DHARMA DEMOCRACY: How India Built the Third World's First Democracy
The statistics said that Indian democracy should never have survived. The statistics were wrong.
India led the postcolonial world into independence after World War Two, and it set the pattern for all other postcolonial countries to follow: independence meant democracy. Nearly every country that was born after 1945 wrote itself a democratic constitution and fashioned itself a democracy. But only one stayed a democracy, from the beginning right through to today. India.
India was the Third World’s first democracy (in time), and it remains the Third World’s first democracy (in quality). Readers of recent reports from the Varieties of Democracy Institute and other ratings organizations may not believe it, but on virtually every measurable quality Indian democracy is the peer of established First World democracies like those found in Europe, North America, and Australasia. And I have the data to back that up.
In my new book Dharma Democracy: How India Built the Third World’s First Democracy I unpack the claims and counter-claims made about the quality of Indian democracy, going beyond the rankings to examine the underlying data. Many of the criticisms of Indian democracy are demonstrably wrong. Others are pure fabrications. Few stick, and those that do can be stuck to other democracies as well. Simply put, India’s democratic institutions would not be out of place in a Western country of twenty or thirty times its income per capita.
But although India’s democratic institutions resemble those of the West, India’s electorate differs dramatically from the electorates of Australasia, North America, and Western Europe. The kinds of questions that are put to a vote in a highly traditional, strongly religious, thoroughly patriotic country with a GDP per capita of around $2500 are very different from the kinds of questions to be decided in the developed West. In Dharma Democracy, I explain what this means to a Western audience. Indian readers, too — whose understandings of Indian democracy are based on subjective personal experience — might be surprised to learn how their country stacks up in an objective analysis.
But if there is one audience I most dearly hope to reach with Dharma Democracy, it is the Western-born children of the Indian diaspora. Many of them are caught between their patriotic parents and a Western intellectual establishment that tells them that India is now an “electoral autocracy” on a par with communist China. They can be forgiven for having doubts. This book will offer them an objective account of Indian democracy told through data and documents, not subjective opinion. If you are a diaspora parent, please consider buying Dharma Democracy for your bicultural child. And tell your children that if, after reading the book, they still have any questions … Professor Babones would love to hear from them.
Dharma Democracy is now available in paperback from Amazon at:
Over the next few weeks, the book will be rolled out on other platforms, and soon thereafter it will be released in Kindle and other e-book formats. As a teaser, I’ve included a short excerpt from the Preface below. I hope you enjoy it.
Yours,
Salvatore
Excerpt from the Preface of Dharma Democracy: How India Built the Third World’s First Democracy
by Salvatore Babones
Indian democracy is the politics of superlatives. Everyone knows that India, with nearly a billion registered voters, is the world's largest democracy. Few realize that, with an income per capita of less than $3000 in 2024, it is also the world's poorest. Or at least: it is by far the world's poorest country to be able to boast of more than a few decades of competitive elections under the rule of law with routine transfer of power between competing parties. India has been a democracy of some kind ever since it became an independent country in 1947, and it has been unambiguously a liberal democracy since the end of the 21-month "Emergency" of 1975-1977. The only other non-Western country that comes close to matching India's record of free and fair elections is Japan, where democracy was imposed by American forces after 1945. To that extent that India is a democracy, its democracy is, by contrast, entirely home-grown.
