser was soon openly embracing the cause of the upper
castes. Another of its columnists, for instance, wrote of
“an urgent need to build up moral and spiritual forces to
counter any fall-out from an expected Shudra revolution”
(Kamath 1994, 6).
The Modi government initiated a counter-revolution when it
started to dilute the positive discrimination benefiting
the Dalits and OBCs by introducing, in 2019, a 10-percent
quota for the economically weaker section (EWS). This quota
radically altered the standard definition of backwardness
in affirmative-action schemes, which had, to that point,
used caste as their sole criterion. De facto, the new quota
benefits upper castes who are neither socially nor
educationally backward. Indeed, by setting an income limit
of 800,000 rupees (approximately US$10,000) per annum,
below which households are classified as part of the EWS,
the government has made this quota accessible to about 99
percent of members of the upper castes. According to
Ashwini Deshpande and Rajesh Ramachandran (2019), it has
“completely overturn[ed] the original logic of
reservations on its head” (27):

By stipulating a quota for non-S[cheduled] C[astes]–

3
S[cheduled] T[ribes] –O[ther] B[ackward] C[lass]
families earning Rs. 800,000 or less, the government
is effectively creating a quota exclusively for Hindu
upper castes who are not in the top 1% of the income
distribution. This means that despite being presented
as a quota on economic criteria and not caste, the
reality is that this is very much a caste-based quota,
targeted towards castes that do not suffer any social
discrimination; on the contrary, these rank the
highest on the social scale of ritual purity.

(Deshpande and Ramachandran 2019, 30)

Thus, by undermining the caste-based reservation system,

the Modi government weakened one of the mechanisms that
India had adopted and fine-tuned over the course of decades
to fight inequality.
Another mechanism used to the same end was taxation. The
government increased indirect taxes (such as excise taxes),
which are the most unfair taxes, as they affect everyone
irrespective of income. Taxes on petroleum products are a
case in point. As a result, India has one of the highest
taxation rates on fuel in the world. Overall, indirect
taxes have come to account for an increasing share of the
state’s fiscal resources under the Modi government,
reaching 50 percent of total tax revenue—compared to 39
percent under the first United Progressive Alliance (UPA)
government (2004–2008) and 44 percent under the second UPA
government (2009–2014) (Kundu 2018). The illiberal
policies we have mentioned so far, regarding Hindu
majoritarianism or elite domination, need to be analyzed in
a larger context—that is, the rise of a specific form of
authoritarianism.

Indian-Style Electoral Authoritarianism

The transformation of the state in Modi’s India is the

third dimension of the country’s current authoritarian
polity. Though elections are still organized every five
years, both nationally and at the state level, the
electoral scene is no longer a level playing field, and
between elections, the rulers exert strong authority over
most institutions.

What Electoral Competition?

Elections are a key element of populist regimes, as they
legitimize the leader, who claims to represent—and even to
4
embody and personify—the people (Jaffrelot 2022). Modi’s
India is no exception: the electoral cycle continues to
punctuate political life to give him maximum public
exposure and to reinvigorate his popular image. Like other
populists, Modi connects directly with voters not only by
making endless in-person speeches, but also by using
holograms, social media, dedicated television channels, and
so on.
But the dice are loaded. First, the BJP invests more money
in its election campaigns than the other parties can afford
to spend. In 2019, the ruling party disbursed $3.6 billion
5
(up from about $1 billion in 2014). These resources, which
enable Hindutva forces to saturate the public sphere, come
mostly from the corporate sector, which is allowed to
donate anonymously thanks to the 2017 creation of electoral
bonds (see the section on “crony capitalism” below)
(Vaishnav 2019).
Second, media coverage of election campaigns is biased.
Interestingly, this bias predates the formation of the Modi
government in 2014. A study by the CMS Media Lab showed
that coverage of Modi accounted for 33.21 percent of prime-
time news telecasts during the campaign from March 1 to
April 30, 2014 (and more than 40 percent in the days before
polling took place), compared to 10.31 percent for Arvind
Kejriwal and 4.33 percent for Rahul Gandhi (CMS India 2014;
Rukmini 2014). Things have not improved since Modi took
over. Most of the mainstream media have fallen in line, for
several reasons. First, the government has cut off its
advertisements on major oppositional media outlets,
reducing their access to an important source of revenue.
Second, these outlets have been intimidated by raids
carried out by the Income Tax Department and other state
agencies dealing with corrupt practices. Third, the
businessmen who own media outlets but need the
government’s blessing for their other industrial
activities have been persuaded to ease out independently
minded journalists. Fourth, crony capitalists close to the
government have created new TV channels (like Republic TV)
or acquired media outlets that either were already well-
established or have subsequently been successfully promoted
by the government (as with NDTV, bought by Gautam Adani).

