In June 2024, Narendra Modi won a third consecutive term leading the Indian government with 240 seats out of 543, fewer than expected, but sufficient. The BTI 2026 documents democratic decline and governance weaknesses in India, but does not precisely document ten degraded governance indicators. These two facts coexist without contradiction: this is precisely the mechanism that political scientists call electoral authoritarianism. Elections continue; what changes is the terrain on which they are played.
The Essentials
- The BTI 2026 documents ten degraded governance indicators simultaneously in India, as Modi enters his third term.
- Electoral authoritarianism modifies institutional rules without eliminating voting: countervailing powers progressively align with the electoral legitimacy of the leader.
- According to a working paper from Texas Tech University (Grier & Grier, August 2026), Indian per capita income sits approximately 1,000 USD below its expected trajectory, with a p-value of 0.00.
- Christophe Jaffrelot’s thesis on “ethnic democracy” finds empirical validation in these data, while leaving open the tension between institutional degradation and the maintenance of growth.
- For Western governments, an Indo-Pacific partner whose institutions are weakening presents uncertain long-term predictability.
Ten Indicators, One Single Movement
The Bertelsmann Transformation Index is a comparative measurement tool produced by a German foundation that has tracked political and economic transformation trajectories in over one hundred countries for twenty years. Observing multiple degradations in the same country over the same cycle calls for analysis of their coherence. The BTI 2026 comprises 17 criteria and 49 indicators in total; its governance index comprises 20 indicators.
The report describes weaknesses concerning judicial independence, press freedom, minority rights, separation of powers, and mechanisms to check executive power. Each taken in isolation could be explained by circumstantial factors. These elements, considered together, draw a structural trend. India moved from “Partly Free” to “Free” in the 1998 Freedom House report; the “Partly Free” classification of 2021 was therefore not without precedent since 1977.
The work of Christophe Jaffrelot provides the analytical framework for reading these data. In Modi’s India, he describes how, in his view, the governments of Narendra Modi and the rise of Hindu nationalism have moved India toward a form of de facto “ethnic democracy.” In the ethnic democracy model, political and civil rights may persist, but the state institutionally privileges a majority ethnic nation. In the case analyzed by Jaffrelot, this majority is defined through Hindu nationalism and Hindutva. In certain regimes, electoral legitimacy can accompany a concentration of power and the weakening of countervailing powers, without this alignment being automatic.
The Supreme Court has rendered decisions sometimes favorable to the government and sometimes contrary to its priorities; one cannot conclude to a general convergence. Dominant media depend on economic actors close to power.
Electoral commissions function formally, but resources and institutional visibility structurally favor the party in power.
The Mechanism of Institutional Complicity
Maintaining elections costs less politically, in terms of international legitimacy, than eliminating them. When the rules of the game have been sufficiently modified beforehand, the result becomes predictable without the vote itself being frauded.
Jaffrelot describes several mechanisms. Jaffrelot analyzes the weakening of certain institutions of control among several dimensions of political transformation. Jaffrelot analyzes transformations in the media landscape and pressures on the press, without identifying them as the second element in a formal list of three levers. Identity mobilization is a central dimension of Jaffrelot’s analysis, but not the third element in a formal list of three levers established in the sources consulted.
This model is not specific to India. Presidential drift in Latin America follows comparable logic: the executive strengthens its positions not through a coup d’état, but through an accumulation of institutional reforms that erode countervailing powers. The Indian difference lies in scale, 970 million registered voters in 2024, and in the sophistication of the apparatus.
The June 2024 result introduces however a nuance. The BJP obtained only 240 seats, far from the absolute majority of 272, and had to form a coalition. Modi governs his third term depending on partners. Some analysts see in this a signal of democratic resistance: the opposition INDIA resisted better than expected in several states, economic difficulties probably contributed to electoral discontent in certain rural areas, without available data demonstrating that all rural voters sanctioned economic policy, and results in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh showed that Hindutva mobilization has its own electoral limits. This reading is honest.
It does not contradict the institutional diagnosis: elections functioned as a mechanism of partial sanction, but within a framework whose rules remain asymmetrical.
The Economic Cost of Institutional Degradation
Institutions are not merely an abstract democratic issue. They condition investor confidence, resource allocation, the quality of public spending, and a state’s capacity to honor its long-term commitments.
The working paper by Kevin Grier and Robin Grier, Texas Tech University, August 2026, provides estimates by synthetic control. By comparing India’s per capita income trajectory to its predicted potential, constructed from data from previous decades and regional comparators, the authors estimate that Indian incomes sit approximately 1,000 USD below the expected trajectory. The p-values for the income deficit vary by year; the document notably indicates 0.00 for certain years and 0.08 for others. The joint value of 0.00 refers to the ten governance indicators.
Caution is warranted on causality. This working paper does not establish a direct and exclusive link between institutional degradation and the income gap: other factors, legacy of previous policies, external shocks, sectoral structure, necessarily contribute. The income gap estimated by Grier and Grier increases after 2014 and partially overlaps periods of institutional decline flagged by other indices, without demonstrating a causal relationship. Economic literature, notably the work of Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson on the link between institutions and development, suggests that this type of correlation merits serious consideration.