That said, much of the Western political science profession now believes that India is not a democracy. The leading democracy rating organization, Sweden's Varieties of Democracy Institute, categorizes India as an "electoral autocracy."[ii] Princeton University's Ashoka Mody believes that Indian democracy began "unraveling" under its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, went into a "death spiral" in the 1970s under his daughter Indira Gandhi (no relation to the Mahatma), and "veered into dangerous territory" in the 1980s and 1990s before the current prime minister, Narendra Modi, "mounted a merciless assault on democracy" after taking office in 2014.[iii] Christophe Jaffrelot of Sciences Po in Paris characterizes "Modi's India" as an "authoritarian vigilante state."[iv] The University of Sydney's Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane call India an "elective despotism," writing that "with power-sharing democracy on its knees, blindfolded, elections prove useful to its killers."[v] Oxford University's Maya Tudor asks "has India really departed the shores of democracy?" and answers with the one word: "yes."[vi]
For most of India's on-the-ground political commentators, things are not so dire. The Berkeley-educated Indian policy analyst Rahul Verma takes issue with the prevailing international consensus, arguing that "claims of Indian democracy's death are highly exaggerated" and labeling accusations like those cited above as "an injustice to India's journey as a democracy."[vii] India's most prominent liberal political journalist, Shekhar Gupta, asked that "all those who said India's democracy was dead and buried, over, that we were no-hopers under fascist rule, please sit down and drink Kool-Aid."[viii] He apparently did not understand the American idiom. India's most prominent journalistic critic of Narendra Modi, Rajdeep Sardesai, believes that "the 2024 elections must be seen as arguably the most unfair election in the history of Indian politics," but that nonetheless "the humble voter could hold powerful politicians to account."[ix] And India's most prominent opposition politician, Rahul Gandhi, quite sensibly said after the 2024 elections that:
The fight for democracy in India is an Indian fight. With all due respect, it has nothing to do with anybody else. It's our problem. And we'll take care of it. We will make sure that democracy is secure.[x]
The Gandhi family scion is correct: India's democracy has always been India's fight. The widespread myth that India inherited its democracy from England is belied by the fact that India is the only one of the United Kingdom's major colonial possessions became and remained a democracy. It is true India's representative institutions were modeled on the British parliamentary system. But so too were the constitutions of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, all of which emerged out of the British Empire in South Asia. Pakistan in particular inherited a British constitutional legacy that was nearly identical to that of India, along with the Indian Civil Service and the British Indian Army, both of which were split in two to form the modern state institutions of India and Pakistan. Yet within two years of independence, Pakistan became officially an Islamic republic. It experienced its first military coup in 1958. It didn't hold proper elections until 1970, and when it did, the country erupted into civil war.
If things have turned out differently in India, the credit must go to the leaders who shaped the country's understanding of itself as a unified political community. Highly literate political activists like Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, B.R. Ambedkar, V.D. Savarkar, Subhas Chandra Bose, V. K. Krishna Menon, and the "father of the nation" M.K. "Mahatma" Gandhi gave India a democracy literature even more impressive than that left by the American founding fathers 150 years earlier. Most Western countries, including even the United Kingdom, primarily derived their democratic principles from the United States. Not India. The revolutionary intellectuals of India's national liberation movement charted the way to a distinctively Indian political philosophy that, although informed by American and European precedents, drew much more extensively on India's own experiences. Call it "dharma democracy."
Dharma is one of those words that linguists like to say is untranslatable, but in reality there is a very close English equivalent that captures nearly all of its meanings: duty. The philosopher (and second President of India) Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan famously defined dharma simply as "right action." Thus sanatana (eternal) dharma encompasses the sacred responsibilities all people owe to God; yuga (era) dharma mandates adherence to the customs of the society in which one lives; sva (own) dharma dictates the expectations of a person's specific position in society. Each is a form of propriety, describing the forms of behavior that are appropriate to a specific context. A king's raja dharma as a ruler may come into conflict with his pitri dharma as a father if he believes that his son is not strong enough to succeed him: kingly duty demands that he ensure the future security of his people, while parental duty demands that he advance the career of his son. Dharma is an infinitely flexible term because it can be applied in an infinite number of situations, but ultimately it comes down to duty. As Radhakrishnan explained, "every form of life, every group of men has its dharma, which is the law of its being."[xi]
Independent India emerged as a democracy in 1947 because India's independence leaders shared an overwhelming sense of rashtra dharma: duty to the nation. This is not quite the same thing as rajya dharma (duty to the state). It is a commitment to the people of a country, as a people – what the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini called a "community of duty." Mazzini characterized the nation as "a common faith, a tradition distinct from that of other nations, and constituting the past, present, and future generations of our people an historical unity."[xii] This romantic ideal had a great influence on the leaders of India's national liberation movement, from Mahatma Gandhi on down. In fact, Gandhi included a chapter on "Italy and India" in his foundational work, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule, originally published in 1909 and promptly banned by the British. It is precisely the chapter in which he first formulated the idea of non-violent resistance. Directly citing the example of Mazzini, Gandhi said that in order to achieve freedom, "what we need to do is to sacrifice ourselves."[xiii]
The literary works of India's independence leaders are suffused with the idea of duty to the nation, although it was not always clear just what "nation" people owed their duty to. Many thought that democracy meant duty to the whole world. The Indian nationalist Sri Aurobindo (again citing Mazzini) wrote in 1908 that "the weakness of European democracy and the source of its failure" was that "it took as its motive the rights of man and not the dharma of humanity."[xiv] Others were more clear that they held a duty specifically to the Indian nation. When the independence leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak departed for London in 1918 to press for Indian home rule, he described it as "a mission of dharma" on behalf of "the fortunes of the whole of India."[xv] Of course, the leaders of national liberation movements throughout the Third World professed duties toward the nations they aspired to lead. Mao Zedong even had "serve the people" inscribed over the entrance to the Communist Party compound in Tiananmen Square.
