Whether they live within or outside the world’s most populous country, Indians have accumulating reasons for concern over the state of democracy there. Recently concluded state-level elections have given a major victory to Modi’s BJP in West Bengal, a crucial state that for decades seemed immune to the appeal of Hindu majoritarianism.
Ruling there from 2011, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) had stood up strongly to block the determination of Modi and his home minister Amit Shah to capture the state. Leading the BJP’s electoral campaign, Modi and Shah (the latter making Kolkata his base for 18 continuous days) seemed to command limitless resources.
The two were also aided by the removal from Bengal’s electoral rolls of hundreds of thousands of names, a majority of whom were TMC supporters, and by the sudden exit from their Kolkata office, a week or so before polling, of hundreds of professionals employed by IPAC, the electioneering agency hired by the TMC. Pressure on IPAC from New Delhi’s Enforcement Directorate has forced the pullout. (In an earlier nationwide election, Modi/BJP had hired IPAC.)
Modi and Shah and their party, currently in power in virtually all the states of northern, central, and western India, will now also occupy, for the very first time, the political throne in the great eastern city of Kolkata. A tenacious woman has lost and Modi and Shah have won. Notwithstanding the tilted scales, a majority of the state’s voters may have wanted a change after three five-year terms of rule by Banerjee and her TMC, which was accused of permitting local-level party bosses to extort helpless citizens.
ACTOR JOSEPH VIJAY
Barely a bit player in West Bengal, the Congress Party has however regained power in the southern state of Kerala, where a Communist-led government was in office for two terms. In neighboring Tamil Nadu state, the TVK, a brand new regional party led by popular movie star Joseph Vijay, has won more seats than either of the two regional parties, DMK and ADMK, that have swapped power in Tamil Nadu during the last six decades. He is likely to become chief minister. Vijay’s father is a Christian and mother a Hindu. The BJP, says Vijay, is his ideological foe.
In West Bengal, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu, three of the states that saw elections, voters unseated existing governments. However, in Assam, which lies east of West Bengal and east also of Bangladesh, the BJP led by chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has been reelected with a larger majority. There and in West Bengal, both states where Muslims constitute a significant minority, the BJP’s pitch to Hindus to unite against Muslims seems to have worked. Not an inspiring picture.
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Anyone interested in democracy’s future in India as a whole should note a public suggestion from India’s minister of state for finance, the BJP’s Pankaj Chaudhary, to the effect that “the long-standing principle of prioritizing the liberty of the accused may no longer hold primacy in the current legal framework.”
The quote is from an account in the Indian Express (May 1) by senior reporter Deeptiman Tiwary, who speaks of evident questioning by the Indian establishment of “the presumption of innocence in India’s criminal justice system.” Minister Chaudhary’s comments were made in the context of bail being ordered by a court for someone charged with money-laundering by the Enforcement Directorate.
No one wants laxity against money-laundering, but pursuing a case with vigor is certainly not synonymous with presumptions of guilt every time the ED brings someone to court, and definitely not when the ED brings activists or politicians to court precisely at election time. Making a prosecutor the judge is dictatorship’s surest sign.
FALL BY SIX PLACES
The World Press Freedom Index for 2026, prepared by the prestigious Reporters Without Borders, has come out, and it reveals a serious global decline. Between 2025 and 2026, the score has deteriorated in more than 60 percent of all countries — in 110 out of 180! Journalism is in effect being criminalized across the globe.
While Nepal has improved its ranking from 90 to 87, Sri Lanka from 139 to 134, and Pakistan from 158 to 153, India has fallen from 151 to 157, and Bangladesh from 149 to 152. In 2026, India sadly emerges as the worst off among these five South Asian lands, having slipped behind Bangladesh and Pakistan.
On April 28, three civil society organizations in Bengaluru, capital of the southern state of Karnataka (one of the few states governed by the Congress Party), sponsored a public discussion on the book Umar Khalid and His World, edited by Anirban Bhattacharya, Banojyotsna Lahiri and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and published by Three Essays Collective.
Khalid is the gifted young Delhi scholar and activist who has been in detention without trial for six years. A BJP MP had urged the Bengaluru police to cancel permission for the April 28 event, and right-wing groups had threatened to disrupt proceedings. Fortunately, the local authorities held firm. Historian and biographer Ramachandra Guha told the audience that the book shows “how Umar Khalid has become a victim of the India we live in.” Added Guha:
“Our country is currently ruled by a party that is both authoritarian and majoritarian, whose repeated violations of the law and constitutional procedure have been enabled by corrupt and compromised state institutions. One should have little doubt that Umar Khalid has been persecuted because he is young, independent-minded, and, not least, Muslim. Of course, in this Umar is by no means alone. Other young and idealistic Indians, Hindus as well as Muslims, languish in prison because a vengeful and vindictive state has been aided by a timid and tardy judiciary. Finally, even as it describes a life of suffering and struggle, the book encourages us to view Umar Khalid as a symbol of the better, nobler India many of us here wish to see being born or reborn.”
