In 2014, Narendra Modi became India’s Prime Minister, marking the beginning of what many experts and international watchgroups identify as a period of democratic erosion in the country.

Since then, a number of other democracies around the world have followed India on this path — including, by many measures, the United States.

On this episode, Dan Richards talks with two experts on Indian politics and society about Modi’s rise in India: its causes and effects, how it compares to other instances of democratic erosion around the world, and what it can teach us about democracy’s weaknesses and strengths.

Guests on this episode:

1. Poulami Roychowdhury is an associate professor of sociology and international and public affairs at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs.
2. Patrick Heller is a professor of sociology and international and public affairs and director of the Watson School’s Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia.

Read Roychowdhury’s and Heller’s recent work exploring democracy and democratic erosion in India.

DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. In Twenty Fourteen, Narendra Modi became India's prime minister, marking the beginning of what many experts and international watch groups identify as a period of democratic erosion in the country and a turn towards authoritarianism.

Since then, other democracies around the world have followed India on the path of democratic erosion, including, by many measures, the United States.

On this episode, I talked with two experts on India's politics and society about the state of democracy in India, what led to the backsliding we've seen in the last decade, what social and economic inequality has to do with it, and what all of this can teach us about the phenomenon of democratic erosion taking place in countries around the world.

PATRICK HELLER: In India, what we're seeing, and I think it's true elsewhere in the Global South, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines, there's a big difference between right wing reaction in the Global South and in the North because in the South, it's an elite reaction.

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: It's this volatile combination of rising inequality combined with real progress in certain forms of equality, leaving a lot of people feeling like we didn't quite get what we were promised. And it doesn't have to do just with the failures of the state to address inequality. It also partly has to do with its successes.

DAN RICHARDS: That first voice you heard was Patrick Heller, a professor of sociology and international public affairs and director of the Watson School's Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia.

The second voice was Poulami Roychowdhury, an associate professor of sociology and international and public affairs at the Watson School. On this episode, Poulami and Patrick on what democratic erosion in India can teach us about inequality, social justice, and the future of democracy.

[THEME MUSIC]

DAN RICHARDS: Poulami Roychowdhury and Patrick Heller, thank you both so much for coming on Trending Globally.

PATRICK HELLER: Thank you.

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: Thanks for having us.

DAN RICHARDS: Poulami, earlier this year co-authored a paper called The Perils and Promises of Unequal Democracy. And in it looked at how social and economic inequality in India has contributed and interacted with democratic erosion and an authoritarian turn as you write.

And I want to get into the mechanics of how and why inequality has this effect on democracy and how it might help us think about the state of democracy in the US. But to start, I was wondering if we could set the stage for listeners, what are the main features of authoritarian turn in India? What are the key signals of it to you both?

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: First, before answering your question, I just want to back up and say that I think there's two big reasons why just thinking about India, about this question of democratic backsliding matters.

So first of all, it's just on its own terms, it's a really important thing to think about because this is like the world's hailed as the world's largest democracy.

So it's still thought of as this paragon of democracy. So I think it's a real puzzle why a democracy that was doing relatively well, despite violating all of the preconditions that political theorists put forward, how it stopped doing well.

But I think there's also this other reason, which is that anybody who's interested in democratic backsliding anywhere should think about India because the authoritarianism that we're seeing recently is coming from-- autocrats are being elected to power.

And so India really shows why is it that so many people are voting for autocrats. So just saying that I would say to get back to your actual question first, and this is a classic feature of rising authoritarianism, one is that there's been a concentration of political power within one political party, the BJP, in a place that was renowned as a multi-party coalition politics place.

But now it's really the BJP and a concentration of power within the executive office, within the body of the prime minister, Narendra Modi. And we know this because there's fewer parties running for elections, fewer candidates. So there's really this concentration happening.

Second, also a classic feature of authoritarianism is that this is a very multi-ethnic country, dozens of languages, whatever, five major religions. But what's happened since the BJP came to power is that a previously secular understanding of citizenship has been redefined along Hindu nationalist lines.

