By Krishna Jha
On September 15, the world observed International Day of Democracy, 2025, focusing on attainment of freedom, promoting equality and removing the hurdles that deter peoples’ participation in decision making which together constitute the core of democracy. In India, at least during the last one decade or so, the essentiality of participation in the nation building is taking its pivotal place, and it has happened because of challenges and the consequences. Yet the goal remains unattained. The message is — struggle has to continue.
It is commonly agreed that democracy has been restricted today and India is yet to attain complete democratic freedom. In 2021, Freedom House dropped India’s rating from Free to Partly Free (the only remaining category is Not Free). That same year, the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project relegated India to the status of “electoral autocracy” on its scale of closed autocracy, electoral autocracy, electoral democracy, or liberal democracy. And the Economist Intelligence Unit moved India into the “flawed democracy” category on its scale of full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime, and authoritarian regime.
At the heart of the malaise lies the question hanging over the fairness of our election system. Free and fair election is the bedrock of any democracy. It is through elections that the governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed. The promise of free and fair election, enshrined in the Constitution and reinforced through decades of jurisprudence, is not a procedural formality but the very foundation of democratic self-rule. Without it, the constitutional edifice that sustains the republic begins to hollow out.
In recent months, however, this foundational promise has come under unprecedented strain. Allegations of systematic irregularities in the electoral process have shaken public confidence in the Election Commission of India (ECI)—the very institution entrusted under Article 324 of the Constitution with the “superintendence, direction and control” of elections. What is at stake is not only the outcome of specific electoral contests but the credibility of the electoral system and, thus, the democracy itself.
The allegations by opposition parties, including the Communist Party of India, are serious and specific. They include claims of duplicate voters registered in multiple constituencies, entries with fake or non-existent addresses, dozens of individuals shown as living in single residences or even commercial establishments, blurred or invalid photographs, and misuse of Form 6 intended for first-time voters. Equally troubling are charges of large-scale deletion of legitimate voters—particularly Muslims, Dalits and OBCs —amounting to targeted disenfranchisement. When placed against narrow margins in key constituencies, these irregularities take on profound significance.
Compounding these charges are allegations of deliberate opacity and suppression of evidence by the ECI itself. Political parties have for years demanded access to machine-readable electoral rolls; instead, the Commission has restricted itself to scanned, image-based PDFs that prevent meaningful digital scrutiny. Requests for CCTV footage from polling stations have been rebuffed, and in December 2024, rules governing access to such records were amended with unusual haste to narrow transparency. The destruction of critical CCTV evidence, last-minute amendments to electoral regulations, and the Commission’s refusal even to meet parliamentary delegations of opposition MPs—all have deepened suspicions that lapses are not accidental but systemic.
The legal right to dissent is one of the basic features of any democracy. This right has become history today. All the legal provisions of the right are still there, but the practical possibility of dissent free from overwhelming harassment has virtually disappeared. Indian courts protect this right not systematically but only erratically. The government has increasingly used colonial-era sedition laws and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) to silence its critics. Individuals have been regularly booked under sedition laws for dissent in the form of posters, social-media posts, slogans and even personal communications. Of the sedition cases filed against citizens for criticizing the government between 2010 and 2021, 96 percent were filed after the BJP came to power in 2014.
The condition of minorities is litmus test for a democracy. In India, since 2014, Muslim community, comprising 14 percent of the population, has suffered a particularly marked decline in civil liberties. Acts of anti-Muslim violence, including lynchings or mob killings, have risen sharply. According to data from IndiaSpend, 97 percent lynchings between 2010 and 2017 occurred after the BJP government came to power in 2014. The victims of these attacks are overwhelmingly Muslim, who are often targeted over rumours of handling beef.
International organizations, including Human Rights Watch and the US Commission on Religious Freedom, report that this violence has created a “widespread climate of fear” for the minority community. This climate of fear is compounded by the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, which legally excludes Muslim refugees from a streamlined citizenship process. There is a widespread fear that this law, combined with a proposed national register of citizens, could be used to disenfranchise Muslim voters who cannot produce the required paperwork to prove citizenship. This situation, along with a virtual shutdown of civil liberties in Jammu and Kashmir—India’s only Muslim-majority state—is a growing concern.
Media, the bedrock of democracy, have radically circumscribed their criticism of government due to outright intimidation and structural changes over last one decade. Since 2014, India has systematically been falling in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index. The country now ranks well below Afghanistan, Belarus, Hong Kong, Libya, Pakistan, and Turkey. In the past too, Indian media experienced censorship.
But widespread harassment of independent journalists and concentration of ownership structures of media houses have meant that journalists and media platforms practice a high degree of self-censorship. They do not feel free to criticize the Modi government. Checks on executive power, the main responsibility of the media, have rapidly fallen away ever since Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government came to power in 2014. There are growing instances of journalists getting harassed by legal cases, receiving death threats and becoming frequent targets of social-media hate campaigns driven by troll farms affiliated with the ruling party and the government. (IPA Service)
