Challenges to Indian Democracy — Old and New

Indian democracy has survived partition, wars, an internal Emergency, and seven decades of near-continuous elections at a scale no other democracy has ever attempted — and it still faces a fresh list of challenges every generation, some inherited from its founding and some created by technology its founders could not have imagined. This topic surveys both kinds.

In two minutes

Indian democracy faces both long-standing ('old') challenges — poverty, illiteracy, caste and communal division, criminalisation of politics — and newer challenges arising from social media misinformation, growing economic inequality, and pressures on the independence of institutions meant to check executive power.

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