Capturing Institutions
The media—known as the “fourth estate”—are not the only
institutions that the Modi government has captured. The
Elections Commission of India, the Central Bureau of
Investigation (the Indian version of the FBI), the National
Investigation Agency, and the Central Information
Commission are other cases in point. A common practice has
been to transfer bureaucrats who appear insufficiently
docile. To give one example, Ashok Lavasa, an Election
Commissioner who was supposed to become Chief Election
Commissioner because of his seniority, was appointed vice
president of the Asian Development Bank soon after the 2019
elections. Sometimes, key players who had resisted the
government’s orders were dismissed following a pseudo-
legal process relying on ad-hoc committees, as with Alok
Verma, the CBI chief, in 2019.
Getting rid of civil servants known for their integrity was
only the first step. The second was to either keep posts
vacant for years or appoint friends. The Central
Information Commission, in charge of implementing the Right
to Information Act, was particularly badly affected by
vacancies: as the commissioners who retired were not
replaced, the backlog of complaints increased tremendously.
Personal friends of the rulers were also appointed to helm
key institutions. This personalization of the regime
precipitated a certain deinstitutionalization of the police
and the judiciary. In both domains, Indian Police Service
officers and lawyers who had been close to Modi when he was
Chief Minister of Gujarat were appointed to key positions
in the CBI or the NIA or as solicitor general.
The judiciary, the most important institution in any
liberal polity—and the Supreme Court in particular—needs
to be analyzed separately. The latter was the first
institution targeted by the Modi government. This was
understandable: the Supreme Court of India has
traditionally opposed the executive in the most effective
way, in particular after it initiated a strategy of
“judicial activism” in the 1990s. Immediately after
taking power, the Modi government amended the Indian
Constitution to change the manner in which Supreme Court
justices were appointed. Whereas previously they had been
chosen by their peers, following what is known as “the
Collegium system,” they were now supposed to be appointed
by a commission on which lawyers would be in the minority.
After the Court quashed the amendment, the Modi government
turned to other techniques for curbing its independence.
First, the government refused to appoint judges selected by
the Collegium because of their past records. Lawyers who
had dealt with the many legal disputes involving Modi and
his right-hand man, Amit Shah, in Gujarat were targeted
first. The government also blackmailed those judges on whom
they had a file due to past corrupt practices.
Notably, the government used “carrots” as much as
“sticks,” by giving (prestigious) post-retirement jobs to
lawyers upon their retirements. This new practice
influenced the way some justices treated the prime
minister, his ministers, and the BJP as a whole.
Since 2017, the Supreme Court has not opposed the
government on any matter of importance. Either it has bowed
to the government in spite of obvious legal anomalies or it
has simply abstained from dealing with the subject.
Examples of the latter approach include the abolition of
Article 370 of the Constitution, which had previously
granted autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir, and the Citizenship
Amendment Act; both were passed in 2019 and immediately
contested in court, but so far to no avail.
The deinstitutionalization process goes beyond bodies and
bureaucrats. Symbols of the Republic’s liberal values are
also at stake. The Right to Information Act, for instance,
has been diluted. According to the 2005 law creating the
RTI, state information on almost all topics were eligible
for publication. Since 2014, many of these topics—
including national security—have been excluded from the
scope of the Act. As a result, the Reserve Bank of India
(whose independence has also been eroded) did not respond
to an RTI application asking for details about the
nonperforming assets in public-sector banks and the names
of the big loan defaulters, among whom are several crony
capitalists (see the section “What Economic
Liberalism?”).
Thus, the deinstitutionalization of India is gaining
momentum at the expense of the rule of law and the liberal
dimension of democracy—which is also affected by the bias
affecting the electoral process. Moreover, surveillance—a
secret technique that is, by definition, very difficult to
investigate—is gaining momentum as a means of controlling
the opposition, the media, and the judiciary.
Surveillance and the Making of a Police State
The central government’s massive use of surveillance
techniques surfaced during the “Pegasus affair,” named
after spyware developed by NSO, an Israeli company whose
customers are exclusively government agencies (Dahat,
6
Sathe, and Sethi 2019; Shantha 2019). Among the many
Indian personalities whose phones have been infected have
figured many politicians, including Rahul Gandhi, Ashok
Lavasa (a former member of the Election Commission), Alok
Verma (former head of the CBI), and a significant number of
journalists, including Siddharth Vadarajan, cofounder of
The Wire (Aryan and Mukul 2001; Business Standard 2021;
Srivas and Agarwal 2021).
A similar technique had previously been used against
intellectuals, lawyers, trade unionists, human-rights
activists, and a Christian priest, Father Stan Swamy (who
died in jail), who were accused of conspiring to overthrow
the government and assassinate the prime minister on the
basis of letters recovered from the computers of two of the
arrestees. Amnesty Tech, Amnesty International’s digital-
security team, subsequently discovered that one of these
computers contained malware allowing remote access and
alleged that the letters could have been planted (Kaushik
and Sivan 2020).
The government of India has also initiated more systematic
surveillance by increasingly resorting to facial
recognition. After the 2020 Delhi riots, Home Minister Amit
Shah declared that “[p]olice ha[d] identified 1,100 people
through the facial recognition technology. Nearly 300
people came from Uttar Pradesh. It was a planned
conspiracy” (Singh 2020). How could the police know? It
seems that “the footage procured from CCTV, media persons,
and the public was matched with photographs stored in the
database of Election Commission and e-Vahan, a pan-India
database of vehicle registration maintained by Ministry of
Road Transport and Highways” (Singh 2020). Gautam Bhatia
points out that “[s]uch ‘dragnet’ screening is a blatant
violation of privacy rights, as it essentially treats every
individual like a potential suspect, subject to an endless
continuing investigation” (Bhatia 2020). This technique
has been employed by the government increasingly
systematically, as the Indian Parliament has yet to enact a
personal-data protection law tight enough to prevent the
7
government from using the biometric data set Aadhaar for
8
facial recognition.

