Democracy doesn’t mean western democracy or liberal democracy. Shadi Hamid has done excellent work on this issue: https://www.brookings.edu/books/the-problem-of-democracy-ame...; see also https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/18/the-problem-of...
Are they, when people opposing one candidate are jailed?
> That’s all democracy requires.
That is certainly false. Democracy isn't mob rule, or as the saying go, it's not two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. Democracy is about self-determination for each person; if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.
And pray tell who that candidate is and what was their platform?
> Democracy isn't mob rule, or as the saying go, it's not two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. Democracy is about self-determination for each person; if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.
And what is the definition of minority to follow? Caste? Religion? Ethnicity?
Each one of these intersectionalities are represented in Indian electoral politics at the local, state, and national level.
The BJP itself lost it's supermajority in the Lok Sabha (Parliament) after Muslim voters in UP flipped to the Samajwadi Party in the 2024 election, and the opposition parties have won major state elections such as in Jharkhand.
In fact, after the 2024 election results, Indian electioneering is starting to stop using the "Hindu-Muslim" trope because it's been overused, and the primary swing voting bank at this point is women, as was seen with the results of the 2024 General, Maharashtra, and Delhi elections.
> if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.
I agree with you that Majoritarianism is NOT democracy.
But minorities are not uniformly opposed to the BJP either. Lower caste Muslims (Pasmanda) tend to lean towards the NDA (BJP's coalition) [0] and Muslim women have begun to lean in favor of the BJP due to women first welfare schemes [1]
Furthermore, assuming the BJP is India and India is the BJP is an extremely reductive take on Indian democracy that was clearly proven wrong in the 2024 General Elections. If it was then the BJP would have won a hypermajority ("Abki Bhar 400 Paar"), but got a severe drubbing forcing them to build a coalition with secular JD(U) in Bihar and TDP in AP.
[0] - https://carnegieendowment.org/2024/02/09/mapping-muslim-voti...
[1] - https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/elections/india/lok-s...
Actually a great filter to know who knows what they are talking about.
Source? According to these sources Bukele beats Modi ~90% to 75%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_B...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1456852/world-leader-app...
The amount of data collection and analysis is insane. Election Consulting Companies like I-PAC and Showtime Consulting would gather extremely granular religious (sect level), ethnic (sub-clan level), age, linguistic (sub-dialect level), economic, and social metrics and poll on a near weekly basis, and work with the parties that hired them to iterate on electoral messaging and promises based on the selected demographic intersection.
These consulting firms also pay Microsoft and Google India level salaries so they are attracting the best of the best at top Indian universities.
For this purpose, I like to mentally model a country (or territory which decided to hold an election of some kind) as a collection of points in a multidimensional space of values or policies which are up for election. Each point represents where a voting person would stand according to their personal principles.
Now, I’d like to postulate that the act of voting corresponds to finding the center of the cluster of points. In this model, it’s easy to imagine the scenario where a very large portion of people (and possibly even the majority) are deeply dissatisfied with the result because they are too far on many dimensions from the center that was elected. This is actually further exacerbated by many factors in real life like the asymmetry of information between people.
The obvious solution would be to create more cluster centers instead of one fat cluster that leaves everyone not very happy. This corresponds to states or provinces within a country in the real world.
So coming from that line of thinking, it leads me to believe that sometimes to maintain a democracy, you need to cut the outliers away to move/make the center such that people are happy with the result. Essentially you enforce the will of the majority by cutting away the minority until it is no longer a tyranny to do so.
Of course this is gross simplification of real life. It is ignoring factors such as external threats, instability, unpredictability, information availability and so on. However, I think it’s useful to think this way for many purposes.
Addressing your extreme example of a criminal, that’s a point so far off in the space that you definitely want to cut it out of the system.
If you want to exempt certain decisions or categories of decisions from the majoritarian rule, that poses a conundrum: how do you decide what’s exempted, and how do you make decisions about issues within that exempted space?
But yeah yeah that's not "true democracy" because anything other than majoritarianism is a grotesque western perversion of the perfect immaculate glorious ideal of "simple majority rules on everything". Whatever.
What equivalent do you have in India (or Bangladesh or Iraq or Afghanistan)? You can try imposing the same ancient political norms that existed in Britain, and that’s what the Indian constitution did. But you can’t scream “you’re doing democracy wrong!” when Indians refuse to give much weight to those colonial impositions, as is happening.
