Home to nearly 1.5 billion people, India is the world’s largest democracy – for now. According to the Journal of Democracy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “government has engaged in what is, by some accounts, a wholesale dismantling of democratic institutions, norms, and practices.”

“At a time when autocrats are increasingly assertive, the cause of democracy can ill afford a loss of India’s magnitude,” the publication notes.

In a new book, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs faculty member Atul Kohli and the University of Toronto’s Kanta Murali, a 2012 Ph.D. graduate of Princeton, point to a root cause of India’s democratic backsliding: increasing wealth disparity.

“Democracy and Inequality in India: Political Economy of a Troubled Giant” (Cambridge University Press) is an examination of democracy, economic growth and distribution, caste, labor, gender, and foreign policy with an eye towards building a framework for understanding the country’s recent political and economic developments. The book is written both for specialists in India and for general readers who want to understand more about the country.

“We argue that erosion of democracy is being pushed by growing economic inequalities in India,” says Kohli, the David K. E. Bruce Professor of International Affairs and a professor of politics, adding that readers of all stripes are welcome to assess the book’s conclusions and decide for themselves.

“We invite specialists on Indian political economy to agree or disagree with this core proposition,” he says. “And we urge non-specialists to ponder how this theme echoes any part of the world that they know well.”

For his part, Kohli says that the troubling trends he and Murali describe are not confined to India.

“Democracy is unfortunately under challenge in numerous parts of the world,” he says. “Our suggestion from studying one important case of such developments is that sharp economic gap between the rich and the poor is not good for democracy.”

While this book analyzes a range of contemporary political and economic issues in India, certain analytical themes run throughout the volume. …

First, India’s well-established democracy is currently under strain. There is no denying that the main route to power and legitimacy in India remains winning elections. And yet, over the last decade, the ruling strategy of the BJP under Modi has become more authoritarian. There has been a marked erosion of political rights and civil liberties under the guise of national security, notable centralization of power, widespread interference with public institutions, active use of state machinery to target political opponents, a precipitous decline in democratic norms, and unprecedented bigotry and intolerance in public discourse. How and why this has come to be will be probed throughout the volume.

To give readers an early sense of our argument on this theme, we attribute democratic decline in India both to the failures of the Congress Party and to the illiberal nature of the BJP under Modi. Toward the end of the twentieth century, the Congress spearheaded rapid economic growth and a decline of poverty in India. This favorable context provided an opportunity for the Congress to reposition itself as India’s main party, an opportunity that it squandered. The reasons included political problems, but mainly the pattern of economic growth that the Congress oversaw and that created sharp economic inequalities. As a result, the Congress lost support of the lower strata. Jobless growth created a generation of dissatisfied youth who often provided stormtroopers to a party like the BJP. Simultaneously, sections of the urban middle class grew disenchanted with Congress-led coalition governments that had been plagued by corruption scandals. And most important, growing inequalities created a powerful group of economic elites at the apex, who preferred someone like Modi – the can-do, highly pro-business leader – over the Congress Party. At the same time, Modi effectively positioned himself as an incorruptible leader, whose modest background provided a sharp contrast to the older, anglicized elite, especially the Nehru–Gandhi family, and who could meet the aspirations of the country’s young population. Modi and his associates, such as Amit Shah, in turn, are no liberals. With the support of Indian business groups, they have used state power to ruthlessly silence dissent and suppress opposition. They have also stood aside silently as the more militant members of the BJP’s extended political network have become Hindu vigilantes, targeting Indian Muslims.

A second important and interrelated theme that runs through the volume is the pro-business nature of the India’s contemporary ruling coalition. Following independence, Nehru and others committed India to a socialist path of development. While the meaning of “socialism” in India was always ambiguous, it implied a leading economic role for the state and some commitment to egalitarianism. During the 1980s, India slowly but surely moved away from this path to assigning priority to economic growth. From then on, India’s leaders have established a close alliance with Indian business groups as a means to generate rapid economic growth. The results have indeed included an acceleration of economic growth, but often at the expense of increasing inequalities. Upper- and middle-class Indians rightly take pride in India’s growing economy; in addition, sustained economic growth has raised the global stature of India. However, India’s economic inequalities have also grown along three vectors: across regions; cities versus the countryside; and along class lines. Both the poorer regions of India and the Indian countryside depend heavily on public investments. But the role of the public sector has declined following economic liberalization in India during the 1990s. Private investments have increased by contrast; they have further enriched India’s better-off regions and have often focused on urban centers. As a result, income in richer regions and in urban centers has grown faster than in poorer regions or in the countryside, thereby widening economic inequalities. Class inequalities have also grown sharply over the last few decades. These are clearly evident in the emergence of numerous billionaires in India but with only few well-paying jobs for the teeming millions.

This pattern of economic development has also posed political challenges for India’s leaders, especially what to offer India’s poor masses in exchange for their political support. Instead of the rich-versus-poor divide implicit in a commitment to socialism, the BJP under Modi has sought to mobilize electoral support along ethnic lines, sharply politicizing the division among India’s Hindu majority and Muslim minority. …