What Economic Liberalism?

When Narendra Modi became prime minister of India, his rise

to power was hailed as heralding a new era of economic
reform, more than three decades after the 1991
liberalization. In reality, however, the Modi government
has promoted crony capitalism and protectionism.

Cronies and Oligarchs

The Indian economy has traditionally been heavily regulated
by the state. The 1991 turn was not particularly radical,
but it allowed big companies to prosper and to emancipate
themselves from politicians’ diktats, to the point that
they could enter into transactional relationships with the
country’s rulers, whose policies, as a result, became more
business-friendly than market-friendly (Jaffrelot, Kohli,
and Murali 2019). For instance, rich businessmen could pay
politicians’ campaign expenditures by buying electoral
bonds, receiving in exchange all kinds of favors, including
the creation of Special Economic Zones, exemptions from
ecological regulations, and undue financial support. In the
process, these men became part of the rulers’ entourage,
forming a new oligarchy that concentrated an increasingly
large share of the economy in its hands. In 2019, the
twenty largest Indian companies accounted for nearly 70
percent of company earnings in the corporate sector,
9
compared to 14 percent in the early 1990s. The five
largest corporations accounted for nearly half of this
total (Economist 2020; Mukherjea and Shah 2020). The ten
10
largest Indian firms now account for 35 percent of the
market value of companies listed on the stock exchange,
11
compared to 28 percent in 2010.
Gautam Adani exemplifies this new variant of crony
capitalism in Modi’s India (Jaffrelot 2018). Having ranked
fourth on the list of the ten richest Gujaratis (Gaurav
12
2012)—a list topped by Mukesh Ambani —as early as 2012,
thanks to his proximity to Modi (Jaffrelot 2019), by 2022
he had become the richest man not only in India but also in
Asia, and globally ranked second only to Jeff Bezos
(Outlook Business Team 2022). Adani’s closeness to Modi
was confirmed in 2014 by the fact that he had accompanied
Modi as his private guest on most of his foreign travels
(Langa 2015). Subsequently, he became one of the most
obvious beneficiaries of the government’s policies,
including privatizations of airports and seaports
(Jaffrelot 2021). Having borrowed huge sums of money from
public banks (Gupta, Shah, and Kumar 2015, 22), he has also
benefited from loans from government banks, which have
conveniently written off billions of debts owed by Adani
and others (Ghosh 2018; Sen 2018).