And this has happened both through legal means like the Citizenship Amendment Act, which says that if you're not Muslim, you can immigrate to India from other countries. But it's also happened through extralegal means, chiefly the fact that BJP activists go around lynching and beating up Muslims and there's never any repercussions.

Third, complete breakdown of checks and balances so that the executive office now effectively controls parts of the bureaucracy that were previously very well insulated from executive power. And we see this in a Modi's use of the National Enforcement Directorate, which does things like, oh, do you have tax fraud? But he uses that directorate now to go after his political opponents and trumped up charges.

And also recently the Election Commission in India, which has historically been this renowned institution, is blatantly overlooking pretty aggressive violations. Thousands of names showing up on voter rolls and stuff. So that's the third.

DAN RICHARDS: I mean, those are big three.

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: Yeah, those are big three. I think there's more. I'll let Patrick talk for a while.

PATRICK HELLER: The big fourth one is there was a discursive attack on civil society. Now there's a material attack. So independent think tanks are being shut down. NGOs are being subject to all sorts of trumped up legal charges. All of civil society, independent civil society, has been intimidated.

We think as many as two thousand human rights activists have been detained and under these, quote, "anti-terrorism acts" that are really beyond any of judicial scrutiny. There's been the bulldozing of mosques and Muslim neighborhoods.

And academia has been completely colonized. So most universities in India are public universities. The heads of those universities are appointed by either the state or the central government. And increasingly, its apparatchiks of the state apparatus who are being put in charge of these universities, and they have no qualifications whatsoever. They're there as ideologues to completely, totally weaponize universities.

And then the media, again, it's dominated by big so-called corporates. These are huge billionaires. So what I think makes the BJP especially dangerous is that it has a very well-defined project of creating an exclusively Hindu nation at the expense of 200 million Muslims. And it is ideologically coherent, and it has 6 million cadres on the ground pushing the project on a day to day basis, including vigilantism.

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: Yeah. And I would also add one last thing to this, which is that over the past decade, there's been a lifting of all sorts of capital controls and regulations with the attendant rise. And this is directly related to your question about inequality, attendant rise of this billionaire class, who also incidentally fund Modi.

So there's this new kind of nexus between very powerful capitalists and the BJP, which I think is part of the dynamics that we're exploring.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, and this maybe gets to what I wanted to ask you about in your recent article as well about this relationship between inequality and democracy. And that you write about, as you say, the perils and promises of unequal democracy.

And I wonder if we could just start with why, in your view, Poulami, does inequality pose such risks to democracy? Is it just that it creates animosity and tension between the haves and the have-nots, or is there something else going on in what inequality does in a state?

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: OK. So this is my article with Reena Agarwal that you're talking about. So you hear everywhere right now that the reason democracies are failing is because democracies need to deliver, and they haven't delivered.

And I think what's slightly different about our argument and possibly unique is we're saying that Indian democracy became open to this assault because it actually did succeed in certain ways.

DAN RICHARDS: It was delivering.

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: It was delivering certain things. It wasn't delivering certain things, but it was delivering other things. And it's this volatile combination in the Indian case of rising inequality combined with real progress in certain forms of equality that led to the BJP finding this opening. So let me just explain--

DAN RICHARDS: How does that-- why does that lead to that?

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: Yeah. So to understand the rise of the BJP actually need to go back to the '90s. The Indian economy liberalizes, which leads to has Piketty, has demonstrated in other parts of the world, like income inequality, wealth inequality goes like this. It shoots up.

And stepping back from India, the thing we about income inequality is that from comparative data. And this is people like Susan Stokes and Eli Rao, who showed that the relationship between income inequality and democratic backsliding is actually extremely robust across the world. The strength of the relationship was surprising to me.

But going back to India, inequality in India is palpable and embodied in a way that I think Americans just don't understand. So you go to Bombay or Delhi and there's these glittering high rises now with immaculately coiffured lawns around them with private security guards and staff.

