When a senior fellow at one of Britain’s most prestigious foreign policy think tanks writes that India is “less liberal, but remains democratic,” he probably expects the phrase to land as reassurance. It shouldn’t.
Chietigj Bajpaee’s essay in Foreign Policy, published last week amid PM Narendra Modi’s European tour, sets out to correct what it calls false narratives — both the Western liberal framing of India as a democratic backslider, and the BJP’s own self-description as a “pole star of democracy.” It’s a useful ambition. The execution, however, is something else.
“The article promises realism. What it delivers is a soft apologia for the BJP’s democratic record, dressed in the language of nuance.”
The buried lede
Midway through the piece, Bajpaee mentions that 9 million names were removed from West Bengal’s electoral roll ahead of the recent state polls — including 2.7 million people who actively contested their deletion, insisting they were neither dead nor absent. He notes this “disproportionately affected minority communities.” Then he moves on. In two sentences.
In any Western democracy, that would be the story. Here, it earns less column space than a paragraph about a Tamil Nadu actor-turned-politician. The decision to mention it and then immediately pivot to praising voter turnout is not balance — it is editorial misdirection.
Turnout is not the same as fairness
The essay repeatedly cites West Bengal’s 90%-plus voter turnout as evidence of democratic vibrancy. But high turnout in a deeply polarised, identity-driven election — in a state with a documented history of political violence — proves nothing about the freedom or fairness of the exercise. Authoritarian-adjacent states routinely post impressive turnout figures. The metric is doing far more work than it can bear.
The Muslim paragraph
Bajpaee acknowledges that Muslims make up 15% of India’s electorate, yet hold zero cabinet positions and fewer than 5% of Lok Sabha seats. He then instructs readers that “this factor should not be overstated.” He does not explain why not. The systematic exclusion of the largest religious minority from executive power is not a footnote to democratic health — in most frameworks, it is central to it. The author raises the alarm and then asks us to lower the volume.
Whose realism is this?
The piece’s conclusion is the most revealing passage. It describes Western policy toward India as resting on three pillars: democratic solidarity, anti-China alignment, and economic partnership. The implication — never stated outright — is that democratic concerns should be calibrated against geopolitical utility. That is a legitimate foreign policy position. It is not a neutral analysis.
Bajpaee is a scholar whose work is closely tied to Western government engagement priorities. An essay arguing that the West should ground its India policy in “realism rather than rhetoric” on democracy is, in effect, arguing for lower standards. Readers deserve to know that before accepting his framing as dispassionate scholarship.
What he gets right
The piece is not without value. Its distinction between democratic process — elections, turnout, institutional continuity — and democratic principles — civil liberties, minority rights, press freedom — is genuinely useful and underemployed in mainstream coverage. His observation that Modi’s succession is unclear, and that this could restore coalition pluralism, is an underreported angle. And his point that India’s foreign policy is closer to Beijing than Brussels in its non-interventionist, regime-agnostic approach is an important corrective to Western self-congratulation.
But these insights don’t redeem a piece that acknowledges electoral manipulation, minority exclusion, and media capture — and then asks us not to make too much of them.
Bottom line: “Less liberal but still democratic” is not a conclusion. It is a question Bajpaee never actually answers. What he has written is less a corrective to Western misreading of India than a permission slip — for policymakers who would rather not let democratic concerns complicate an otherwise convenient relationship.
