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India is the world’s largest democracy. It is also increasingly a democracy that is eating itself from within. Under the Bharatiya Janata Party governments of Narendra Modi, now in their third consecutive term, the formal architecture of democratic governance remains intact: elections are held, courts sit, and newspapers continue to be published. Yet the conditions that make democracy meaningful, the free flow of information, the ability to criticise without fear, the capacity of citizens to hold power to account, are being systematically dismantled. The dismantling is not happening through a single emergency decree or a dramatic rupture. It is happening quietly, incrementally, and across multiple institutional registers at once.

This post is an attempt to make sense of what is happening. Its ambition is structural, not merely descriptive. I attempt to identify and name the state’s playbook for managing and policing public discourse in India. The government’s approach to discourse management is not reducible to any single law or institution. It operates through a hydra, a multi-headed organism in which every attempt to cut one instrument of suppression leaves the others fully intact and functioning. It operates through the amplification of convenient voices, the choking of inconvenient ones, and, when those tools prove insufficient, the direct deployment of state coercion against bodies. It is working intensely, and, most importantly, it is working with impunity.

The purpose of this post is to invite engagement. The taxonomy offered here is a first draft, not a settled conclusion. I welcome responses from scholars, practitioners, and citizens with direct experience of any dimension of this phenomenon.¹⁾ The playbook must be named before it can be contested; the contest, in a democracy, belongs to everyone.

But before I expand on the playbook, a quick note on why a resilient public sphere matters.

The Democratic Case for an Unmanaged Public Sphere

Democratic theory rests on a foundational premise that citizens must be able to speak, hear, contest, and deliberate freely. Without that prior condition, the ballot is an empty ritual and the democratic superstructure built around it a sham. Jürgen Habermas, whose work on the public sphere remains foundational to political theory, argued that legitimate democratic authority derives not merely from majoritarian procedures but from a communicative process; a process that is open and supports unconstrained exchange, in which the force of the better argument, not the power of the speaker, decides outcomes. Robert Post, in his influential work on the relationship between democracy and free speech, made the point with even greater precision. Post argues that democratic legitimacy requires the continuous formation and revision of public opinion, and that process is impossible if speakers are silenced, threatened, or coerced. Remove the conditions of free discourse, Post argues, and you do not merely impair speech, you hollow out the very democratic self-governance that speech is meant to constitute.

The practical stakes of these insights are concrete. Free public discourse enables citizens to scrutinise governmental performance, identify policy failures, hold officials accountable, and build the coalitions necessary for electoral challenge. When that discourse is suppressed, the government faces no informational check from below. Mistakes go unscrutinised. Corruption goes unreported. Electoral outcomes are shaped not by genuine deliberation but by information asymmetries that systematically favour the incumbent, a condition that can be understood as the epistemic failure of an unfree democracy. Citizens cannot even form accurate preferences, let alone act on them, if the information environment is controlled from above. In such conditions, as Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have argued in their comparative study of competitive authoritarianism, elections continue, but they are no longer fair. The ruling party does not abolish democracy; it domesticates it.

That description maps, with alarming accuracy, onto contemporary India.

Three Instruments of Discourse Management

What follows is an attempt to document and structurally understand the Indian government’s approach to managing public discourse. The pattern is not the product of a single law or a single institution. It is multi-headed—a hydra in which severing any one instrument leaves the others intact and functioning. The state manages discourse through three broad and overlapping strategies: amplifying ideologically convenient voices; silencing or marginalising inconvenient ones; and, where those tools fail or prove to be inadequate, deploying the coercive power of the state directly against bodies, not merely speech.

1. Support for Convenient Speech

The first instrument is the construction and maintenance of a media ecosystem that is systematically favourable to the BJP’s political narrative.

India’s television news landscape is now dominated, at its upper end, by two business conglomerates whose owners, apart from being the richest Indians, have documented proximity to the ruling establishment. Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries controls Network18, which operates over seventy channels reaching approximately 800 million Indians. In 2022, Gautam Adani—a businessman whose industrial rise coincides with and, critics argue, is inseparable from the BJP’s governance—acquired a majority stake in NDTV, one of India’s last major independent national broadcasters. The takeover prompted the resignation of several leading NDTV journalists, including many of its star anchors. The channel, previously known for government criticism, has become supine post-acquisition. Some have characterised the development as signalling the end of media pluralism in India, observing that Adani’s “unconcealed proximity to India’s ruling party raises serious questions about respect for NDTV editorial independence.”