But India's independence leaders were of a different mold, and a different mind. With the possible exception of Nehru, they were more concerned to ensure the success of the independence struggle than that of their own careers. Gandhi may be the only "father" of a non-Western nation who clearly had no ambition to lead it. His dharma was to inspire, not to govern, and he seems to have recognized that. He and the other founders of India wrote extensively about their aspirations for the Indian nation, and fully expected to be held accountable by history for living up to their ideals. We don't have to tease implicit political philosophies out of their speeches and letters. India's founders left us a veritable library full of books laying out their visions for the future of their nation, and ruminating on the meaning of nationhood itself. The Indian independence literature is the world's most voluminous, and arguably its most thoroughly introspective. It is too little read by Indians today. It deserves to be read by the world.
In contrast to America's founding fathers, India's independence leaders went far beyond debating the simple mechanics of government. These minutiae do appear in their writings, and much ink (and some blood) was spilt over issues like reserved parliamentary seats for specific community groups, the degree to which the law should support social reform, and even the extent of the franchise. These were all important questions to be answered in the runup to independence, but the major literary works of India's founding fathers focused on what it meant to be a nation, who was and wasn't an Indian, the meaning of nationhood for India, and the duties of citizens toward the new Indian nation. India's constitution-making body, the Constituent Assembly that sat from late 1946 to early 1950, debated such matters as the national flag, the national emblem, the national anthem, the national song (not the same thing), the national language, and (especially) what the country should be named. Everyone agreed that India was an old nation, even if no one agreed just what nation it was.
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[ii] Multiple authors, 2024, Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot, Varieties of Democracy Institute, page 17.
[iii] Ashoka Mody, 2023, India Is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today, Stanford University Press, pages 233, 18, and 19.
[iv] Christophe Jaffrelot, 2021, Modi's India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, translated by Cynthia Schoch, Princeton University Press, pages 349 and 405.
[v] Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane, 2021, To Kill a Democracy: India's Passage to Despotism, Oxford University Press, pages 198-216 and 264.
[vi] Maya Tudor, 2023, "Why India's Democracy Is Dying," Journal of Democracy 34(3):121-132, page 122.
[vii] Rahul Verma, 2023, "The Exaggerated Death of Indian Democracy," Journal of Democracy 34(3):153-161, pages 153 and 159.
[viii] Shekhar Gupta, 2024, "Those Who Said Democracy Was Dead, Sit Down. Game's on in Indian Political League after a Frozen Decade," The Print, 4 June.
[ix] Rajdeep Sardesai, 2024, 2024: The Election That Surprised India, HarperCollins, pages xvii and 470.
[x] Rahul Gandhi, 2024, " Rahul Gandhi in the U.S. Targets Modi Government's Handling of China but Agrees with Its Approach on Pakistan," The Hindu, 11 September.
[xi] Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, 1927, The Hindu View of Life, Unwin Books, page 56.
[xii] Giuseppe Mazzini, 1890 [1861], The Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini, Volume 1, Smith, Elder, & Company, pages 289 and 288.
[xiii] M.K. Gandhi, 1938 [1909], Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule, Revised New Edition, Navajivan Press, page 101.
[xiv] Sri Aurobindo Ghose, 1908, "Asiatic Democracy," Bande Mataram, 16 March (pages 929-932 in The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Volumes 6 and 7, 2002, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, page 930).
[xv] Bal Gangadhar Tilak, 1919 [1918], Bal Gangadhar Tilak: His Writings and Speeches, Ganesh & Co., page 324.
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