And then right next to it is a slum with an open drain. And the children in that slum don't go to school. They are washing the clothes of the children in the high rises.

But interestingly, what this inequality generates is that both the slum dwellers and the people in the high rises are annoyed because the slum dwellers are like, what the-- we didn't get enough of this new pie.

But interestingly, the people in the building are like, why do we still have to look at slums? Why isn't this London yet? The promise of modernization hasn't been fulfilled for either of these groups. So in a certain sense, poverty is falling and all tides are whatever that horrible--

DAN RICHARDS: Arising--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: Yeah. I don't even want to repeat it. But people are just like, we didn't actually get what we wanted. The second thing that's happening since the '90s is that largely driven by the Congress Party, which is in charge.

During this era, there's amped up attempt on the part of the state to improve the lives of the many marginalized people that exist in this country. So while neoliberalization is happening, there's also an expansion of the welfare state.

There's also the Mandal Commission, which is basically 27% of government jobs and educational institutions are reserved for lower caste, other backward castes.

And there's this insane flurry of rights legislations. We have NREGA, which is guaranteed rural employment. We have the domestic violence act. We have the amendment to the Hindu succession act, which says that Hindu women should get equal inheritance as men.

So what does the second process lead to in terms of how voters are feeling? Well, this very visible attempt on the part of the state to say, we want to improve the lives of marginalized groups actually pisses off a lot of elites.

So especially, you see this around the Mandal Commission caste quotas, where upper caste Hindus are like, well, my son can't get a government job anymore. So there's immense anger and resentment and just this feeling of very similar to how American whites think of affirmative action.

But interestingly, the other thing that happens is that the groups that were promised the rights are also like, well, our lives haven't gotten that much better. Hindu women aren't actually getting inheritance. Their brothers are still seizing their property.

And you really see, in Twenty Twelve, so two years before the BJP comes to power, this moment, it's right after this brutal rape and murder of this woman named Jyoti Singh Pandey, who dies after being assaulted in a bus in Delhi, and the whole country explodes.

And this is a moment where a lot of people who thought the rights that were extended to women by the Congress Party, they're like, well, why am I not safe?

So what does this mean? These two processes come together, leaving a lot of people feeling like, we didn't quite get what we were promised. And it doesn't have to do just with the failures of the state to address inequality. It also partly has to do with its successes, but successes that were not complete.

DAN RICHARDS: So I see how this expansion of welfare legislation and rights based legislation created a sense of threat among some of India's elites, while at the same time, maybe not going far enough to keep the lower and marginalized classes from feeling their own resentment towards those in power, that neither side was really satisfied with what they perceived as the direction of the country.

How, though, did that lead to the embrace and ascent of Prime Minister Modi's party, the BJP, which is an elite driven Hindu nationalist party who has made up Modi and the BJPs winning constituencies all these years?

PATRICK HELLER: Yeah. Look, first, the BJPs made inroads into poor constituencies and lower castes. It is still predominantly an upper caste, upper class political party.

Second, we have to remember this is a parliamentary system and that in every constituency, unlike in the US, there's multiple parties. So the BJP is in power with about 36% of the vote.

So 2/3 of Indians do not vote for the BJP. So important to remember this. And that's the nature of the system. It's very few parties have ever had more than 40%.

Its base is in the cities. It's Bangalore, Delhi, all the cosmopolitan, globally integrated, modernistic cities vote BJP. So it's the exact opposite of the US pattern where cities are democratic and support for MAGA and ethno-populism comes from more rural areas.

So in that sense, in India, what we're seeing, and I think it's true elsewhere in the Global South, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines, there's a big difference between right wing reaction in the Global South and in the North because in the South it's an elite reaction. It's the elites that are reacting to this two, three decade process of the mobilization of the rights of the majority. And so they feel threatened.

DAN RICHARDS: And this gets to-- I wanted to talk about how these patterns you both are laying out can help us think about inequality and democracy in the United States. And what's so interesting that you're saying is, while on certain surface level elements, what we see happening in places like India and Brazil might look a lot like what we think we're seeing in the United States.