This structural capture is reinforced by the BJP’s deployment of state advertising as an instrument of editorial discipline. Central government advertising, routed primarily through the Central Bureau of Communication, functions as a financial lifeline for many outlets. In May 2023, the Modi government increased the CBC’s budget by 275 per cent, from approximately $24 million to $89 million. Crucially, the CBC ran advertisements carrying the BJP’s election slogans, conflating state communication with party promotion. The BJP reported spending approximately $73 million on media advertisements for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections alone, a figure that dwarfs all opposition spending and which, combined with state advertising flows, creates powerful incentive structures for editorial restraint among media houses dependent on government revenue.

The state’s generosity with sympathetic knowledge institutions is similarly strategic. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation Act, 2023, created a governing structure for India’s primary research funding body that is presided over by the Prime Minister himself, with members including Union Ministers, government departmental secretaries, and NITI Aayog representatives. Independent research funding, in other words, now flows through a body whose leadership is the government. The incentive toward ideological alignment is structural, not incidental.

Finally, the BJP’s information technology cell and its networks of bot accounts function as a force multiplier for government-favourable content. The organisation has invested heavily in digital amplification, with the party spending nearly $3.6 million on Google Ads in a single month ahead of the 2024 elections. The party’s dominance of the digital advertising market is orders of magnitude greater than any competitor, ensuring that the government’s preferred narratives saturate the digital environment.

2. Shutting Down Inconvenient Voices

The second instrument is the systematic suppression of voices that dissent from the government’s preferred narrative across civil society, the knowledge institutions, and the political opposition.

Civil society and NGOs. Since 2014, the government has cancelled the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) licences of more than 20,000 NGOs, including Amnesty International India, Greenpeace India, Oxfam India, the Centre for Policy Research, and the Lawyers Collective. The FCRA, as the International Commission of Jurists has found, has been converted from a regulation of foreign financing into a tool to silence civil society, with cancellations deployed as punishment for organisations deemed politically inconvenient. Foreign funding to Indian NGOs declined by 40 per cent between 2015 and 2018, and the V-Dem Institute reports that India’s civil society participation index has reached its lowest point in 47 years. A United States Senate hearing in 2024 heard testimony that India’s FCRA made it “very difficult” for NGOs to receive international donations.

Knowledge institutions. In the past, I have written on this blog about the alarming deterioration of academic freedom in India. The V-Dem Academic Freedom Index shows India in constant decline. Research that produces politically inconvenient findings attracts state attention. For instance, the federal Intelligence Bureau visited Ashoka University’s economics department after a paper documented potential electoral irregularities favouring the BJP. India ranks among the most repressive environments for academic freedom globally. The chilling effect is real, diffuse, and largely unmeasurable, but it is felt. The censorship of the Oscar-nominated film The Voice of Hind Rajab—blocked by the Central Board of Film Certification this month, reportedly on the ground that it might “break up the India-Israel relationship”—is only the most recent instance of political considerations overriding both artistic merit and the constitutionally guaranteed right to expression.

Online speech. Between March 2024 and June 2025, Union and state governments ordered X (formerly Twitter) to remove approximately 1,400 posts or accounts, with over 70 per cent of notices issued by the Home Ministry’s Cybercrime Coordination Centre. In a July 2025 order, the government demanded the takedown of over 2,300 accounts, including two Reuters news handles—an incident that briefly drew international condemnation before the government reversed course and attributed the Reuters takedown to an error.

A quick survey of social media platforms shows that such practices are not only continuing but also being pursued more aggressively. More structurally, the government is considering three additional legal changes to strengthen its position to unilaterally block online speech. First, it is reportedly considering amendments to the IT laws framework that would extend content-blocking powers beyond the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to include the Ministries of Home Affairs, External Affairs, Defence, and Information and Broadcasting.

Second, after changing the 2021 IT Rules to reduce the content takedown period to mere three hours in February 2026, the government is mulling to reduce it further to just an hour. It is important to note here that in using the 2021 IT Rules for unilaterally blocking online speech acts, the government is essentially circumventing (in fact, blatantly violating) the legal and more elaborate takedown procedure as envisaged in a different set of IT Rules.²⁾ The relevant provisions of the 2021 IT Rules aren’t really about content takedown; they concern the due diligence obligations of online social media intermediaries. For the intermediaries to continue claiming immunity for third-party content, the 2021 IT Rules mandate them to take down online content as notified by the government as part of their due diligence obligation. However, by extending this power to notify to multiple government agencies and departments that are operating without following the due elaborate process, the government has essentially created an alternative mechanism for itself to unilaterally control (read censor) the online social media space by threatening the intermediaries with possible legal consequences for hosting inconvenient third-party content, all in violation of the parent IT Act. Every government officer, once notified by law, can now scroll social media, and upon finding a content piece that they do not like, can order social media intermediaries to take it down within three hours, unilaterally. Such illegal circumvention has also recently been upheld by the Karnataka High Court (see pages 290-292), and this makes me wonder why the government is even planning on decentralizing the content-blocking power when it has already achieved that de facto.

