South Asia’s self-defeating flirtation with majoritarianism
https://arab.news/zqh45
South Asia is home to roughly a quarter of the world’s eight billion people and nearly half of all of Asia, giving the region outsized demographic, political and economic weight. Except Afghanistan, the seven other countries in this region are electoral democracies. These include three of the world’s ten largest democracies in terms of registered voters – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
New temperature checks on democracy and its quality have just taken place this month in India and Pakistan, while Bangladesh heads to polls in a few weeks’ time and announcing a new constitutional mechanism. For a region that prides itself in its chosen democratic ethos, the diagnosis is not looking good.
India just held state elections in Bihar, a test case for the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity and nationalistic political agenda with religious overtones. In Pakistan, a string of by-elections for the national and provincial legislatures took place with a similar test of support for the policies of Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif.
The region should ditch flirting with majoritarianism in the name of democracy.
-Adnan Rehmat
In both countries, the ruling coalitions led by Modi’s BJP party and Sharif’s PML-N, improved their majorities in national and regional legislatures. In defiance of some opinion polls, both parties routed their respective political foes. Technically, there is nothing legally wrong with these outcomes, with the opposition generally accepting the results, and the victors crowing about their dominance.
But there is something unsettling about the politics of this electoral exercise held within constitutional democratic frameworks in both countries. India and Pakistan are both incredibly pluralistic and diverse, their political landscapes and socio-economic demographics and the whole backdrop to the electoral exercise reeked not just of routine opportunism but also aggressive and incendiary political bullying.
When their parties came to power in India and Pakistan in general elections held last year, it was against backdrops of manipulated political narratives. In India’s case, around an exclusionary campaign of Hindutva dominance rather than inclusive human rights agendas. The anti-minority soundbite was the default electoral language.
In Pakistan’s case, the electoral system denied an election symbol to the largest opposition party, as well as suspected gerrymandering of vote-counting and documentation systems.
This month’s large-scale electoral exercises have only ended up aggravating this situation further with the opposition in both countries severely curtailed from the electoral, parliamentary and governance spaces as well as the ruling parties going past their legal but controversial majorities.
For those tracking the quality of democracy in the region, South Asia’s largest two democracies are shrinking spaces further for their legitimate oppositions.
This trend is to the detriment of political pluralisms and participatory democracy as majoritarianism consolidates power further in fewer hands, weakening meaningful dissent in public interest and the perennial appeal of democracy.
The flip side of majoritarianism is authoritarianism and degraded accountability. In Pakistan, this translates into a power matrix back to a single party majoritarianism, antagonizing a key coalition ally and sidelining the main opposition party further. The same goes for India.
Bangladesh is aligning itself with the trends in India and Pakistan by banning from the upcoming national elections in February 2026 the previous ruling party and current beleaguered opposition party of ousted and exiled former prime minister Hasina Wajed.
It is not without irony, then, that the three largest democracies of South Asia have bruising bilateral relations often threatening to morph into war. India and Pakistan already went to battle a few months ago. This needs to change as plural democracies are a better and cheaper option at dispute resolution.
Indian and Pakistani polities – as well as the system in transition in Bangladesh – need to bolster, not weaken political pluralisms, to keep democracy meaningful and participatory. They should enforce stronger independent campaign finance rules and provide state funding or equal access to media for opposition parties. They should also pursue legal reforms to guarantee independent electoral institutions and enforceable protections for diversified voices, ensuring the opposition is not structurally marginalized.
This will help materialize the primary dividend of democracy: the enormous potential for economic expansion. South Asia remains among the fastest growing regions globally, with forecasts often above six percent annually but this can be sustained only if political power serves political stability. For this, the region should ditch flirting with majoritarianism in the name of democracy.
– Adnan Rehmat is a Pakistan-based journalist, researcher and analyst with interests in politics, media, development and science. X: @adnanrehmat1