The underlying dynamics, it's maybe similar outcomes coming from different places. And maybe first, what are some ways you think the patterns and trends you've described in India's democracy apply and fit into the context of the United States? And then maybe we can talk more about how it's different, like you said, with education and urbanization and certain demographic things. But what's similar between these different types of authoritarian turns?

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: So Tom Carruthers recently had this article about, oh, everyone has misidentified the causes of democratic backsliding. And it's different things in different places.

I don't fully agree. I think there's a reason this is happening in so many different places. And so I agree with you that the specificities are different in terms of the particular ways these things manifest.

But I do think that the Indian case and the major overarching outline we've put in place does apply to the US case. The first facet of this is that the economic policies of the past 30 to 40 years have led to massive forms of inequality and concentration of wealth at the top and that creates certain dynamics, certain kinds of resentments and frustrations that in particular places take on xenophobic forms. In India, it's against Muslims. Here, it's against immigrants and people of color.

The other part of what we're saying about India, I think, also really applies to the US, which is that, especially, if you think about what is happening in the US before the second Trump presidency, MeToo, Black Lives Matter, increasing visibility for trans people and acceptance.

So what does this lead to? It's the same thing. It's gains actually, real social gains in equality for historically marginalized people. And we now see that the administration that we have in place is very actively, every single day, capitalizing on the elite resentment against these gains and trying to roll them back. So I would say that overarchingly, there is a very similar pattern happening here.

DAN RICHARDS: In the US, we have seen another response to these rising levels of inequality, which is a type of populism that is maybe more exemplified by figures like Bernie Sanders that's maybe more focused on economic distribution but less hostile to diversity and democratic institutions. Have there been similar figures and movements in India? And if so, what's the same and what's different about those trajectories?

PATRICK HELLER: Yeah. That's a terrific question. And India is a really fascinating case to reflect on because not only does the BJP only get 36%, 37% of voter support, but it's also a largely Northern phenomenon. So there are many parts of India, just like there are many parts of the United States that have not gone with right wing populism.

So in the South, for example, the state of Kerala, the state of Tamil Nadu, and there are states in the West as well, West Bengal. And remember, these states average 60 to 90 million people. So these are big, big places.

And what's interesting is that the parts of India that have not, by and large, supported the BJP are the parts of India where local political parties, usually of the center left, parties that see themselves as social justice parties, these parties have been around for a while and they've done well. And they've built relatively successful inclusive welfare regimes.

So the lesson is where the left or the center left has been able to deliver basic education, basic health care, some degree of social justice, and where maybe the tensions of inequality aren't as pronounced and maybe where elites don't feel quite as threatened because in a sense, the masses have already been incorporated.

They've already become included in the system. And so they're not seen as such an imminent threat. And the institutions in general are more robust. So health care and education in Southern India is just much better than in the North.

And the appeal of the BJP is really limited. And in fact, it's the left populace. The Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu, which are anti-Brahmanical parties, and this Communist Party in Kerala, which is essentially a social democratic party. These are the ones that have had a lot of success.

And there's other cases in the world, Brazil. So Bolsonaro was called the Trump of the tropics because he looked and acted and represented exactly the kind of politics that Trump represents. And he won an election under somewhat odd circumstances, but he won. He was in power for four years. He did a crap job.

He began to erode the democratic institutions. He then attempted a coup. And as in most constitutional democracies, it's illegal to attempt a coup. And now he's going to prison for it. And in the meantime, the Workers' Party, led by a union guy, Lula, is back in power and doing what they do best, which is building out the welfare state.

So this isn't just a moment of right wing reaction. It's also a moment in some cases of reconstituted left populism, which looks a lot like Bernie Sanders.

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: I would just add that Modi and Trump are different in the sense that Modi is more of a welfare chauvinist. So Trump promised, made lots of promises to working class people, which he has not delivered on. And in fact, quite the opposite. He's undercutting whatever meager provisions were in place for poor people in this country.

