In 1997, Fareed Zakaria coined the term “illiberal democracy” in his landmark Foreign Affairs essay, ‘The Rise of Illiberal Democracy’, observing that electoral rituals could survive even as constitutional liberalism, institutional autonomy, and civic restraint are quietly eroded. Few precepts have been so prescient. Indeed, there was a time when democracies were not especially efficient, but they were, at the very least, uneasy with themselves. The US and India, the world’s most significant democracies, which have had a sometimes uncomfortable but palpable compact, both tempered their dreams with a measure of shame. In both, power advanced cautiously. Authority apologized. Institutions hesitated ― not because they were virtuous, exactly, but because they were aware of being watched, judged, and, occasionally, in the wrong.
India and the United States ― the world’s most populous democracy and the oldest constitutional one ― were built on different civilizational premises, but they shared this sensibility. Their institutions were not designed to embody the popular will in its purest form; they were designed to restrain it. To complicate it. To slow it down. The assumption was not that citizens would always choose wisely, but that power, left to itself, rarely does.
The early years of the 21st century offered no shortage of reasons to doubt democratic virtue. In the United States, executive power expanded aggressively in the name of security. Surveillance authorities multiplied. Legal grey zones were treated as operational necessities. Wars were sold through moral clarity which was later revealed to be selective.
Something in that arrangement has shifted. Not abruptly, and not in quite the same way in the two democracies. The change has been procedural rather than theatrical, cultural rather than strictly legal. And it has produced an odd result: democracies that still conduct elections, still convene courts, still publish newspapers ― but seem increasingly untroubled by the idea that something essential may be slipping away.
The most noticeable absence, once one begins to look for it, is not freedom or legality, or even dissent. It is the absence of embarrassment.
The present moment did not arrive with the melodrama that political decline is often expected to provide. There were no sudden coups, no tanks circling parliaments, no mass closures of newspapers. Instead, the change made itself known quietly, in gestures that were easy to rationalize at the time.
A delay here.
A pressure call there.
A procedural reinterpretation, offered as clarification.
Individually, none of these moments looked decisive. Collectively, they began to feel familiar. For those who have moved between India and the United States geographically, intellectually, emotionally, the recognition came slowly. Both democracies had always been turbulent. Both have histories of exclusion, hypocrisy, and moral failure. Neither could plausibly claim innocence. And yet, there had once been a shared assumption that institutional life carried an internal corrective ― a sense that certain lines, if crossed, required explanation, justification, or at least the admission of discomfort.
Institutions, one believed, could be bent, but not without consequence. They might fail, but they would not fail cheerfully. Only in retrospect does it become clear how much depended on that expectation.
The early years of the 21st century offered no shortage of reasons to doubt democratic virtue. In the United States, executive power expanded aggressively in the name of security. Surveillance authorities multiplied. Legal grey zones were treated as operational necessities. Wars were sold through moral clarity which was later revealed to be selective.
And yet, even then, the system displayed signs of unease. Courts intervened, though sometimes belatedly. Journalists persisted. Congressional committees investigated. Officials resigned. There was an insistence, however uneven, that extraordinary measures required extraordinary justification. The language of regret remained available.
India’s own crises were no less profound. Communal violence, institutional failure, moral abdication ― none of this was new. But earlier periods were marked by a residual attachment to the constitutional vocabulary. Leaders spoke of duty. Judges invoked precedent. Election officials guarded their autonomy with a confidence that did not require performance. What distinguished those moments was not moral purity, but moral friction. Wrongdoing encountered resistance ― not always successfully, but visibly. Institutions appeared aware that they were meant to be something other than instruments of convenience. That awareness, it turns out, was doing more work than anyone realized.
India’s transformation over the past decade has not followed the dramatic arc often associated with democratic collapse. There has been no single moment of institutional rupture. Instead, there has been a gradual reorientation: a recalibration of how institutions understand their role.
They still exist. They still function. But increasingly, they seem to operate with a new sense of purpose.
Investigative agencies, for instance, have not lost their legal authority. They have refined its timing. Legal scrutiny tends to arrive at moments of political relevance, directed toward critics whose influence happens to peak just before elections or policy debates. The law remains intact; its deployment becomes expressive.
The press, meanwhile, has not been censored in any formal sense, but Animal Farm is everywhere. It’s the elephant in the newsroom, and thereby, it is in every room in America and India. Newsrooms continue to publish, though. Channels continue to broadcast. What has changed is the ecosystem in which journalism survives. Ownership patterns have shifted. Advertising pressure has become selective. Regulatory scrutiny has grown attentive. Self-censorship presents itself as pragmatic, survivalist prudence, and that prudence is sold by editors as professionalism.
