In this latest episode in the second season of our Democracy in Question? podcast, Shalini Randeria is in conversation with Yogendra Yadav, asking: What ails Indian democracy today?
Most western academics were skeptical about the future of India, the world’s largest democracy, throughout the 1950s to the 1970s. It succeeded beyond all expectations in mobilizing large-scale electoral participation, especially among poor and illiterate voters, though paradoxically they benefitted the least from it economically. And yet today its very existence seems to hang in balance as the country faces a deep crisis of liberal, secular democratic norms, values and institutional practices. Freedom House even downgraded India from a free democracy to a "partially free democracy" last year. So what ails Indian democracy so suddenly? How deep are the roots of the massive challenges it must overcome? Must it revitalize itself using Indian civilizational ideas instead of, or melded with, western norms of liberalism and secularism?
Yogendra Yadav is a leading political theorist and leader of the Swaraj India political party, established in 2016.
You can listen to the podcast on our website, or subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts.
The podcast series is a cooperation between the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, and the Excellence Chair and Soft Authoritarianism Research Group at the University of Bremen.
