The Sociocultural Component of India’s Democratic Backsliding

ABSTRACT This study examines democratic backsliding in India through the lens of political culture. It offers a framework for understanding democratic decline by analysing the interplay between the ruling elite and society. The focus is on aspects of Indian political culture that have enabled the erosion of democracy by an elected government. The analysis highlights illiberal, communal, and majoritarian tendencies expressed in three key historical developments: the framing of the Constitution, the Emergency period, and the rise of Hindu nationalism. These tendencies have allowed Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party to leverage cultural symbols, historical narratives, and communal ideologies to consolidate power and undermine democratic principles. The findings suggest that while India’s democratic decline is driven by populist leadership, it is also facilitated by entrenched sociocultural dynamics. While grounded in the Indian case, the study offers a broader framework for understanding how sociopolitical patterns in other contexts may similarly enable democratic backsliding.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Asian Studies Review

• Publication date

  2025-06-02

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/10357823.2025.2512595
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Democratic backsliding

  2025influential reference
• India’s Communal Constitution: Law, Religion, and the Making of a People. By Mathew John

  2025cited by this paper
• Democratic Backsliding, Resilience, and Resistance

  2025cited by this paper
• Misunderstanding Democratic Backsliding

  2024cited by this paper
• Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot: Democracy Report 2024

  2024cited by this paper
• The Authoritarian Roots of India’s Democracy

  2023cited by this paper
• Modi’s Undeclared Emergency

  2023cited by this paper
• Democracy Erodes from the Top: Leaders, Citizens, and the Challenge of Populism in Europe

  2023cited by this paper
• INDIA: CONFLICT WITH MINORITIES IN THE CONVENTIONAL POLITICAL SYSTEM. THE STATUS OF MUSLIMS

  2023cited by this paper
• Who’s to blame for democratic backsliding: populists, presidents or dominant executives?

  2023cited by this paper
• Political support and democratic backsliding trends. The strange case of Central and Eastern European countries

  2023cited by this paper
• India's Authoritarian Turn: Understanding the Emergency (1975–1977) and Its Afterlife

  2023cited by this paper
• The Forum: Global Challenges to Democracy? Perspectives on Democratic Backsliding

  2023cited by this paper
• The Supreme Court in Modi’s India

  2023cited by this paper
• Why India’s Democracy Is Dying

  2023cited by this paper
• Supporters of India's BJP: Distinctly Populist and Nativist

  2022influential reference
• A Global Crisis of Liberal Democracy?: On Autocratic Democracy, Populism and Post-Truth Politics

  2022cited by this paper
• From democracy to hybrid regime. Democratic backsliding and populism in Hungary and Tunisia

  2022cited by this paper
• Modi’s India: The Rise of Ethnic Democracy

  2022cited by this paper
• How India's Ruling Party Erodes Democracy

  2022cited by this paper
• Commissioned Book Review: Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane, To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism

  2022cited by this paper
• Dysfunctional democracy and political polarisation: the case of Poland

  2022cited by this paper
• The expanding role of majoritarianism in India

  2022cited by this paper
• India’s Farmers’ Protest: An Inclusive Vision of Indian Democracy

  2022cited by this paper
• Why democrats abandon democracy: Evidence from four survey experiments

  2021cited by this paper
• Trends and dimensions of political participation in India: An analysis since 1989 general elections

  2021cited by this paper
• Democratic Backsliding in Poland and Hungary

  2021cited by this paper
• The Intertwining of Liberalism and Illiberalism in India

  2021cited by this paper
• The Anatomy of Democratic Backsliding

  2021cited by this paper
• India's First Dictatorship

  2021cited by this paper
• The End of the Backsliding Paradigm

  2021cited by this paper
• Democratic regression in comparative perspective: scope, methods, and causes

  2020cited by this paper
• Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States

  2020cited by this paper
• Killing a Constitution with a Thousand Cuts: Executive Aggrandizement and Party-state Fusion in India

  2020cited by this paper
• Populist Majoritarianism in India and Pakistan: The Necessity of Minorities

  2020cited by this paper
• From Civic Pluralism to Ethnoreligious Majoritarianism: Majority Nationalism in India

  2020cited by this paper
• Conflict change and persistence: the India-Pakistan and Arab-Israeli conflicts compared

  2020cited by this paper
• What is Post-Democracy?

