Moments of hope: how Indians keep pushing back against the hollowing out of democracy

After six weeks of voting in the world’s largest democracy, on June 4, Indians will learn who is to be their next prime minister. Narendra Modi, standing for a third term, is the frontrunner.

Critics of Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) warn that India’s democracy has been hollowed out during his premiership, including through its treatment of religious minorities, most notably Muslims, the targeting of political adversaries, and by pushing through laws with little debate in the Lok Sabha, India’s parliament.

Thousands of Indians have taken to the streets to protest against Modi’s policies. And for Indrajit Roy, professor of global development at the University of York in the UK, this pushback by Indians against threats to their democracy is an example of an audacious type of hope. He talks to The Conversation Weekly podcast about what it means to be living in hope, and where he sees examples of that in India.

For Roy, to live in hope shouldn’t be conflated with aspiration, or with a search for a form of political utopia.

Hope is a collective emotion … it’s about collectively thinking of how you want to live your life. Hope is also about not giving up. It’s about pursuing a collective objective, despite lots of difficulties and pursuing them without quitting. Hope is necessarily incomplete … it’s imperfect, it’s always a work in progress.

In a new book called Audacious Hope: an archive of how democracy is being saved in India, Roy charts the ways various Indians have fought back against threats to democracy.

One prominent example were the countrywide protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019. This law, passed in haste in the Indian parliament, gives a fast-track route for citizenship for religious minorities from India’s Muslim-majority neighbours Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

While six religions are included, Muslims are not. For Roy, the protests against the law from across Indian society were a good example of audacious hope.

This was a very clear example of how numerous Indians, despite all odds were out on the streets protesting a divisive law. And I found that almost moving, touching because they didn’t have to do it. For a lot of them, they wouldn’t be touched, affected by this law at all, perhaps, but it was the principle of a divisive citizenship law which many people were really against.

The protests – and the implementation of the law – were interrupted by the COVID pandemic. But in March 2024, just a few weeks before the election, Modi’s government enacted the law and new protests sprung up.

Listen to more reflections on hope and politics in India in Roy’s interview with The Conversation Weekly podcast.

A transcript of this episode will be available shortly.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written by Gemma Ware and produced by Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Stephen Khan is our global executive editor and Soraya Nandy does our transcripts.

_Newsclips in this episode from NBC News, France 24 English, BB C News, DW, CNN News, The Telegraph, Al Jazeera English and the song Wapas Jao by Poojan Sahil.

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Indrajit Roy receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and Arts and Humanities Research Council.