Third, a parliamentary committee has recently suggested further expanding the powers of the Fact Check Unit of the government-run Press Information Bureau, which is empowered to have any online content removed by directly coordinating with the internet intermediaries. Readers would recall how the Bombay High Court had quashed the establishment of a Fact Check Unit under the IT Act. However, as the PIB FCU was not the locus of that judgment, it is undertaking the same functions in an attempt to circumvent the effects of the High Court order. These newly proposed arrangements, once implemented, would make the executive branch simultaneously the arbiter of what constitutes unlawful content and the issuer of takedown notices—a structural conflict of interest with profound consequences for online speech.

Parliament. The government has abused its legislative agenda-setting powers to prevent meaningful accountability. The entire overhaul of India’s criminal laws was passed in 2023, while over 100 opposition members were suspended from Parliament. More strikingly, the Prime Minister’s Office has instructed the Lok Sabha Secretariat that parliamentary questions on the PM CARES Fund are “not admissible.”  PM CARES—the emergency fund established in March 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, chaired by the Prime Minister in his ex officio capacity with Union Ministers as trustees—has received billions in donations from public sector undertakings and private corporations, and has accepted foreign contributions in departure from established policy. Yet it is simultaneously held by the government to be exempt from the Right to Information Act and, now, from parliamentary interrogation. No audit reports have been published since 2022. The fund that centralised India’s pandemic response seems to be accountable to no one.

3. Repression of the Body

When the management of speech proves insufficient, the state has demonstrated a willingness to proceed to the management of persons.

Sonam Wangchuk—the climate activist and educationist known internationally for his work in Ladakh—was detained on 26 September 2025 under the National Security Act (NSA). A preventive detention statute authorising imprisonment without trial, the NSA was invoked against Wangchuk for leading a peaceful march demanding statehood and Sixth Schedule protections for Ladakh.³⁾ These are the very safeguards the BJP had promised the region when it revoked Jammu and Kashmir’s special status in 2019. He spent 169 days in Jodhpur Central Jail before the government revoked his NSA detention on 14 March 2026, days before a scheduled Supreme Court habeas corpus hearing, a timing that suggests that the government anticipated it could not defend the detention on its merits. What adds to this concerning abuse of law by the government is that on the day of the hearing, the Court termed the petition infructuous and disposed it, noting that “nothing left in the matter to decide”. Effectively, the Court indicated that the state could trample upon an individual’s liberty for months, despite having no justifications and with complete impunity and no costs.

The case of Ali Khan Mahmudabad, an associate professor at Ashoka University, is equally instructive. In May 2025, he was arrested by Haryana Police following two police reports based on a Facebook post in which he noted that the same commentators celebrating women military officers during Operation Sindoor should equally condemn mob lynchings and bulldozer justice taking place across India. Charged under provisions equivalent to sedition, he spent three days in custody before obtaining bail from the Supreme Court. The Haryana government eventually declined to grant prosecution sanction in March 2026, framing this as “one-time magnanimity.” The state thus framed its decision not to pursue a prosecution it could not sustain as an act of generosity. I have written previously on this blog about the crisis of academic freedom in India; Mahmudabad’s arrest is its logical endpoint.

Rahul Gandhi—the principal leader of the parliamentary opposition—was convicted by a Gujarat magistrate court in March 2023 on a criminal defamation charge for a rhetorical question posed at an election rally in 2019. The sentence of precisely two years, the maximum under the Indian Penal Code for defamation, and the exact threshold triggering automatic disqualification under the Representation of the People Act, was, as I documented on this blog, not coincidental. The Supreme Court stayed the conviction, Gandhi was restored to Parliament, but the months-long disqualification of the country’s leading opposition figure in the run-up to a general election had accomplished its purpose.

Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam remain in custody under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, India’s most draconian anti-terror statute, for over five years, without trial, for speech acts connected to the 2020 protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act. Research by Bhardwaj has documented how the Supreme Court’s habeas corpus jurisprudence in preventive detention cases has been characterised by extraordinary delay — defeating the very logic of the writ. In case after case across this section, the judiciary has offered neither protection of the public space nor timely relief to those imprisoned for political expression.