But the breakdown is not that the BJP doesn't provide welfare and then these left or left center parties do. They're all doing the same things. But if you have a regional party that's pretty well established, including in my home state of West Bengal, we have Mamita Banerjee leading the TMC.

And you see that he's really not making traction in a lot of these places. And it's not just because of the power of local identities, but also the fact that Modi is now doing what Mamita has been doing where he's like, oh, I need to also provide bicycles to young girls or something. So they're all trying to extend welfare, which is, which is a bit different from the US scene where most people are not trying to extend welfare.

PATRICK HELLER: But the US, in a sense, has always been an exception. Because even the right wing parties in Europe are not attacking the welfare state. They're just saying the welfare state is for those who, quote, "deserve it." So it's this anti-immigrant rhetoric. And there's a lot of that in India as well.

So they're now claiming that a lot of people live in India, aren't really citizens, and they have to prove that they're citizens if they're going to access welfare or vote for that matter. So there's that same of logic. But yeah, I totally agree.

That said, what Modi has done, and this is exactly what Bolsonaro tried to do in Brazil unsuccessfully, but they've reconfigured the nature of the welfare state.

So the welfare state that was being built in this period that Poulami talked about, the 10 years before the BJP, was a rights based welfare state. You were entitled to certain things as a bearer of rights. And you could claim it through law, through institutions, through participation in politics, cetera.

Welfare in India now is being reconfigured as a gift from the great leader. So everything comes directly from Modi himself. It's not going through institutions. It's not going through processes. And it's really seen as the great leader delivering stuff to the people.

And so yes, it's a poor country. You have to deliver welfare, otherwise you're not going to get the votes. But there's different ways of delivering welfare. And this is going back towards patronage and clientelism instead of building a rights based welfare regime.

DAN RICHARDS: As you say, even though the United States is different in this way with its relationship to welfare, I can't help but think when you describe that patrimonialism that one of President Trump's favorite things in his first term was being able to write checks directly to citizens.

PATRICK HELLER: Absolutely, classic example.

DAN RICHARDS: One thing I wanted to come back to just because it seems to be such a stark dividing line in American politics that is different in India is education. As you said, the highly educated voters tend to support the BJP and Modi.

And in the United States, it is highly educated voters who are most consistently opposed to Trump. What do you make of that difference? Is it just a matter of different historical trends in how education was provided to people? Why does that not align?

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: If you think of the history of education in India, education was a reserve for Brahmins. And that relationship still really holds that this is a country where the highest educated people, it was not just Brahmins but Brahmin men.

So still today, the most educated people are part of the social group that is the ruling, the dominant group in the country.

PATRICK HELLER: And they feel threatened in terms of-- I mean, all the professional Indians who've come to the United States over the last 30 years and who run the IT sector, et cetera, they're all products of the IITs, which are the MITs of India.

These were almost exclusively Brahmin, upper caste, upper class schools. So they were being subsidized by the government to eventually get an H-1B visa and go to the United States and become wealthy. And they're fueling the growth of the Indian economy today and doing extremely well.

Now the lower castes are saying, well, wait a minute, we should profit from these subsidies as well. And so when they do through the Mandal Commission and these various initiatives by the government to increase quotas for lower castes, initially in the '80s when the Mandal Commission increased those quotas, the reaction of Brahmin students was self-immolation.

I mean, imagine self-immolating, but it was seen as an existential threat. And so to me, that explains why English speaking, highly educated, cosmopolitan professionals who drink beer and probably eat meat in secret, et cetera vote for an incredibly reactionary, backward looking, patriarchal, anti-Muslim, neo-fascist political party.

DAN RICHARDS: And whereas in the United States, it's just that higher education has become more open in the last half century.

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: Yeah. I think things like the GI Bill actually democratized education.

PATRICK HELLER: We forget this. US was the first country in the world to have mass education. Everybody everyone got educated. The reason we have high local property taxes is because local property taxes were the basis for education.