India and the United States were never mirror images. One prized civilizational abundance; the other prized procedural order. One thrived on contradiction; the other on rules. Yet both have arrived, by different routes, at a similar temptation: to treat institutional restraint as an obstacle rather than a safeguard.
Universities, once sites of unruly argument, have been encouraged to rediscover discipline. Dissent is reinterpreted as disloyalty. Curricula are revised in the name of balance. Administrators are selected less for intellectual stewardship than for reliability. The result is not silence, exactly, but a narrowing of curiosity.
Even citizenship, long understood as a constitutional relationship rather than a cultural inheritance, has acquired new qualifiers. Legal frameworks and bureaucratic procedures introduce uncertainty around belonging, quietly redefining who must prove their right and who may assume it.
The judiciary, still capable of independence, has grown cautious in precisely those cases where urgency would once have demanded clarity. Delay becomes a form of discretion. Silence, a form of survival.
Taken together, these developments are often explained as course correction — a restoration of national confidence, a reclamation of authenticity. Institutions, in this telling, are not being weakened; they are being aligned.
It is a persuasive narrative, particularly when paired with electoral success. But it subtly alters the institutional imagination. Bodies designed to mediate pluralism begin to see themselves as custodians of a singular story.
If India’s shift has been incremental, the American experience has been more disconcerting precisely because it felt sudden. The country that had taught generations of students to revere process over personality found itself debating the legitimacy of its electoral machinery.
The shock was not merely political; it was conceptual. Elections had long been treated as facts ― imperfect, contested, occasionally flawed, but ultimately decisive. When that assumption eroded, something foundational went with it.
January 6 did not emerge from nowhere. It followed years of rhetorical pressure applied to institutions that had once been considered neutral by default. Court rulings were accused of bias. Journalists were dismissed as enemies for reporting facts. Career officials were replaced by loyalists for following procedure. Expertise itself became suspect.
The pattern was familiar, though many were reluctant to name it as such. Elections were framed as metaphysical struggles rather than administrative exercises. Legal processes were recast as partisan maneuvers. The distinction between loyalty to institutions and loyalty to leaders collapsed. As in India, grievance provided the connective tissue. A displaced ‘authentic’ nation — “overrun by elites, outsiders, professionals, and minorities” — required ‘reclamation’. Institutions that resisted this project were accused of treasonous betrayal. Democracy, under this logic, did not require constraint. It required victory.
For those who live between these two democracies — culturally, professionally, emotionally — the convergence has been unsettling. India and the United States were never mirror images. One prized civilizational abundance; the other prized procedural order. One thrived on contradiction; the other on rules. Yet both have arrived, by different routes, at a similar temptation: to treat institutional restraint as an obstacle rather than a safeguard.
The irony is hard to miss. India, long caricatured as chaotic, begins to enforce coherence. America, long admired for its procedural sobriety, flirts with improvisation. Each abandons the very quality that once distinguished it. This matters not merely as a political observation, but as a lived experience. Careers, intellectual habits, ethical commitments — entire ways of understanding public life — rest on the assumption that institutions exist to slow power, not amplify it. When they cease to do so, public life acquires a brittle quality. Everything becomes louder. Nothing becomes clearer.
What ultimately unites these developments is not ideology but affect. Earlier generations of leaders, regardless of conviction, appeared to be aware that power required the performance of restraint. They apologized when cornered. They cited precedent. They expressed regret. These gestures were not always sincere, but they acknowledged that shame still possessed political meaning.
Today, such gestures are treated as weakness. Apology is mocked. Hesitation is derided. Institutional friction is dismissed as sabotage. The absence of shame is striking. Leaders no longer seem embarrassed by the use of state power against critics. Institutions no longer appear to be troubled by their proximity to politics. Transgression does not seek alibi; it seeks applause. Democracy, stripped of embarrassment, becomes something else ― still participatory, still noisy, but less self-aware.
It would be a mistake to conclude that institutional conscience has entirely vanished. It has not. Judges dissent. Journalists persist. Students protest. Bureaucrats follow rules they know may cost them.
What has changed is not the existence of resistance, but its framing. Acts that once appeared routine now feel heroic. Integrity becomes exceptional. The routine functioning of institutions begins to look like defiance. This is not how democracies are meant to operate. They are not sustained by heroism. They are sustained by habit.
The concept of “illiberal democracy” was once treated as a cautionary label, applied to other places, other systems, the failures of others. It described regimes that held elections without cultivating the habits that make elections meaningful. The discomfort now lies in recognizing familiar contours at home.
This is not a story of collapse. It is a story of thinning ― of institutions that continue to exist but remember less clearly why they were designed as they were. Democracies rarely fall in spectacular fashion. They adapt. They normalize. They grow accustomed to what once would have unsettled them.
And somewhere along the way, they forget how to blush.
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