The standard liberal thesis, markets accommodate stable authoritarian regimes, encounters counter-evidence here. Ethnic democracy can create legal uncertainty for entrepreneurial minorities, weaken contract protection, and produce distortions in public contract allocation. These effects are not immediately visible in overall growth rates, which remain high in India. But they appear in the gap between potential and reality.
Western Diplomatic Choices Regarding India
The geopolitical tension is real. India is an indispensable strategic partner in the Indo-Pacific architecture vis-à-vis China. It is a member of the Quad with the United States, Australia, and Japan. It is the world’s largest democracy, in the formal sense. And it hosts an influential diaspora in Western democracies.
These interests can lead Western governments to formulate muted criticisms, or even to remain silent about them. Jaffrelot emphasizes that an Indo-Pacific partnership with a democracy whose substance erodes remains without clear diplomatic response. A trade treaty between unequals is a mirage of regional integration: the same logic applies to security partnerships built on an asymmetry of values. An ally whose institutions weaken is an ally whose long-term predictability is uncertain.
The competing reading deserves to be laid out. Sadanand Dhume is at the Council on Foreign Relations, while Milan Vaishnav is at the Carnegie Endowment; attribution of this common thesis requires precise citations not provided. No reliable attribution has been found showing that Dhume and Vaishnav explicitly judge that the BTI and Freedom House overestimate degradation for this reason. This argument contains some truth: India has never been a perfect liberal democracy, and nostalgia for a golden age that never existed sometimes skews comparison.
But the argument of relative degradation, not relative to an ideal, but relative to India of 2010 or 2014, resists this critique. The ten V-Dem indicators of Grier and Grier are analyzed in the same study; they cannot be presented as BTI indicators or as a common measure with Freedom House. The degradation is documented in trend, not in absolute terms.
If Countervailing Powers Resisted Elsewhere, Why and How
The 2030-2035 horizon for India poses a question that exceeds the present diagnosis: in comparable trajectories, which institutional mechanisms have resisted and which have given way.
Comparison with Turkey is necessary. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan followed a formally similar trajectory, electoral triumph, weakening of countervailing powers, identity mobilization, media capture, but in a country incomparably smaller and less institutionally complex. Turkish democracy ultimately gave way under the weight of a constitutional reform that concentrated executive powers in 2017. The tipping point was the complicity of judicial and military institutions, obtained through successive pressure and purges.
In India, the Supreme Court has sometimes resisted. Its rulings on detention without trial of activists under counterterrorism law, or certain decisions on minority rights, show that institutional alignment is partial, not absolute. Regional media in vernacular languages, Tamil, Bengali, Malayalam, maintain critical coverage; critical coverage has suffered strong pressures and weakened in parts of dominant media, but private and digital segments remain critical and diverse. The 2024 results in Tamil Nadu and Kerala illustrate that electoral geography remains diverse.
These resistances are signals to follow. They indicate that India of 2026 is not Turkey of 2017: federal complexity, linguistic diversity, and the depth of judicial tradition constitute structural brakes on centralization. But brakes, not guarantees.
The plausible scenarios for 2030-2035 are distinguished by one pivot point: the economic trajectory. If the gap documented by Grier & Grier widens, stagnant incomes despite nominal growth, rising youth unemployment, informal sector under pressure, the BJP’s electoral equation becomes fragile. The 2024 elections showed that rural voters sanction economic results. A trajectory of prolonged economic disappointment creates conditions for an alternation, as India has experienced several times since 1977.
Conversely, if growth remains robust and India capitalizes on industrial relocations from China, the regime’s electoral legitimacy strengthens, and pressure on institutions continues to exercise itself without visible economic counterpart. In this scenario, institutional degradation continues without open crisis, producing what political scientists call a stable authoritarian equilibrium: sufficiently excel to not provoke rupture, sufficiently constraining so that alternation remains difficult.
The third scenario, the least probable in the short term but the most structurally interesting, is democratic reconsolidation by federal states. The opposition has controlled governments in states representing hundreds of millions of inhabitants. If these entities maintain their judicial and media institutions, they constitute laboratories of democratic resistance in a country where federalism has historically played this role. State constitutional courts, regional assemblies, public universities outside Delhi’s control: these spaces exist. Their vitality over the next five years will say much about the final direction of India’s trajectory.
India maintains multiparty and competitive elections at several levels, in a framework that several evaluations judge asymmetrical; the BTI does not document ten governance indicators simultaneously degraded. It tests the capacity of international indices, strategic partners, and investors to read correctly what they see, and to draw consequences from it.
Sources
- Foreign Policy, “Modi’s India, Europe, and Western Policy” (May 2026), https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/05/22/modi-india-europe-democracy-elections-bjp-economy-western-policy/
- Christophe Jaffrelot, Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, Princeton University Press, https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691206806/modis-india
- Bertelsmann Transformation Index 2026 (BTI), Bertelsmann Stiftung (no specific page URL available)
- Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2026, Freedom House (annual report)
- Kenneth Grier & Robin Grier, Working Paper, Texas Tech University, August 2026 (no final publication URL available)