Education for all, at least among the dominant racial group. Obviously, Blacks were excluded all the way through the end of the Jim Crow period, and the legacy is still there.

But the public education system of the United States was relatively inclusive, the race question aside, whereas in India it was always the privileged domain of upper castes. And now that it's being challenged from below, it's creating these really acute conflicts.

And I think in the US, it was much more inclusive through the '70s and '80s, and it's become more hierarchical. And the university system has definitely become more hierarchical. So there's still good quality public institutions, but tuition has been rising, et cetera.

So now higher education has become a source of conflict in the United States. And a lot of the resentment of the kind of MAGA base is precisely the fact that they haven't had the same kind of access that some of the, quote, "coastal elites" have had to higher education, and that's fueling some of the resentment, which is why when Bernie Sanders started proposing free community college, et cetera, that resonated with a lot of people.

And I've always thought that one of the big failings of the Democratic Party was pushing for greater inclusion of access to higher education for the middle class and lower middle class and the working class.

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: And I do want to qualify that. There have been very successful left-based movements in India that actually were led by the most educated classes. So this is not necessarily the relationship that always holds in India.

But the other thing that Patrick highlighted a while ago that might be worthy of discussing is that the BJP's base is an urban base versus a rural base, which is the reverse of the US case.

And so it's not just education. There's something about urban life in India that leads to high levels of support for the BJP, whereas rural life does not. And it's interesting that that's literally the mirror opposite.

DAN RICHARDS: So what do you both make of that distinction?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: --first.

PATRICK HELLER: Well, part of it's historical because the social base of the BJP going way back has always been the merchant trading community. And they're obviously by definition concentrated in urban areas. And they tend to be anti-big state anti-regulation. And that's the source of their affinity with neoliberalism, et cetera.

But I think it does come back to this idea of accessing institutions. Why do people move to cities? Sometimes they're pushed out, but insofar as they make a conscious choice to move to a city to improve their lives, it's because cities have better education. They have better health. They have better economic opportunities. The institutions are more robust, et cetera. Rural India is a tough place to live.

But by the same token, those institutions are only as good as they are exclusive. If everybody has access to them, it doesn't confer as many benefits. So the people who live in the city, they have an incentive to ration access to the city. And every city in the world does this. We do it through landmark, rents and property prices, et cetera. There's a market mechanism to keep the poor out.

In India, there's market mechanisms, but there's all sorts of other mechanisms. And one of them is, and this is going to sound crazy, but is vegetarianism literally.

I mean, if you're a renter looking to rent in Indian cities, and we know this, people it anecdotally, but we have polling data on this as well, the way you keep lower castes and Muslims out of the cities don't rent to meat eaters.

So there's all these mechanisms of segregation. So cities become, I think, the trenches of resistance for elites against this potentially mass popular uprising.

DAN RICHARDS: And not to simplify the distinctions between the United States and India, but would it almost be fair to say, in that case, that a lot of the ways historic elites in cities in the United States created exclusion wasn't by creating more exclusion within the city, it was by moving to the suburbs yet our cities became a more diverse, inclusive place, similar to how education became a more diverse, inclusive place?

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: Yeah. I mean, this pattern in India goes back quite a while. So if you look at the history of riots, communal riots in India, it's cities that have communal riots, not villages. So it raises a question that perhaps there's different kinds of solidarities in villages and in cities in India, whereas those solidarities are reversed in the US.

So you go to a lot of cities in the US, including Providence, and you see dense social networks, expansive social networks, people are interacting and mingling with a lot of different kinds of people and socializing.

And you go to a lot of rural areas in the US, and you see massive amounts of isolation. In India, I think it's possibly the reverse where villages are places where Hindus and Muslims are constantly co-mingling.

They may not share the same dishes. So your Muslim friend comes over and your grandma's like, here's a separate cup, but he's still coming over. But in the cities, that Muslim person never even comes over.