  2020cited by this paper
• Illiberal Measures in Backsliding Democracies: Differences and Similarities between Recent Developments in Israel, Hungary, and Poland

  2020cited by this paper
• India’s founding moment: the constitution of a most surprising democracy

  2020cited by this paper
• Narendra Modi’s social media election campaign and India’s delegative democracy

  2020influential reference
• Contextualist political theory about multiculturalism in a post-multiculturalist context

  2020cited by this paper
• Emergency chronicles: Indira Gandhi and democracy's turning point

  2020cited by this paper
• Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times

  2020cited by this paper
• Reporters Without Borders

  2019cited by this paper
• Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India

  2019cited by this paper
• Polarization versus Democracy

  2019cited by this paper
• Cultural Backlash

  2019cited by this paper
• Crises of Democracy

  2019cited by this paper
• Conflict Change and Persistence

  2019cited by this paper
• Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism

  2019cited by this paper
• How Democracies Die

  2019cited by this paper
• Should we be afraid? Liberal democracy, democratic backsliding, and contemporary populism

  2019cited by this paper
• Narendra Modi and India's Populist Democracy

  2018cited by this paper
• Unwelcome Change: Coming to Terms with Democratic Backsliding

  2018cited by this paper
• Polarization and the Global Crisis of Democracy: Common Patterns, Dynamics, and Pernicious Consequences for Democratic Polities

  2018cited by this paper
• Revisiting Contextualism in Political Theory: Putting Principles into Context

  2018cited by this paper
• The state of democracy in South Asia

  2018cited by this paper
• Democracy for Realists: Why Elections do not Produce Responsive Government

  2017cited by this paper
• The Signs of Deconsolidation

  2017cited by this paper
• Populism: A Very Short Introduction

  2017cited by this paper
• Rise of the Political Right in India: Hindutva-Development Mix, Modi Myth, and Dualities

  2017cited by this paper
• The Myth of De-Consolidation: Rising Liberalism and the Populist Reaction.

  2017cited by this paper
• Democracy and Its Institutions

  2017cited by this paper
• Is Western Democracy Backsliding? Diagnosing the Risks

  2017cited by this paper
• The Oxford handbook of the Indian Constitution

  2016cited by this paper
• The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect

  2016cited by this paper
• Are People Really Turning Away from Democracy

  2016cited by this paper
• Two treatises of government

  2016cited by this paper
• Democracy in decline: steps in the wrong direction

  2015cited by this paper
• Civil society in changing India: emerging roles, relationships, and strategies

  2013cited by this paper
• The Theory of Political Culture

  2013cited by this paper
• The Politics of Caste

  2011cited by this paper
• Political Culture and Democracy

  2011cited by this paper
• Religion, Caste and Politics in India

  2010cited by this paper
• The Clash Within

  2009cited by this paper
• Democracy's Third Wave

  2008cited by this paper
• It Depends

  2007cited by this paper
• India’s Unlikely Democracy: Economic Growth and Political Accommodation

  2007cited by this paper
• Citizens versus People: The Politics of Majoritarianism and Marginalization in Democratic India*

  2007cited by this paper
• The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future

  2007cited by this paper
• T HE 'MUSLIM THREAT' AND THE BHARATIYA JANATA PARTY'S RISE TO POWER

  2006cited by this paper
• The Idea of Political Culture

  2006cited by this paper
• Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: Components of a Prodemocratic Civic Culture

  2005cited by this paper
• The Political Deficit of Substantial Democratisation

  2005cited by this paper
• A Contextual Approach to Political Theory

  2004cited by this paper
• Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy

  2003cited by this paper
• India's silent revolution : the rise of the lower castes in North Indian politics

  2003cited by this paper
• GOVERNMENT OF INDIA

  2002influential reference
• Liberalism and Its Discontents

  1998cited by this paper
• Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype

  1997cited by this paper
• The making of India : a historical survey

  1997cited by this paper
• The Puzzle of Indian Democracy: A Consociational Interpretation

  1996cited by this paper
• The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited: 1993 Presidential Address

  1994cited by this paper
• Democracy's Third Wave

  1993cited by this paper
• The Cultural Particularity of Liberal Democracy

  1992cited by this paper
• Liberalism and Democracy

  1992cited by this paper
• State and Communalism in India

  1990cited by this paper
• Democracy in plural societies

  1977cited by this paper
• The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations

  1964cited by this paper

• No citing papers are available for this paper.