Recently party politics agenda has been occupied by the debates of rising right-wing extremism, challenging and changing the status quo in many countries. The discussion around extremism(s) attaches specific importance to populist and authoritarian tendencies gaining traction, even in the established democracies of the world. India is one of those countries that has lately been experiencing an upsurge of extremism manifested in the form of Hindu nationalism. According to the Freedom House (2024), India has been classified partly free for the first time under the Indian People’s Party’s (Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP) authoritarian governance. The 2022 report has also reported the setbacks for India especially in the categories of civil and political freedoms. In line with such reports, there is a growing consensus among the scholarly literature that the Indian democracy is backsliding as Prime Minister Narendra Modi increasingly resorts to populism and authoritarianism.[1] Modi’s BJP makes use of tools such as rent distribution, privatizations, PPP projects, reductions of labour rights, environmental regulation, and state intervention while basing itself on the entrepreneurial “Hindu people” who are adamant about achieving the country’s development vision. On the other hand, the founding party of India, the Indian National Congress (INC) or simply the Congress, represents the corrupt elite who are aligning with the non-Hindu minority against Modi’s developmentalist vision. According to Rogenhofer and Panievski, this is part of an anti-democratic populist playbook that constitutes an attempt to homogenize an intrinsically heterogeneous society through the mobilization of one authentic, ethnoreligiously conceived “people”.[2] Rogenhofer and Panievski contend that the type of populism in India, together with populism in Turkey and Israel may construct a new type of populism that is different than populism’s European and Latin American versions.[3] Şefika Kumral (2023) slightly departs from such a view by making a distinction between offensive and defensive types of populism, differentiating populism experiences of the Global North and the Global South. I argue that the distinction is quite important and can be useful to reveal how the international relations of India represents a facade of democratic erosion in the country.[4]

Kumral’s article presents a detailed account of authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and populism in India and Turkey, and it does so by locating such an account in a global context. Kumral starts off by underlining the tendency to overgeneralize the Global North’s experience of populism in scholarly literature. Many of those accounts, according to Kumral, have to do with neoliberal globalization’s impact on right-wing populist movements and try to explain “the political alienation of working and middle classes from mainstream parties by turning our attention to the effects of the rise of income inequality, decline of welfare benefits, uncertainty and insecurity created by financial crises.” Such accounts are concerned with how neoliberal globalization paved the way for “right-wing populist leaders who began to mobilize masses against the former political and economic elites as well as against ethnic, racial, and religious minorities and political opposition”. Kumral contends that the above-mentioned views fall short of accurately addressing the relationship between neoliberal globalization and right-wing populism, which is “far more ambivalent” than those accounts suggest. That is mostly because of the uneven development of capitalism, Kumral argues by indicating its distinctness between the Global North and Global South countries. While we are experiencing an abandonment of the welfare state in the Global North, we see that right-wing populists in the Global South employ neoliberal policies with “selected provisions of welfare”.[5] While core countries of the Global North are trying to recover the decline in their economic supremacy, which is caused by capital‘s leaving to Global South countries to find surplus value -resulting in the mitigation of long-time established privileges of labour aristocracies and middle-classes in Global North countries-, peripheral and semi-peripheral countries takes this as a chance to elevate their countries to their “rightful place” and “to challenge the existing hierarchies of wealth and power.” The uneven development of capitalism, Kumral claims, “unmakes working and middle-classes in the former centres of production while it “produces new working and middle-classes in new emergent economies”. In the Global North, right-wing populist leaders ally with these declining classes -defensive populism-, the classes aiming to take their privileges back; however, right-wing populists in the Global South ally with newly rising classes in forming a hegemonic bloc -offensive populism-. The Global South’s offensive populism, therefore, brings the old elite structure to the foreground and blames them for their inability to take advantage of this new neoliberal conjuncture to gain popular support. The Global North’s defensive populism, on the other hand, takes advantage of “the backslash against globalization” and blames earlier neoliberal and financial elites for deteriorating conditions, considering protectionism and deglobalization as chances to recover from the current condition.[6]

Modi’s success in keeping his position as Prime Minister of India after three consecutive elections, in fact, lies in his ability to not only increase votes from the upper classes, which traditionally form his party’s base, but also to attract the attention of the lower classes. This can be considered directly related to the Global South’s experience with populism. Unlike the Global North countries, the implementation of neoliberalism in the Global South was accompanied by certain welfare state policies, which led to an improvement in the rights of the lower classes and the emergence of new middle classes. In India, this hegemonic bloc of upper classes—who form the traditional base of the BJP—and lower and new middle classes, whose rights were improved by benefiting from welfare state policies, constitutes the power behind the government. Modi’s offensive populism, in this context, represents an important part of his political discourse. A key pillar of Modi’s narrative is elevating India to its rightful place on the global stage, in a world where international hierarchies are beginning to shift as a result of the migration of capital to the Global South. Modi’s discourse revolves around the goal of “Making India Great.” The theme of “development” combined with India’s rise also shaped the rhetoric of Modi’s party, BJP, during the 2014 elections when they came to power. BJP accused the previous government of lacking civilizational consciousness and being politically incompetent. According to the BJP, this incompetence, which was manifested in the consecutive Congress governments, led to more than half a century of wasted time during which smaller nations surpassed India.[7]

The Congress, the leading opposition party, remains an important part of Indian politics on the 75th anniversary of the Congress-led independence of India. The Congress, however, has lost its popularity within Indian society and it has, at least formally, lost strength, especially following the BJP’s 2014 victory. The Congress recorded its lowest vote shares in history during the 2014 and 2019 general elections, which has significantly mitigated its representation in both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. The Congress concomitantly lost its traditional stronghold among lower classes and empirical studies now indicate that Congress votes are distributed relatively evenly across different classes, leaving the Congress without a strong voter base. This relative decline in Congress’s support among the lower classes can be seen as a result of Modi’s implementation of selected welfare provisions, which in practice relies on rentier channels and clientelist distribution by the BJP. The 2024 elections, however, indicated the end of Modi’s increasing political fortunes in India as the Congress-led Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.) performed quite well by achieving to gain 234 seats out of a total of 543. The Congress-led INDIA alliance brought together more than 20 political parties to confront the BJP’s electoral coalition, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and prevented the BJP from having the sole majority in the lower house of the parliament. The opposition bloc put emphasis on minority rights and India’s ever-decreasing democratic standards during their electoral campaign, while also bringing ‘development’ and ‘anti-corruption’ to the foreground much like the BJP did in 2014.

[1] McDonnell, Duncan, and Luis Cabrera. “The right-wing populism of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (and why comparativists should care).” Democratization 26.3 (2019): 484-501. s. 484

[2] Rogenhofer, Julius Maximilian, and Ayala Panievsky. “Antidemocratic populism in power: Comparing Erdoğan’s Turkey with Modi’s India and Netanyahu’s Israel.” Democratization 27.8 (2020): 1394-1412.

[3] Ibid., 1407.

[4] Kumral, Şefika. “Globalization, crisis and right-wing populists in the Global South: the cases of India and Turkey.” Globalizations 20.5 (2023): 752-781.

[5] Ibid., p. 2.

[6] Ibid., p. 5.

[7] Ibid., p. 12.