And so there's a social dynamic that is not just about residential segregation, but about social segregation, where people don't know each other in cities in India. And the idea of modernity, I think, is actually quite different in India than what we think of as the modern and cosmopolitan.

So we think of cities as being these cosmopolitan, modern places where people love liberal values and want to know people who are different from them.

But I think the idea of modernity and cosmopolitanism in a lot of post-colonial places is not about that. It's about potentially material acquisitions or linked to how successful will your children be, things like that and how clean is the area around you and part of cleaning up the area around you is getting rid of these poor people and silencing them.

So I think to add to the institutional dynamics that Patrick is talking about, I think the social and cultural dynamics of cities in India actually are closer to the social and cultural dynamics of rural areas in the US. And that leads to particular political affiliations.

DAN RICHARDS: In Twenty Twenty-Four, the BJP lost seats in India's election. And in that same year, of course, Trump won in the United States, and he won by gaining support in almost every demographic group in the United States.

I wonder, looking at India, what led to this push back against the BJP? And what, if anything, might that election be able to tell us about some of the potential weaknesses that could exist or could come up for Trump and the MAGA movement?

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: I think it has to do directly with the topic of this podcast, which is that he has not been particularly good at reducing inequality. In fact, it's gotten worse.

So now India has, and I was even shocked to learn this, the highest concentration of wealth in the world, i.e. the richest Indians their share of wealth is higher than the richest Russians, which is astounding.

So a few things happened. In Twenty Fourteen, they had a majority, meaning that they didn't have to form a coalition government. They extended that majority in Twenty Nineteen. And then in the latest election, I think there were some political missteps that they made, the BJP, but also some economic failures.

The political mistakes were that before the election, they kept going around saying 400 Paar, which means we're going to pass 400 seats.

PATRICK HELLER: They set the bar very high.

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: Very high. And this is a meaningful number. 400 seats means that they would have had a super majority, which would have allowed them to change the constitution.

This really freaked out a lot of people, and especially lower caste people who were like, oh, God, you're going to get rid of the reservation system. People are like, oh my God, we cannot let them have a super-majority.

So this 400 Paar thing backfired. But also the fact that right before this latest election, you see that inflation is just going through the roof. And it's really impacting food prices.

And as a result, you see a drop in the percentage of women who vote for the BJP. And I think it's because women are in charge of feeding their families, and they're like, can't feed them.

So you see a lower support from women, lower support from lower castes. There were also a couple regionally specific things.

They lost a lot of seats in UP, which has been a bastion for them, including Ayodhya, which was just shocking. This is where they demolished the mosque and then they lost Ayodhya. I mean, I was pretty astonished.

But some of the reports coming out of UP were people saying, my children, especially my sons, they still can't get jobs. Everything costs a lot. So there was a way in which the political missteps, combined with the fact that inequality has actually gotten much worse, I think bit them in the back.

PATRICK HELLER: I mean, look, one of the reasons that populism is doing well across the world is that democratic institutions, and Poulami you said this earlier, haven't been able to deliver or have under-delivered.

And partly they've under-delivered delivered because we live in an increasingly globalized world where it's difficult for governments to really manage their economies. It's difficult to mobilize revenues to pay for social programs because capital has become increasingly mobile.

And democratic institutions are up against all these global powers, global commodity chains and markets that are setting prices and dictating policies, et cetera. And so the institutions don't deliver. Adam Przeworski famously said that people have realized that they can vote, but they can't really choose.

And in that context, populists are attractive. They come and they say, I am the solution to all of your problems. And the real problem is the other, Muslims in India, or immigrants in the United States, or immigrants in Europe.

And they overpromise. I mean, they make all these exaggerated claims. They grotesquely simplify everything. They say, if I'm in power and if I populate the bureaucracy with ideological loyalists, we're going to fix all the problems.

And it turns out that when you populate the bureaucracies with ideological loyalists rather than people who are actually competent and good at what they do, and when you run roughshod against over rules and processes, et cetera, what you're going to get is a lot of corruption.