The pattern of federal investigative agencies being deployed against sitting opposition chief ministers and state legislators, only to see charges dropped upon political defection, has now been documented with quantitative rigour. The Indian Express found that 25 prominent politicians facing action from central agencies crossed over to the BJP between 2014 and 2024, and 23 of them obtained effective reprieve. For instance, Himanta Biswa Sarma faced CBI raids in 2014, joined the BJP in 2015, and became Chief Minister of Assam. The opposition calls this the “washing machine.” Most strikingly, a Delhi trial court discharged all 23 accused in the Delhi excise policy case on 27 February 2026, finding the chargesheet rested on “surmises, conjectures and inferential leaps,” after Arvind Kejriwal had been arrested as a sitting Chief Minister, minister Manish Sisodia imprisoned for over a year, and the AAP government fatally destabilised before the Delhi elections.

The Invisible Fourth Layer: Self-Censorship, Private Capital, and Non-State Actors

Three further dimensions of this picture deserve acknowledgment, though they resist easy documentation.

First, the repression that is recorded in case files and news reports is the visible portion of a larger phenomenon. Across conversations, in universities, newsrooms, and civil society offices, a pervasive self-censorship has settled in. None of this is adjudicated; none of it leaves a record. But it is real, and it is, in many respects, the most important effect of the incidents catalogued above. The demonstration of willingness to prosecute is the governing mechanism; the prosecution itself is only the instrument.

Second, private capital has largely withdrawn from the space of opposition support. Any entrepreneur or business house that openly funds critical journalism, an opposition politician, or an inconvenient NGO does so knowing that its regulatory approvals, tax files, and licensing permissions are subject to a state apparatus that has demonstrated both the inclination and the capacity to use them instrumentally. The chilling effect on private patronage of dissent is, again, invisible in any single file, but it is structural, systematic, and decisive.

Third, the state is not the only actor in this space. Non-state actors, motivated by ideological affinity or the expectation of reward, have participated in the suppression of discourse. Comedy shows have had their venues attacked and their equipment vandalized. Watching the comedy sets recorded after such incidents, one does not need to be a semiotician to identify the adjustments: the cautious self-editing, the deliberate avoidance of political territory, the narrowing of comedic range. The state did not issue those orders. It did not need to.

Not All Is Dark

The picture painted above must not be mistaken for a picture of a defeated public. It is not. The Ladakhi movement, which kept marching, kept protesting, and ultimately kept Wangchuk in the political conversation even from a jail cell in Jodhpur, demonstrates the resilience of collective action against a government that holds many of the institutional cards. The fact that the Delhi court discharged Kejriwal and Sisodia in language that indicted the investigation itself shows that not every institutional actor has been captured. The fact that the Supreme Court stayed Rahul Gandhi’s conviction, released Kejriwal on bail with observations about his right to liberty, and gradually pressured the Haryana government toward dropping the Mahmudabad prosecution suggests that the judiciary, however inconsistently, retains some capacity for corrective intervention. It, however, in no way justifies the judiciary’s actions that have either explicitly enabled or tacitly supported the governmental censorship instincts and abuse of power by not hearing crucial matters for years. Nevertheless, Citizen journalism, alternative media, and international reporting have collectively ensured that episodes of repression do not disappear from the record. There is, beneath the institutional surface, an undercurrent of disapproval, not yet visible at the ballot box in all constituencies, but visible in the 2024 general election results, which denied the BJP the outright majority it sought and forced it back into coalition dependence.

Conclusion: Naming the Playbook

This post has been an attempt to map the state’s playbook for discourse management: to understand its structure, rather than merely catalogue its instances. The structure is three-layered: amplification of convenient voices through media capture, advertising leverage, and digital spending; suppression of inconvenient voices through regulatory choking of civil society, content takedowns, parliamentary manipulation, and control of knowledge institutions; and direct repression through preventive detention, weaponised prosecutions, and the instrumentalization of federal agencies.

What distinguishes this playbook from its historical predecessors is not severity but sophistication. The Emergency of 1975 operated through the formal suspension of constitutional rights and overt censorship. The current model operates without any such declaration. It operates through a diffuse network of incentives, threats, regulatory asymmetries, and selective prosecutions that together achieve the suppressive effect while preserving democratic form. The very conditions of free democratic deliberation, which Habermas placed at the foundation of legitimate government and Post identified as the prerequisite of democratic self-governance, are being systematically and deliberately eroded.

The post The Playbook of Repression appeared first on Verfassungsblog.