Youth unemployment, economic inequality, religious nationalism and growing tensions between India’s states are placing mounting pressure on its democratic institutions and federal system.
The Indus civilisation is millennia old; its latest reincarnation, India as a nation-state, is young. Stitched together from 555 princely and provincial territories at the sunset of the British Raj, it became a secular democracy that endured, delivering results affecting pawns to maharajas. Its message to the world was unmistakable: India was here to stay.
India has matured in fits and starts, but a geopolitical upheaval is under way around it, and a coalition of domestic political, economic and social forces is converging within it, portending a structural overhaul of the state.
The veins of Indian diversity have always been prone to exploitation, but constitutional checks and balances kept them at bay. Over the past two decades, they have unravelled, as political purveyors manipulate the democracy’s weaker joints, deepening the fissiparous tendencies beneath India’s, and Hinduism’s, admired diversity and tolerance of the ‘other’.
The Indian Union today is beset by institutional decay, declining public standards, and dilution of integrity across federal and state establishments.
One. Hinduism’s value system, which lubricated coexistence among the land’s ethnic, religious, caste and linguistic diversities for millennia, is fraying. Western observers had long predicted the Indian union’s break-up but underestimated the superglue of the Hindu way of life.
Now, under the onslaught of ideological Hindutva – an identity theft of Hinduism itself – that grip is weakening. Parliament, the Supreme Court, the Election Commission and the bureaucracy increasingly serve power rather than check it, and much of the media sits under BJP-oligarchic control. Power without accountability has seeped into institutions long honed by constitutional norms.
Two. The ruling Hindutva autocracy has failed an aspirational young population that is 52 per cent under 30. The education system, its hallowed institutions captured by Hindutva ideologues, manufactures half-educated graduates faster than the economy can absorb them; roughly 40 per cent of graduates under 25 are jobless.
Their frustration surfaced recently: what began online as satire among students, embracing the slur ‘cockroaches’ levelled at them, grew within weeks into the ‘Cockroach Janta Party’, the biggest challenge to Modi’s government since 2014. After leaked entrance-exam papers affected two million students, the education minister was dismissed, an unprecedented retreat by Modi.
A half-educated youth is dangerous: they know what they desire but have little chance of getting it. Their exclusion breeds frustration and anger. Their numbers, concentrated in urban India, are gaining cohesion and signalling demand for a societal turning point.
Three. Regimes are rarely brought down by poverty alone; what matters is when the lower and middle classes, the educated, the propertied, and retired officials – in India, ‘elder wisdom’ carries weight – withdraw their consent. That desertion is under way.
The economy beneath this is one of grotesque contrast: the top 10 per cent hold 58 per cent of national income, over half its children suffer malnutrition, and net foreign direct investment (FDI) has collapsed as pervasive corruption strangles entrepreneurship.
Politicians paper over this with election-time freebies, but basic literacy and ubiquitous smartphones are arming the 700 million poor and lower-middle classes with imported ideas and aspirations.
Modi has been deploying populist carrots, but such bribes are losing impact as the ruling class’s hypocrisy is exposed, from corruption in Hindutva-controlled temples to the elite’s children studying abroad.
Four. Land drives economic structural change; as Twain observed, no one is making more of it. India’s upper-middle and rich classes, bribing local officials, are acquiring land everywhere – along new highways, in the Himalayas, on islands. A nouveau riche agrarian class is emerging, no longer an immiserated peasantry but one with autonomy to act in its own interests. Its protests are sprouting, small and large, like Punjab’s farmers, who refuse Delhi’s diktats.
Five. The South is reasserting itself against the Hindutva-led North on several fronts: local language versus Hindi primacy, intra-regional migration, division of the economic cake, and representation at the federal level.
The southern states resent funding northern counterparts through GST revenue, accusing the Centre of marginalising the South through the GST Council itself. Notably, the 2026 delimitation of parliamentary constituencies threatens to strip southern states of People’s House seats while rewarding the high-fertility Hindi-belt states – what Tamil Nadu’s former chief minister Stalin called “the sword of Damocles”.
Six. Nationalistic pride in the armed forces shapes how people view the ruling regime. The 1962 humiliation by China still stings the Indian psyche, and relentless pressure along the northern border feeds a sense that India is falling behind. That anxiety is compounded by the politicisation of India’s traditionally apolitical armed forces – generals genuflecting to Hindutva politics, discrimination against non-Hindu soldiers, sinecures for retired officers – even as some have condemned it.
Seven. Ultimately, a ruler’s actions, perceived or real, catalyse change – from monarchs like Louis XVI and Nicholas II to authoritarians like Ceausescu, Suharto and Marcos.
Modi’s star is dimming. He came to power on a wave of promised reforms that never matched the expectations he raised (satisfying only crony capitalists).
Modi’s moral claim to divine sanction – that he is ‘non-biological’ and was ‘probably sent by God’, echoing Trump’s claims of having been chosen or saved by God for a mission – is inviting ridicule.
Rulers who root their authority in the divine are accountable only to that source, not to the people – a pattern historically associated with illegitimacy and despotism.
India today is a wounded beast. The state that is likely to emerge from this decade will not be the one Nehru built, nor the one Modi promised.
80 years is not old age for a nation, but a crossroads. In the coming decade, India’s (flawed) democracy will either perform a second act or write its epitaph.
Rakesh Ahuja
Rakesh Ahuja, a former Australian diplomat, is a Cultural Intelligence (CQ) Consultant. Professional Background: RakeshAhuja.DownloadingMyMind.com