You're going to get a lot of crony capitalism. You're going to get a lot of patronage. You're going to get a lot of completely incoherent policies like Trump's tariff stuff, which changes every day. Or in Modi's India, all the economic policies, they don't add up to anything. They just add up to cronyism.

And they don't deliver. The economy is not doing better. Inequality is getting worse. Institutions are corroding. And people in the United States, for example, clearly Trump had a lot of support on the immigration point and closing down the border. He doesn't have support when it comes to violating due process. And this is clear in the polling.

People are like, yeah, people are here and are illegal and have committed crimes should go. But, if you've been a good person and you're following the law, cetera, you're entitled to due process. So people are willing to make sacrifice some elements of democracy and go with the populist over promises.

But when you start actually attacking the core of democracy, due process, basic rule of law. And in the Indian case, it's really clear, the BJP was like, we're going to change the constitution.

And the lower castes were like, well, wait a minute. We liked our constitution. It gives us rights. It recognizes that we're a historically marginalized population, et cetera. And that's when they said, enough with this and they defected from the BJP coalition.

So I think we're already seeing signs of that in the US. A lot of Black and Latino voters who did shift to Trump are now, wait a minute. This isn't exactly what we were expecting. And maybe we do need to defend the core elements of democracy. So populism, overoverpromises and rarely actually delivers that, I think, gives us some room for hope.

DAN RICHARDS: I like to end with hope. And I have one more question though. So we'll see which direction it goes. If in your views, these authoritarian turns have maybe overpromised and under-delivered, I feel like what we've also seen and heard in this conversation is that efforts in democracy also have maybe under-delivered in ways that have caused resentment.

Is there a way or a path forward that could get us out of this sense that who's ever in power is underdelivering to huge constituencies that end up just getting fed up after a few years?

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: Well, look, what I'm going to restate is that I think democracies have delivered. But the delivery actually causes problems. So when you expand social rights, some people get pissed off because they don't want everyone to be equal.

So stepping back, even if democracies aren't delivering, I still think democracy is a good idea. It's a virtue in and of itself. But if you look at the record, you do see that democratic countries tend to be very good at certain things. They tend to be more peaceful across the board. They wage fewer wars. That's good for people.

They tend to actually be better at GDP growth. Though everyone's like, what about China? Despite China, most democracies are better at GDP growth than most autocracies.

People in democracies live longer than people in autocracies, and they tend to be more educated. So I think that in core ways, we need to remember that democracies have delivered and that the problem is not necessarily that they're not delivering, it's how to manage what they are delivering. And some governments have been better at that than others.

PATRICK HELLER: This is difficult under any circumstance. There's tremendous resistance. Some of these policies are expensive. In the current global economy, it's hard to mobilize revenues, et cetera.

But the one thing that's also extraordinary about democracy is you learn. It's a process of deliberation, experimentation, feedbacks, et cetera. Authoritarian regimes don't have these mechanisms. And the Chinese case is a bit of a unique case. But most authoritarian regimes underdeliver and the literature on this is really clear.

That said, it takes a lot of patience and time for democracies to deliver at the material level, especially given current conditions of the global economy, cetera.

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: Yeah, and I would say the main challenge right now is not, oh, democracy isn't delivering, is that the dynamics that take place once an authoritarian regime is in power is very different from what allows them to achieve power.

So I think the real challenge ahead is that it will be difficult to go back to democracy in a lot of these countries where there's been rising authoritarianism. And it's not because people aren't dissatisfied.

We do see increasing dissatisfaction already after eight months in the US. But it's the fact that it gets harder and harder to get those people out of power once they are in power. So that's not a positive note, but sorry.

DAN RICHARDS: No, but I think it's a clear analysis of the challenges people who support democracy are facing at this moment. And thank you both so much for taking the time to talk with us and think this all through.

POULAMI ROYCHOWDHURY: Thank you for having us.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Additional music from the Blue Dot Sessions.

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