The Dismantling of India’s Democracy 1947 To 2025

India’s democracy once celebrated as an unprecedented experiment in pluralism and participatory nation building now faces a grave crisis. In this urgent and penetrating work veteran journalist Prem Shankar Jha traces how the country’s hard-won democracy—rooted in diversity and tolerance—has been steadily hollowed out since Independence—slowly at first and since 2014 with determined ferocity. </p>Structural flaws in our Constitution like the lack of state-funded elections Jha argues were made substantially worse by Indira Gandhi’s ban on company donations to political parties. As parties increasingly turned to clandestine donors for election financing politics became a near-criminal enterprise facilitating the rise of a predatory state long before 2014. And now under the Modi regime the weaponization of state agencies the serious undermining of electoral processes and the transformation of governance into a tool of political vendetta threaten to tear down the last remnants of India’s democracy. </p>Jha further argues that the erosion of democratic institutions the rise of Hindu majoritarian politics and the normalization of state repression are not isolated events but symptoms of a deeper transformation. Drawing on Indian history and global parallels he makes the bold case that what India is witnessing is not simply a drift towards authoritarianism but the emergence of a distinctively Indian form of fascism. Our only hope cannot be he says an electoral victory for the opposition; it must be grounded in a commitment to both political accountability and cultural inclusivity. </p>Rich with insight and analytical clarity from decades of engagement with the subject The Dismantling of India’s Democracy</i> is both a lament and a call to action. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how a democratic republic can be undone from within—and how it might yet be reclaimed. </p>