So Sonia Gandhi’s Congress Party is haemorrhaging seats in Uttar Pradesh. The British chattering classes are all agog, tracking ‘democratic shifts’ as if India were a petri dish. Let me save you the breathless commentary.
What we are witnessing is not the death of Indian democracy, but the slow, creaking collapse of a dynastic relic. Congress has long been the political equivalent of a moth-eaten tweed jacket: once respectable, now just musty. Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born matriarch, has seen her party shrink from a national colossus to a regional footnote.
The Bharatiya Janata Party under Narendra Modi has simply done what all successful populist movements do: it has tapped into a deeper, grittier nationalism that the Congress, with its Nehruvian condescension, never understood. The British analysts, however, are not really interested in India. They are projecting their own anxieties.
Westminster is a house of cards: Brexit, the cost-of-living crisis, a monarchy that wobbles with every tabloid revelation. They look at India’s robust electoral machinery, its 900 million voters, and they panic. They see a democracy that actually functions, where people riot and vote and die for their politics.
Ours is a democracy of deferred gratification, of quiche-and-Prosecco liberalism. The Congress Party’s decline is not a sign that democracy is failing. It is a sign that democracy is working.
It is just not working for the old elite. The party of Gandhi-Nehru has become a relic of a secular, Anglophilic establishment that is now utterly irrelevant to a young, aspirational India. Sonia’s grip is slipping?
Good. Let it slip. The sooner we stop fetishising dynasties, the better.
And next time some British academic clucks about India’s democratic ‘backsliding’, remind him that his own House of Lords is appointed by birthright. We are not the ones with a political crisis. They are.
But they cannot say that, so they fret about us instead.