Varieties of Protectionism
Crony capitalists always put pressure on governments to
protect their interests against competition. In Modi’s
India, they have attempted—successfully—to keep foreign
firms at arm’s length, at the expense of Modi’s official
commitment to welcome multinationals to India. The latter
have been kept at bay in at least three domains where big
Indian players have felt under threat: telecoms, retail,
and e-commerce. In these three major areas, Vodafone,
Walmart, and Amazon lost the battle against local
oligarchs, and chiefly against Ambani’s Reliance, a
company seeking to shield itself against foreign
competitors (Ladwa 2020; Vincent 2019). India has always
been wary about free exchange and laissez-faire, but as
Swaminathan Aiyar points out, “the old protectionism
focused on creating national champions in the public
sector, whereas the new protectionism mostly protects
private-sector players” (Aiyar 2018).
In addition, India has become more protectionist in terms
of trade. Business Standard, the most reliable publication
on India’s political economy, points out that “in recent
years, India has reversed its two-and-a-half decade-old
policy of tariff reduction to favouring protectionism”
(Vanamali and Kumar 2022). Indeed, the average tariff rate
for India jumped from 13.5 percent in 2014 to 17.3 percent
in 2019 (when it was below 10 percent in the rest of Asia)
(Shiino 2021). Between 2017 and 2019, tariffs were
increased for a total of 2,139 items representing more than
13
45 percent of the items subjected to ad valorem tariffs.
This policy reflected more than national economic interest;
it also found its roots in the Hindu nationalist ideology.
Front organizations of the Sangh Parivar, including the
Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (Forum for the Awakening of Economic
Nationalism), have traditionally argued in favor of a self-
sufficient development model. The notion of Swadeshi
crystallized in 1905–1906, during the colonial era, when
the Indian National Congress, which was spearheading the
freedom movement, decided to boycott goods made in Great
Britain and to replace them with products made in India.
This idea was subsequently popularized by Mahatma Gandhi in
the 1920s. Today, the SJM is promoting boycotts in order to
make India more autarkic, to protect not only its domestic
market but also its culture, since foreign imports are
perceived as incompatible with the country’s traditions.
This approach has been upheld by Modi himself, who has
valorized a “self-reliant India” (Atmanirbar Bharat)
(Brewster 2020).

Conclusion

Since 2014, India’s illiberalism has found expression in

four converging ways. First, minorities have de facto (and
sometimes de jure) been denied full-fledged citizenship.
Second, “the world’s largest democracy” has invented a
new kind of electoral authoritarianism. Third, social
hierarchies echoing the logic of the caste system have been
reasserted in place of positive discrimination. And last
but not least, economic liberalization has been affected by
the construction of a form of crony capitalism that has
reinforced both social inequalities and the concentration
of power in the hands of the few. Some of these trends are
of course interconnected. For instance, the concentration
of political power and the concentration of economic power
via the making of oligarchs go together, and the BJP’s
strategists maintain that Hindus, instead of developing an
emancipatory caste consciousness, should unite against
their real enemies, Muslims.
In what sense is illiberalism more relevant than other
“isms” to characterize the Indian situation? One could
indeed apply other conceptual tools, including the Weberian
notion of “sultanism,” which Juan Linz refined two
decades ago, defining the latter as a form of “personal
rulership” based on “a mixture of fear and rewards”
(2000, 151). First, in a sultanist regime, the strongman
captures institutions by appointing to key positions of the
state apparatus men who pay him personal allegiance,
somewhat akin to the historical relationship between feudal
lords and their rulers. Second, the political economy of
this quasi-feudal form of authoritarianism is threefold:
the rulers “demand gifts and payoffs from business for
which no public accounting is given,” they “establish
profit-oriented monopolies,” and “the economy [be it
public or private] is subject to considerable governmental
interference but not for the purposes of planning but of
extracting resources” (151). Third, sultanism relies on a
certain privatization of violence. In Modi’s India, this
process has resulted in the making of a vigilante state,
calling to mind Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s list
of factors that contribute to the demise of democracy. For
them, it is an indicator of authoritarian behavior if
rulers “endorse violence by their supporters by refusing
to unambiguously condemn it and punish it” (Levitsky and
Ziblatt 2018, 65).
Modi’s India fulfills these criteria, but sultanism does
not capture other major dimensions of illiberalism,
including the questioning of universal citizenship,
something that, in the case of today’s India, harks back
to the rise of Hindu nationalism. This ideology—the matrix
of the ruling party—is responsible for a brand of ethno-
religious majoritarianism that was bound to disenfranchise
minorities, de facto if not de jure.
But India’s illiberalism, because of its social and
cultural conservatism, is still more than an amalgam of
sultanism and majoritarianism. Modi’s national-populism
(another “-ism” that has affinities with illiberalism)
became effective in Gujarat and then India at large because
it met the expectations of sections of society from two
points of view. Certainly, the rise of Islamism and the
wave of jihadi attacks of the 2000s exacerbated Hindus’
feelings of vulnerability, but these sentiments had already
been planted among upper and dominant castes by positive
discrimination schemes that jeopardized their domination.
By polarizing India’s society along religious lines and
presenting Muslims/Pakistan as the real threat, Modi was
able to reunite the Hindu community against this “Other”
in the name of Hindus’ High Tradition, associated with the
upper caste. India’s illiberalism therefore goes beyond
the political and economic dimensions of the other “-
isms” listed above: it has societal roots combining the
defense of social elites and that of their culture—by any
means, including state action (hence the erosion of
affirmative action) and vigilantism, a technique that
targets “deviant” low-caste groups as much as minorities.
The uniqueness of India’s illiberalism probably lies in
its counter-revolutionary quality: it epitomizes the
reaction of traditional elites to the emancipation of
plebeians. It is hegemonic in the Gramscian sense, as the
latter’s consent has partially been manufactured. Many
OBCs and Dalits are indeed partially coopted and have
started to defend the upper-caste ethos and orthopraxis, as
evident from the lifestyle of Modi himself, who comes from
14
a low caste but has followed the Sanskritization path in
the RSS and today emulates the upper castes.