CENSORING THE NET
I thank the New York Times for publishing on May 1 a guest article by a Mumbai-based Indian journalist about rising curbs by Indian authorities on expressions of disappointment or unhappiness – even when these expressions are confined to the internet. Half a handful of brave exceptions apart, India’s thriving TV channels, radio networks, and legacy newspapers (thriving because of viewer numbers) have long succumbed to government inducements and threats.
Only a Modi remark, or the BJP view, is highlighted. Day after day, India’s march towards a Hindu state is connived at. Plainly illegal and unconstitutional steps go through with muted public criticism. Most of the time the judiciary finds reasons for accepting the government’s line.
Dissent has thus been confined to the internet. Now it’s being blocked there as well! Here’s what Arman Khan, former executive editor of Vogue India, says in the NYT piece that I’ve welcomed:
“The stakes are particularly high for Muslims like me, who face constant pressure in Mr. Modi’s Hindu-chauvinist India to prove our patriotism even as the ruling party weakens our voting rights and otherwise marginalizes us. When I share a political post on Instagram, it is nearly always followed by a panicked call from my parents, worried about the legal repercussions. Every word I write, including in this essay, is tinged with fear. Like many others, I have become less vocal on social media. With each passing day, our voices are diminished.”
The world should know, and remember, that India’s Information Technology Act empowers the government to block internet content. It warns global IT companies of financial punishment and arrests of their officers if orders are disobeyed. This Act has been tightened by amendments and proposed fresh ones will toughen it further.
DEFECTIONS FROM AAP
For two five-year terms, from 2015 to 2025, the Aam Aadmi Party or AAP ran the elected government of the union territory of Delhi. In 2025, the BJP replaced AAP as Delhi’s ruling party, but from 2022 AAP has governed India’s Punjab state, which borders Pakistan’s Punjab province and is not far from Delhi.
India is divided into 28 states and 8 union territories. Until April 24, AAP had three members, all from Punjab, in India’s Lok Sabha and ten members, two from Delhi and eight from Punjab, in the Rajya Sabha. On April 24, seven of AAP’s Rajya Sabha MPs (six from Punjab, one from Delhi) crossed over and joined the BJP! Now AAP is left with six MPs altogether, three in the Lok Sabha and three in the upper house.
Nine days earlier, on April 15, the ED had raided multiple premises of one of AAP’s defecting MPs, Ashok Kumar Mittal, who among other things had founded Lovely Professional University in Phagwara, Punjab, and remains that university’s chancellor.
There’s been much discussion on the ethics and legality of this defection by the seven, and reflection also on the future of AAP and its leader, Arvind Kejriwal, once seen as possibly providing an alternative to the BJP and also to the Congress Party, which had ruled India and most of its states from 1947 to 2014, apart from a couple of brief breaks.
In addition to Punjab, where AAP remains in office (on May 1 its ministry comfortably won a confidence vote there), the party has a presence in Delhi, and a minor presence in two other states (Gujarat and Goa). Overall, however, the party has lost a great deal of the appeal it once had. For this loss I see two chief reasons. One, Kejriwal has been unwilling to share influence with a team of colleagues. Secondly, he has failed to oppose the BJP’s drive to establish India as an authoritarian Hindu state.
WILL THE ISLAND SURVIVE?
Suddenly arriving (on April 29) on the Great Nicobar Island, where his visit was fortunately covered by sections of the Indian media, Rahul Gandhi enabled many in India and across the world to see for themselves videos and photographs of this unbelievably green island (not a large one, actually, it measures around 350 square miles) possessing primeval trees and two tiny (and threatened) tribal groups (the Shompen and the Nicobarese).
Believe it or not, the Modi government plans to turn this remote island into a crowded military-commercial-industrial-tourist hub with two townships, a vast container terminal, an international airport, and solar and gas-driven power plants!
Lying a good deal east of India’s long eastern coast, and situated at the southern extremity of the group of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the isle of Great Nicobar, a precious holding of the Indian nation, is only 121 miles north of Aceh, the harbor city on the northern tip of Indonesia’s large Sumatra Island, which saw that horrible havoc from the tsunami of December 26, 2004.
Aceh sits, moreover, at the northwestern end of the crucial Malacca Strait through which much of the world’s shipping must pass. At the southeastern end of this strait, which separates Sumatra (or Indonesia as a whole) from Malaysia, lies Singapore.
Unimpeded shipping through the Malacca Strait is essential for India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Sri Lanka – and for the whole world. The similarity between Hormuz and Malacca is impossible to miss.
FAIRYTALES
Given the competition/rivalry between India and China, it is not surprising that from 2012 the Indian Navy has kept a naval air base on Great Nicobar. No Indian, no realistic person anywhere, can question the need to keep this base in robust health.
But the plans for townships, tourism, an international airport, and immense container terminals are a wholly different matter. These schemes must be vigorously challenged. Anyone claiming that the Shompen and Nicobarese people and the island’s virgin trees will survive these gargantuan plans involving billions of dollars is selling fairytales. Rahul Gandhi should be thanked.