India is the world’s largest democracy, with a population of more than 1.48 billion. In the 2024 general election, voting took place over 44 days, making it the largest democratic exercise in the world.

Unlike the United States where elections are decentralized between the states, the power of overseeing the elections in India is placed in the hands of just one committee: The Election Commission of India (ECI for short). The ECI is an independent, autonomous constitutional body that is in charge of administering elections, going through voter registration across the large country, and ensuring that everyone is accurately registered and able to cast a vote. It is led by three commissioners: Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and Election Commissioners Sukhbir Sandhu and Vivek Joshi.

Recent elections however, have called the transparency of the ECI into question. They suggest that India is experiencing what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in How Democracies Die, describe as democratic erosion: a gradual decline in which elected leaders use legal and institutional tools to weaken democracy from within, rather than abolishing it outright. India’s recent electoral controversies fit that pattern and show features of populist politics, in which a leader claims to speak for “the people” while excluding others from that category.

Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that democracies today rarely collapse through coups. They identify four warning signs of authoritarian behavior: a weak commitment to democratic rules of the game, denial of the legitimacy of political opponents, toleration or encouragement of violence, and a readiness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media. They also show how such leaders go about undermining democratic norms. First they “capture the referees,” the neutral institutions such as courts, law enforcement, and in this regulatory agencies like the ECI that are meant to enforce the rules fairly.

Narendra Modi ran in the last (2024) general election winning a historic and rare third term as Prime Minister. Opposition parties soon suspected that the government was concealing problems in the process, and in 2026 an investigation into the ECI began, examining its integrity and the fairness of voter registration. SIR (Special Intensive Review), is a process which in the past has been used to ensure no eligible voters were left out and no ineligible voters were let into election participation. The SIR rolls require repeat voters to simply fill out an enumeration form in order to register, whereas new voters are required to submit 11 different identification documents, including a birth certificate and passport. Many citizens who are impoverished or belong to religious groups that go against Modi’s Hindu party, like Muslims, are typically unable to produce this level of documentation, and as a result have been excluded from the polls.

Levitsky and Ziblatt stress the importance of neutrality needed for “referees of the game” and the ECI has been showing anything but neutrality. Sandhu and Joshi objected to decisions made by Kumar at least 14 times on record over the past 10 months, with Sandhu even saying that Kumar’s actions were, “Unauthorized and illegal“. If these accounts are accurate, a body designed to be independent was being steered by one official against the objections of its own members, which is the kind of referee capture the authors warn about. Most of those removed voters belonged to economically weak, religious minority, or otherwise vulnerable groups, which are also among the least likely to vote for Modi. 9 million Muslims from West Bengal were removed from voting just days before their elections, despite the local commissions officer contacting Delhi’s head electoral office and asking for the votes to be reinstated. The 9 million votes were never counted, and instances of similar conduct were repeated across the country to result in 130 million people being removed from the voter list, and taken out of democratic participation.

This pattern touches on the first of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s warning signs, commitment to the democratic rules of the game. The ECI does not appear to be holding free and fair elections, and as a result is changing what it means to be an equal citizen. While India might not yet have reached the full extent of a populist or authoritarian regime, recently it has definitely been checking boxes that are pulling it further and further away from democracy.

The second warning sign, denial of the legitimacy of opponents, is also visible. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been India’s dominant party for years, and Modi has worked to delegitimize his main rival, the Congress Party, by calling its members sore losers and deceitful.

The fourth warning sign, readiness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents and the media, is likewise present. Modi is known for pressuring the press and limiting the freedoms of his critics, and the removal of Muslim voters nationwide extends that logic from the media to the ballot box itself.

The pattern here is less an overnight collapse than the slow, almost imperceptible decline Levitsky and Ziblatt describe, in which democracy is being destroyed from the inside out. India has not necessarily reached the end of that path, and its elections still draw enormous participation. The recent elections serve as proof of this decline, and should the investigation fall flat or be delegitimized by the government, there may be no telling as to what the future holds for the largest democracy in the world.