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Notes
1 Golwalkar wrote in the 1960s: “Each cell [in a human body] feels its
identity with the entire body and is ever ready to sacrifice itself for
the sake of the health and growth of the body. In fact, it is the self-
immolation of millions of such cells that releases the energy for
every bodily activity. The training that is imparted every day on the
shakha in a strictly regulated fashion imparts that spirit of
identification and well-concerted action. It gives the individual the
necessary incentive to rub away his angularities, to behave in a
spirit of oneness with the rest of his brethren in society and fall in
line with the organized and disciplined way of life by adjusting
himself to the varied outlooks of other minds. The persons
assembling there learn to obey a single command. Discipline enters
their blood” (Golwalkar 1966, 534).
2 In 1953, K. M. Munshi, a fellow traveler of the RSS who joined the
Sangh Parivar at the end of his life, wrote: “We, who are blinded by
an admiration of the social apparatus of the West, fail to realize
that chaturvarna was a marvelous social synthesis on a
countrywide scale when the rest of the world was weltering in a
tribal state” (Munshi 1953, 43–57).
3 Aboriginals, known as Scheduled Tribes, have also been awarded a
quota of 7 percent, which is proportional to their demographic
weight.
4 For more on populism, see the chapter by Pappas in this volume.
5 In its May 24, 2014, edition, The Economist estimated that the party
had spent $1 billion out of a total of $4 billion spent during the 2014
election campaign, making these Indian elections the second most
costly in the history of democracies, behind Barack Obama’s first
campaign for president of the United States (Economist 2014). This
assessment tallies with that of the Center for Media Studies, which
put the total figure closer to $5 billion (Bhowmick 2014). Regarding
the role of money in Indian election campaigns, see Kapur and
Vaishnav (2018).
6 WhatsApp—the application used by the attackers to break into
phones—has sued NSO Group (Satter and Culliford 2019).
7 Aadhaar is the name of a biometric data set that already contains
the information of more than 1.3 billion Indians (Belorgey and
Jaffrelot 2021).
8 In October 2020, Vivek Raghavan, the Chief Product Manager and
Biometric Architect of the Unique Identification Authority of India,
declared that the UIAI was “developing face authentication system
which will be available to all the Aadhaar holders.” The UIAI had
“allowed face recognition as an additional means of Aadhaar
authentication” since 2018 (“Aadhaar Authentication” 2018).
9 By comparison, in the United States the twenty largest companies
only account for one-quarter of corporate-sector earnings.
10 The companies in the “top league,” by market value, are Reliance
Industries Limited, Tata Consultancy Services, Hindustan Unilever
Ltd, HDFC Bank Ltd, HDFC Corporation Ltd, Infosys, Kotak Mahindra
Bank, Bharti Airtel, ITC, and ICICI Bank.
11 These figures were calculated on the basis of data from Business
Standard (https://www.business-standard.com/company/tcs-
5400/peer-comparison/marketcap/bse/sector-by-sector).
12 Interestingly, Mukesh Ambani is the chairman of the Ahmedabad-
based Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University, yet Deendayal
Upadhyaya did not favor big companies but rather agriculture and
cottage industries (”Modi” 2011).
13 Non-tariff barriers have increased too, as EU trade experts testify
(Jaffrelot and Zérinini 2021).
14 For M. N. Srinivas (1966), Sanskritization refers to a very specific
lifestyle: it is “the process in which a ‘low’ Hindu caste, or tribal or
other group, changes its custom ritual, ideology and way of life in
the direction of a high and frequently, ‘twice-born caste,’ that is the
Brahmins, but also the Kshatriyas or even the Vaishyas” (6). Such a
process reflects a certain social coherence, as all groups admit the
superior value of the upper castes. In that sense, the latter exert a
form of hegemony.