In the Rig Veda, among humanity’s earliest surviving texts, a deceptively simple line unsettles every politics of exclusion: Ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti – truth is one, the wise call it by many names. Long before pluralism became a constitutional principle or a liberal slogan, it was articulated as a civilisational instinct. India did not merely tolerate difference; it theorised it, ritualised it, and—at its best – governed through it.

The Upanishads argued not for uniform belief but for shared inquiry. Adi Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta did not erase difference; it wove contradiction into coherence. Bhakti and Sufi saints – Kabir, Nanak, Ravidas – collapsed rigid boundaries through devotion that refused to ask whether God answered Ram or Rahim. Disagreement was not a threat to truth; it was its method.

This philosophical disposition was not confined to metaphysics. It shaped statecraft. Ashoka, ruling over a vast and wounded empire, responded to the carnage of Kalinga not with triumphalism but remorse. His edicts warned against disparaging other sects, arguing that honouring differences strengthened one’s own faith. Akbar later translated this ethic into governance – abolishing discriminatory taxes, convening interfaith dialogue, and articulating sulh-e-kul, peace with all. These were not acts of benevolence alone; they were recognitions that legitimacy in India flowed from inclusion.

Even epic imagination reflected this moral order. Valmiki’s Ramayana described Ramarajya not as rule by religious dominance but by impartial justice—where the weak were protected, the poor heard, and power restrained by dharma. Gandhi reclaimed this idea, carefully stripping it of sectarian meaning. His Ramarajya was not a Hindu state but a moral republic, grounded in self-rule, restraint, and equal regard. Independent India’s founders attempted to institutionalise this inheritance. Ambedkar’s Constitution did not privilege belief; it protected conscience. Nehru insisted that the state must act as an umpire, never a player. Secularism, in the Indian sense, was not hostility to religion but neutrality among them.

It is against this long arc that recent developments have unsettled observers – within India and beyond. Critics argue that the post-2014 political order marks not a routine ideological shift but a redefinition of the state’s moral posture. Where the republic once mediated difference, it increasingly appears to arbitrate identity. Where power once sought legitimacy through accommodation, it now draws energy from consolidation.

The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 crystallised these anxieties. By introducing religion as a criterion for fast-tracked citizenship, it punctured a foundational premise of constitutional equality. Coupled with proposals for a nationwide National Register of Citizens, it triggered fears – particularly among Muslims – of statelessness by bureaucratic design. The protests that followed were among the largest in independent India’s history. The state’s response – police crackdowns, internet shutdowns, and selective enforcement – deepened the sense that dissent itself was being reclassified as disloyalty.

Institutional guardrails have also come under strain. The Election Commission, once admired for muscular impartiality, has faced sustained criticism for delayed or uneven responses to incendiary campaigning. Judicial independence has been shadowed by opaque transfers and post-retirement appointments that invite questions about incentive and pressure. Investigative agencies, according to publicly available data cited by opposition parties and civil liberties groups, have overwhelmingly pursued leaders outside the ruling coalition – fuelling the perception that law has become an instrument of political management rather than neutral accountability.

For minorities, these shifts have been felt less abstractly. Cow-protection vigilantism, documented by independent monitors, has claimed dozens of lives since 2015, disproportionately Muslim and Dalit. The 2020 Delhi riots – sparked amid charged political rhetoric – left over 50 dead, most of them Muslim, and raised troubling questions about policing failures. Several states have enacted so-called “love jihad” laws that place interfaith relationships under criminal suspicion, effectively deputising the state into intimate choice. Administrative actions – from demolitions justified on tenuous grounds to educational exclusions triggered by rumour – have reinforced a climate in which citizenship feels increasingly conditional.

None of this occurs in a vacuum. The government’s defenders point to genuine achievements: rapid infrastructure expansion, digital public goods at unprecedented scale, and India’s emergence as the world’s fifth-largest economy. They argue that a strong cultural core is necessary for national confidence after centuries of colonial erosion. This argument resonates with many Indians – and dismissing it outright would be analytically lazy.

But strength and exclusion are not synonyms. Economic growth has coincided with deepening inequality. Electoral finance, despite a 2024 Supreme Court intervention striking down opaque funding mechanisms, remains skewed toward concentrated power. International democracy indices – from V-Dem to Freedom House – now classify India as an “electoral autocracy,” a term that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. Labels matter less than trajectories, and the trajectory worries those who once saw India as democracy’s most persuasive non-Western exemplar.

The V-Dem Democracy Report 2025, assessing data up to 2024, reaffirms India’s status as an electoral autocracy since 2017, with its Liberal Democracy Index at 0.29 – ranking the country 100th out of 179 nations and confirming ongoing autocratisation. Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2025 report rates India “Partly Free” with a global freedom score of 63/100 (Political Rights 31/40, Civil Liberties 32/60), noting a three-point decline in the prior cycle due to discriminatory policies toward Muslims, media pressures, and institutional strains under Hindu-nationalist governance. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2024 classifies India as a “flawed democracy” with a score of 7.29 (rank 41), acknowledging freer and fairer elections in 2024 that reflected public concerns over employment and freedoms, yet underscoring the region’s gradual drift away from representative democracy.

Political theorist Roger Griffin described fascism not merely as authoritarianism but as a myth of national rebirth achieved through purifying exclusion. India is not fascist – but the grammar of “othering” has undeniably entered mainstream discourse. Muslims are casually rendered “Pakistanis,” Sikhs “Khalistanis,” journalists “anti-nationals.” Digital regulations increasingly blur the line between governance and censorship. Even religious authorities who question politicised faith find themselves obstructed by the state. The danger here is not the loss of civility; it is the erosion of moral confidence. Nations that must constantly identify enemies to define themselves eventually forget who they are.

India’s pluralism was never ornamental. It was functional. Ashoka carved it into stone because empires fracture without it. Akbar practiced it because rule without consent decays. Gandhi insisted on it because freedom without moral restraint curdles into domination. The tragedy today is not disagreement over policy – it is the quiet replacement of a civilizational ethic with a majoritarian mood.

Kabir’s warning echoes with uncomfortable clarity: “The Hindu says Ram is beloved, the Muslim says Rahim. They fight and kill each other; neither knows the secret.” The secret, perhaps, was never theological. It was political: that India survives not by answering who belongs, but by refusing to ask the question at all.

India stands, once again, at a crossroads. The world watches not because India might fail to grow, but because it once proved that growth and pluralism could coexist at scale. The real test ahead is not economic or geopolitical. It is whether a civilisation that taught humanity that truth has many names can still resist the temptation to give it only one.

Satish Jha co-founded Jansatta in 1983 for the Indian Express Group and edited Dinamaan for the Times of India Group from 1986-88.

This article went live on January twenty-first, two thousand twenty six, at nineteen minutes past nine in the morning.

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