S2E3:What ails Indi­an democ­ra­cy today?

Most west­ern aca­d­e­mics were skep­ti­cal about the future of India, the world’s largest democ­ra­cy, through­out the 1950s to the 1970s. It suc­ceed­ed beyond all expec­ta­tions in mobi­liz­ing large-scale elec­toral par­tic­i­pa­tion espe­cial­ly among poor and illit­er­ate vot­ers. And yet today its very exis­tence seems to hang in the bal­ance as the coun­try faces a deep cri­sis of lib­er­al, sec­u­lar demo­c­ra­t­ic norms, val­ues and insti­tu­tion­al prac­tices. Free­dom House even down­grad­ed India from a free democ­ra­cy to a “par­tial­ly free democ­ra­cy” last year. So what ails Indi­an democ­ra­cy so sud­den­ly? Yogen­dra Yadav (a lead­ing polit­i­cal the­o­rist and leader of the Swaraj India par­ty estab­lished in 2016) helps us make sense of the past, present and future of democ­ra­cy in India.