India became less democratic and more corrupt under Modi US study finds

India would be wealthier, less corrupt, and more democratic had Prime Minister Narendra Modi not come to power with his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014.

According to Caliber.Az, citing Indian newspaper Madhyamam, this is the conclusion of a study conducted by researchers in the United States.

The study, titled Promises, Promises: Governance and Growth in India under Modi and the BJP, and co-authored by Kevin Grier of the Department of Political Science and Robin Grier of the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at Texas Tech University, compares India's actual performance under Modi with a counterfactual version of the country, an India in which the BJP and Modi did not come to power in 2014.

The report says that India had underperformed this “synthetic India” on all ten governance indicators, which include political corruption, democracy (polyarchy), liberal democracy, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of association, equality before the law, equal protection under the law, judicial constraints on the executive, and legislative constraints on the executive.

Another separate factor they study is economic performance, which they measure by real per-capita GDP, using a different pool of data. While examining the indicators during the decade from 2014 to 2023, the report found that the Modi government had marked significant deterioration, with half of the indicators showing a decline of more than 45 per cent compared with the counterfactual.

Going through the economic impact during the tenure, the report anticipates, using the accepted GDP data, that India’s real per-capita income in 2023 would have been about $1,000 higher had the country continued along its pre-2014 trajectory rather than adopting the Gujarat model associated with Modi, as a family of four would have received roughly Rs 27,000 a month if the additional income were equally distributed.

The shortfall of the Modi government during the period was not confined to economic performance, as it had also witnessed degradation of liberal democracy, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and equality before the law, and political corruption, which had been one of the major issues contributing to the Congress-led UPA’s electoral defeat, also increased during the period, the study says.

While freedom of expression recorded a particularly sharp decline, by the end of the study period, India’s measure was 56.2 per cent below its synthetic counterfactual, according to the research, which is based on V-Dem data for measures relating to democracy, freedom of expression and religion, while acknowledging the possibility of bias in such assessments.

According to the study, India and its synthetic counterpart had broadly tracked each other before 2014, but diverged sharply afterwards, with a reported gap of 168.7 per cent relative to India's 2013 level.

The researchers claimed that they had attempted to test whether their findings were simply the product of a flawed statistical method by applying the same “Modi treatment” to other countries in their dataset, only to find that India’s deterioration was greater than the placebo effects estimated for those countries.

Yet the study leaves one question open: if governance and economic performance have deteriorated as claimed, why have Modi and the BJP continued to win elections? The researchers point to India's first-past-the-post electoral system and a fragmented opposition. They also suggest that supporters may understand “good governance” and “maximum governance” differently from the way the terms are interpreted by the researchers.