And no matter how gleefully you celebrate the distress of liberal westerners when minority populations are abused and human rights are violated, the essential force driving towards the liberation of minorities everywhere is not some foreign tradition, but their own humanity. Until the Muslims and Sikhs of India are killed off entirely, they have their will to survive and to seek a better life. Modi may be popular, but short of genocide he cannot take that away.
It's something I disagreed with you about before, but have come to agree with you about Raynier.
Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Turkiye, and Israel have all begun falling out of the US orbit after we began pressing on the liberalism aspect.
We should fight for liberal democracy at home, but it is not something we should necessarily evangelize abroad, as elite and economic consolidation plays a greater role in building lasting ties with a country instead of ideological ties.
I had a convo with Mastro and Doshi about this during a seminar a couple months before the election, and it sounded like they also started agreeing with this view as well.
Elite and economic consolidation is a corrupting force, though. A country's actions are just as important as it's stated values - if it partners with others who don't share those values, then it's just performance. If your country signals that it doesn't actually care about its purported values, then why would any country which does care want to create long-term relationships or otherwise ally themselves with you? How would anyone be able to trust you if you compromise your foundational principles for economic gain? How could you trust them?
The US government funded social infrastructure like health clinics, schools, and sanitation systems, but the Chinese government funded hard infra projects like canals, highways, energy systems, and weaponry without human rights oversight [0].
When Cambodia decided to end their democratic experiment, the US condemned it, but the Chinese government was indifferent. And now Cambodia has solidly shifted to the Chinese sphere of influence.
This story has repeated all across ASEAN from Thailand to Malaysia to Indonesia.
The reality is it's only the economic, military, and poltical decisionmakers that matter, and if you needle them too much, they will try to find alternatives or build their own strategic autonomy.
France did the same thing in the De Gaulle era for the exact same reasons (military regime that didn't like getting needled about democratic backsliding).
> then why would any country which does care want to create long-term relationships or otherwise ally themselves with you
Cold hard cash, weapons, and legitimacy. Which is what ASEAN countries have begun to do by shifting closer towards China. They don't want or need lectures - they want to maintain their own power.
Notice how Europe has grown silent about Turkish democratic decline now that European nations require Turkish support to stabilize Ukraine. And if PiS wins the Polish elections, you won't hear similar complaints about "democratic backsliding" compared to the PiS barely 3 years ago. When push comes to shove, values don't matter much.
In an era where great power politics has returned, values matter less than hard power.
[0] - https://www.iseas.edu.sg/articles-commentaries/iseas-perspec...
Regimes fall when subsets of the elite decide to defect to the opposition.
For example, Hosni Mubarak fell not because of protesters in Tahrir Square, but because Sisi didn't feel like shooting protesters at that time for Mubarak's sake (Sisi had ambitions). If Sisi and the Egyptian military didn't decide to return to the barracks, the Arab Spring in Egypt would have never happened.
The only solution to this is by actually cultivating multiple different factions within those elites. Yet this is something the US is not good at anymore because this kind of knowledge and understanding requires significant cultural background, and State Dept hiring regulations prevent people of the same ethnicity from working on relations for those countries.
> Consider the various examples of regime change and/or support for dictators/authoritarians enabled by the United States in South America and the Middle East
The most notable one in the post 1971 era is Iran 1979 where US cultivated the secular Shah's government and military leadership, but not the organized Shia clergy. If the US had cultivated Khomenini, we wouldn't have been in such a severe situation. The French on the other hand engaged Khomeini and Shia clergy, and it helped ensure that France could maintain relations until the sanctions regime began in the 2010s.
By the 1990s, US foreign policy in Latin America changed to democracy promotion due to the same points you brought up, and that caused Honduras to switch in favor of China after corruption investigations threatened their leadership, and Nicaragua switched in favor of China due to pushback for democratic backsliding in 2017-18.
I’ll leave aside my conspiracy theories about how much Anthony Blinken had to do with Hasina being overthrown last year. But we have a new government promising more liberalism but the security situation has deteriorated: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/3/4/gotham-but-no-ba.... Holding fair elections will be impossible, because the interim government has a tremendous incentive to ban Hasina’s party, which has long been the most popular party.