A silent democratic backlash in South Asia Premium

A look at the Indian and Pakistani historical experience tells us that as democracies are experiencing backsliding, newer methods are being devised by the citizenry to produce a democratic backlash

The recent developments in Bangladesh, and the earlier events in Sri Lanka and Pakistan as well as the recent electoral outcome of the general election in India, clearly suggest a silent democratic backlash in South Asia. While there have been different historical trajectories in postcolonial democracies, we will make sense of this backlash by comparing the Indian case with that of Pakistan.

Comparisons of the Indian and Pakistani political systems in the post-colonial years have concentrated primarily on reasons why democracy endured in India while Pakistan transgressed into authoritarianism, despite both having a similar colonial legacy. Many scholars have detailed the reasons contributing to democracy in India compared to Pakistan. These range from the presence of a mass-based political party system in India versus an organisationally weak Muslim League to the dominance of particular social classes constituting the Congress (middle classes) and the Muslim League (the landed aristocracy).

While the value of such works is evident and advances our understanding of the political trajectories of India and Pakistan, the traditional comparison has undermined attempts at understanding the democratic space in Pakistan in the same vein that it has obfuscated analysis of an authoritarian tendency in the Indian political system despite its democratic credentials. We expand on what we understand and imply by this particular reasoning and argue that India and Pakistan are in the midst of a silent democratic backlash, where social forces are seeking to reclaim democratic space.

India was typified as a case of exceptionalism with a functional democracy, a history of free and fair elections and the well-accepted operative idea of the separation of powers. Barring the aberration of the imposition of the Emergency in 1975, India remained an accountable democracy. Constitutional vision and the anti-colonial legacy did well in the Indian case to maintain the dominance of civil rule over military rule. Krishna Menon, who served as the Defence Minister (1957-62) in Jawaharlal Nehru’s cabinet, played his part in undermining the armed forces, whether out of a larger vision of maintaining the supremacy of civilian rule or merely out of being ‘meanest and pettiest’ towards his generals, as Jairam Ramesh notes in his recent biography of Krishna Menon. India never faced the threat of military dictatorship.

However, the rise of Narendra Modi in 2014 changed all that. India played the catch-up game in moving briskly towards an authoritarian model of governance based on executive overreach. It was, perhaps, for the first time that the Indian democratic exercise not only took a presidential form but also campaigned for an Opposition-free democracy with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s campaign for a ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’. The current dispensation has been politicising issues related to security and the armed forces. Universities in India are sought to be converted into havens of religiosity and symbolism of armed forces to counter the democratic protest politics of students and youth.

Pakistan, on the other hand, started out as a lost cause with the bureaucracy and the military pulverising the political process and steering it in the direction of authoritarianism. Despite the deep-seated authoritarianism at the elite level, all military dictatorships, from 1958, saw their demise through large-scale protests underlying the distaste of the masses with military rule. In one case, mass protests ushered in Pakistan’s first general election, the onset of military oppression in its eastern wing and the disintegration of the state in 1971 — the exact opposite of what the military intended. The intention to control and dominate the political system collapsed again under the weight of a lawyers’ movement and a public loss of legitimacy as General Musharraf’s rule alienated the masses and the political elites alike. Since 2008, Pakistan has had four general elections and a relative transitioning to democracy, however, typified by a strong push-back against this transition by the military. During this time, Pakistan’s politics has witnessed a political elite consensus to continue on the democratic path (as witnessed in the Charter of Democracy and also the 18th Amendment). But the last two elections (2018 and 2024) signify a worrying trend on the part of the political elites to seek consensus with the military to not only outbid but, more importantly, decimate and wipe out political opponents.

The result, however, for the political elites undertaking tactical alliances with the military for political survival and the military itself has been the contrary. What Pakistan has witnessed since 2008 is a further deepening and widening of the citizenry’s advocacy for democracy, and a developing contradiction between the political class and military over who has the right to rule. The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government and the military embarked on a ‘one-page’ mantra only to see the Pakistan Muslim League (N), or the PML-N, taking out public rallies criticising the government, but, more crucially, the military for its political engineering.