The West has never been too comfortable with India’s rise. Indeed, at independence, nobody expected India to survive as a democracy. “Power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues, freebooters”, the imperialist Prime Minister of Britain Winston Churchill is supposed to have remarked on the independence of India, adding “all Indian leaders will be of low calibre and men of straw.” Now after leaders like Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, it is perhaps their leaders who deserve to be called “people of low calibre”.

In his 1968 book “Population Bomb”, the Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich, and before him in 1967, the Paddock brothers, William and Paul, had predicted that India would splinter into anarchy and chaos over famine and food riots. The Paddock brothers in fact argued that there was no point in giving food aid to India as it would be a sheer waste ~ Indians should rather be left to their own fate. After India’s third Parliamentary election, Aldous Huxley wrote, “When Nehru goes, the government will become a military dictatorship ~ as in so many of the newly independent states, for the army seems to be the only highly organised centre of power.” On the eve of the 1967 elections, the Times of London ran a series of articles titled “India’s disintegrating democracy”.

Its Delhi correspondent, Neville Maxwell, wrote that “the great experiment of developing India within a democratic framework has failed” and that Indians would soon vote in the “fourth ~ and surely last ~ general election.” India has not only survived all these dismal predictions, but has thrived and prospered. No one today calls us a third world country or the “Sick Man of Asia”. The West has grudgingly ceded space to India’s growing heft in international affairs as champion of the global south and its economic rise within a short period of a decade under the NDA rule, which has seen India overtaking its erstwhile colonial master. India is comfortably poised to become the third largest global economy before the end of this decade.

While the West has taken note of India’s achievements in space and technology benefiting millions of poor, it never misses a chance to denigrate India’s rise by highlighting contrary views, especially of Indian academics positioned in American university campuses who, for some strange reason, are also not comfortable with India’s rise. Now the Western media is turning its ire towards the Indian polity, focusing especially on the current parliamentary elections. A country practices and manages its democracy according to its own culture, values and ethos, which need not necessarily be Western.

The Western media overlooks the fact that despite its many flaws, India’s democracy remains a most vibrant one, evidenced by the high participation of citizens in the electoral process which dwarfs the low participation rate in their own democracies. Some time back, the Swedenbased V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report 2024 termed India’s democracy as an “electoral autocracy”. Now, in an editorial titled “The mother of democracy is not in good shape”, UK’s Financial Times has said that the “gap between pro-democratic rhetoric and reality is widening in India”.

Citing “an intensifying clampdown on opposition parties”, in particular the arrest of Arvind Kejriwal, it said “this matriarch of representative government is in ill health, with worrying implications for the coming polls and what may follow.” Most Western media have highlighted Mr. Kejriwal’s arrest. Only the courts will decide whether the arrest was justified or not. But the Western media has universally highlighted the arrest as a sure indicator of India’s regression from democratic principles, while the string of cases filed against Donald Trump in US courts in its election year are just upholding the “rule of law” and letting the law take its own course in a proper democracy! “A desire to woo India has often led western democracies to hold their tongue over democratic backsliding”, the Financial Times continued and advised Western governments to be more robust in criticizing India, since “preserving political freedoms is in the best interests of Indian growth and prosperity, and of the Modi government’s ambitions to enhance the country’s role as a leading member of the global community.”

One FT journalist has wondered, “Will this be India’s last democratic election?” recalling the Western media’s inherently entrenched bias against India. In an editorial, the Guardian wrote that BJP’s win would mean that Indian democracy would be the loser. “Democracies run best when there is a contest of ideas and equal treatment of citizens in everyday administration”, it says, before concluding that “these are in short supply in Modi’s India.” In another article, its columnist Kenneth Mohammed wrote “Behind a veneer of progress, injustice and inequality propped up by corruption and the caste system haunt the subcontinent ….. It seems to be a global south problem that leaders are more enthusiastic to spend taxpayers’ funds on expensive vanity projects than concern themselves with fixing basic issues of infrastructure, health and education to raise the standard of living for all its people.”

Christophe Jaffrelot, a professor of political science in France, wrote in Le Monde, “India’s elections this year stand out for their undemocratic nature”, arguing that Mr Modi is turning democracy into electoral authoritarianism. The Los Angeles Times questioned, “Is Narendra Modi’s India still a democracy?” In an article titled “The Modification of India Is Almost Complete”, Michael Kugelman wrote in Time magazine, “The Modiera actions are highly controversial because of India’s constitutionally enshrined secular traditions and resilient democracy. But …. it has far too many backers to be characterized as a wholesale trampling on the public will. This may be the tyranny of the majority, but it’s also something that enjoys a public mandate.” Aijaz Hussain and Sheikh Saaliq wrote in the Washington Post, “A decade into power, and on the cusp of securing five more years, the Modi government is reversing India’s decadeslong commitment to multiparty democracy and secularism.” All of India’s institutions are suspect in their eyes, “civil liberties are under attack. Peaceful protests have been crushed with force.

A once-free and diverse press is threatened. Violence is on the rise against the Muslim minority. And the country’s judiciary increasingly aligns with the executive branch.” Every democracy has its flaws. But one wonders whether the Western media would have been so critical of India’s democracy and its electoral process if the opinion polls did not predict such an emphatic victory for the BJP alliance. They are apparently buying the Opposition campaign about ‘democracy in danger’. After the collapse of the Soviet empire, when Francis Fukuyama wrote his essay “End of History” claiming that the Western political, economic, and social systems constituted the culmination of humanity’s sociocultural evolution, the West expected all countries to follow their unique model.

To measure this convergence, they then started devising a series of arbitrary indexes on liberty, human rights, freedom of religion and even human happiness, styled on their values. That is how they wanted to keep their control in a multipolar, post-colonial world. When countries like China and India started charting their own independent paths by defying their values, they started vilifying them. Now with low population, low productivity and the prospect of a wider economic recession, the West is facing an uncertain future, while India is rising. A rising India, like a rising China, refuses to buy the Western model of development and Western values. It is now becoming increasingly assertive, if not confrontational and combative, almost adopting China’s wolf-warrior diplomatic approach. The West wants India’s democracy to be under its continuous vigilance and control, and whichever alliance comes to power after the elections will be most unlikely to allow it.

(The writer is a commentator, author and academic. Opinions expressed are persona)