India’s democracy is losing in Bihar, and beyond

A strange disconnect between Bihar and Karnataka spells bad news for the state of India’s democracy, such as it is.

The Congress party is ramping up the campaign in Bihar elections, while Karnataka’s Congress government is cranking up the heat to prove elections are gamed. As the Mahagathbandhan opposition alliance in Bihar announced its chief ministerial face in Patna, a Special Investigation Team (SIT) zeroed in on people who attempted to delete Congress votes in Karnataka’s Aland Assembly segment during the 2023 state elections.

Launching the Congress’s signature campaign against “vote chori”, the state’s revenue minister, Krishna Byre Gowda, said the “Election Commission is working as a BJP subsidiary” in stealing elections. The Congress, and the rest of the opposition, is clearly untroubled by the illogic of calling elections a fraud on the people by a captured Election Commission even while participating in one under the same Election Commission.

The question is, why hasn’t the INDIA bloc boycotted Bihar elections if elections are as compromised as it claims?

Boycotts are, after all, not that uncommon. According to the Global Election Boycotts Database, more than a fifth (21.36%) of the 356 national-level elections in 70 countries held between 2000 and 2022 were boycotted.

The trickier question is, do boycotts work? And herein lies an alarming subtext on the state of India’s democracy.

Political studies literature is stacked against election boycotts as resistance. This is because boycotts remove all competition, which the regime could use to strengthen its grip on power – as the fear is with the Modi government.

The long-term consequences of election boycotts are more complicated. Some studies indicate increases in democratisation index scores and a significantly higher likelihood of an incumbent losing in a future election.

One comprehensive study of 171 threatened and actual election boycotts between 1990 and 2009, however, shows success was achieved in only 4% of the cases.  Alejandro Toledo’s boycott in Peru in the early 2000s, for example, drove Alberto Fujimori from power. But for the most part, boycotts entrenched the ruler.

Elections, it is contended, keep opposition parties relevant and their organisations engaged and give them some leverage and access to state resources and means of patronage. Boycotts, on the other hand, allow the incumbent uncontested authoritarian control.

An oft-cited example is Venezuela, where opposition boycotts in Hugo Chávez’s first term allowed him to consolidate power unopposed. Boycotts also may have similarly helped Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. In Azerbaijan, the opposition’s boycott of the 2003 elections could not keep Ilham Aliyev from power; he is still the president. So is the 92-year-old Paul Biya in Cameroon, despite opposition boycotts since the 1990s.

Opposition perseverance with the electoral process, on the other hand, has toppled many a strongman: Slobodan Miloševic in the Yugoslav elections in 2000, Georgia’s Eduard Shevardnadze in 2003, and Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych in 2004.

These examples are instructive, but one could also question their relevance to India. A democratic crisis in every country is, after all, unique, shaped by its own stage of democratic evolution, civic culture, history, context, and its place in the global imagination. A boycott here might play out very differently from in Venezuela or Zimbabwe.

We will never know, though, because the opposition is not taking any chances. This risk aversion is a reflection of the depths to which our democracy has fallen.

When a democracy reaches a stage where the opposition participates in elections it knows are manipulated, we are decidedly in the territory of managed democracy – a hybrid regime of ostensible electoral competition but with limited real choice – where elections exist as a procedural ritual even as substantive power remains centralised. The opposition plays its bit in maintaining the democratic façade for fear of worse if it doesn’t.

The electoral process is the final frontier that is breached before we get to this stage.

In the past decade, our democratic space has been incrementally constricted. But it felt that, theoretically at least, there was still a possibility of upending power through elections. That possibility still exists but has become a lot more skewed if even votes are being manipulated, not just institutions. Crumbs of power are still attainable for the opposition – a state here, some seats there, as part of the managed democratic appearances – but the hurdles to real power may have become insurmountable. That is the lot of competitive authoritarianism, which sits between full democracy and full autocracy.

Enough unanswered questions in past months have put a question mark on the very sanctity of our electoral process, many of them raised by the same political parties that still decided it is better to be in than out. Because what if we are in the early Chavez or Mugabe years? What if it gets worse if we opt out?

These are not the sort of parallels the “world’s largest democracy” ought to be looking at. Or the choices its opposition ought to be making.

The opposition has been trying to prove our democracy is cooked. It has succeeded, ironically by its own actions.

No matter who wins in Bihar, India’s democracy is losing for sure.

(The writer is co-author of To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism)