India’s once-robust democracy is in decline, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) being the only party with effective political organizing and a clear national message. FSI Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy Larry Diamond, Hoover Senior Fellow Šumit Ganguly, and Hoover Research Fellow Dinsha Mistree reflected on this reality in a CDDRL seminar series talk. The discussion built on findings from their recently released book, The Troubling State of India's Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 2024).

The absence of a coordinated opposition in India has continued to threaten the functioning of its democracy. The challenges confronting the Indian National Congress Party (INC) are at the heart of the problem.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the INC emerged as a healthy political party. It enjoyed a unified national vision that championed secularism and independence from the British Empire. By being inclusive towards various political and religious identities, it unified a vast coalition across India’s broad geography, utilizing effective grassroots organizing mechanisms.

Today, however, the INC is hampered by extreme personalism due to the domineering role of the Gandhi family. The party lacks the organization or national vision to compete with the BJP. This decline began under the populist prime minister Indira Gandhi, who rose to power in the late 1960s. She replaced party leaders with loyalists and sycophants, weakening critical party mechanisms. The party began to set aside ideologically-driven political priorities in favor of more personalistic sinecures.

As subsequent members of the Gandhi family continued to lead the party, the INC failed to pose as an effective alternative to the BJP. The lack of political options results in a harmful feedback loop where citizens are discouraged from engaging with the opposition at all because they perceive no other candidates as having a chance at gaining power.

The future of India’s democratic competition requires the revival of opposition parties. Local parties at the state level are unlikely to grow to match the BJP, as they are often focused on specific ethnic and regional concerns, as well as lacking the infrastructure to take on the BJP nationally. The INC, once a leading national party, is unlikely to reinvent itself effectively unless it is released from the personalist grasp of the Gandhi family. The history of coalition building among the diversity of parties at the state and regional levels may provide a potential model for democratic checks or even electoral alternation. In any case, vigorous opposition must emerge from within India's political party system if backsliding is to be countered in the world's largest democracy.

A full recording of the seminar can be viewed below: