What just passed was the year of democratic exhaustion and electoral strife. When Winston Churchill dismissed Indian leaders as “men of straw” in his opposition to independence, he was articulating a deeper imperial assumption that self-governance required a civilisational maturity that only centuries of Anglo-Saxon institutional evolution could provide. Free India’s imperative became not merely to govern, but to disprove Churchill. Jawaharlal Nehru, speaking at the midnight hour of independence, promised India would make “a tryst with destiny.” But beneath that soaring rhetoric lay an unspoken anxiety: What if Churchill was right? That anxiety advanced into institutional neurosis. Every democratic structure had to be perfect. Every check had to have a counter-check. Every balance had to be triple-verified. India’s founders, in their determination to prove Churchill wrong, built a system so complex, so encumbered with procedural safeguards, that it often could not govern itself. Nehru, the visionary, intellectual, moderniser, was also, fatally, an Anglophile who confused institutional complexity with institutional strength. Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, steeped in Fabian socialism and British constitutional theory, he believed that India’s diversity required not streamlined governance but elaborate governance. The result was a constitutional architecture of staggering intricacy.
The Concurrent List: The Indian Constitution divides powers among three lists: Union, State, and Concurrent. The last, containing 47 subjects on which both Centre and states can legislate, was meant to provide flexibility. In practice, it created jurisdictional warfare. When both levels of government can legislate on the same subject, with central law prevailing in case of conflict, federalism becomes fiction.
The Planning Commission (1950-2014): Established without constitutional mandate, this extra-constitutional body became a parallel government, allocating resources, setting priorities, and effectively dictating state policy. It embodied Nehruvian faith in centralised expertise over democratic accountability. When it was finally abolished in 2014, the central control it represented had already spread elsewhere.
The All India Civil Services: Its officers, recruited centrally but serving states created a permanent schizophrenia. State governments could not fully control “their” bureaucrats, who owed ultimate loyalty to Delhi. The British “steel frame” was preserved, but now serving Indian masters.
Article 356 (President’s Rule): Intended as an emergency provision for genuine constitutional breakdown, it was deployed 125 times between 1950 and 2019, and often for naked political advantage. Indira Gandhi used it to dismiss nine opposition state governments in a single day in 1980.
The Nehruvian machinery, designed to prevent majoritarian excess, had been reverse-engineered into an instrument of majoritarian steamrolling in and out of Parliament. Ironically Vallabhbhai Patel often invoked by those now centralising power, had, in 1949, cautioned that excessive centralisation would “sap the foundations of our democratic structure.”
By 2025, the chickens were home, roosting. Granville Austin, the constitutional historian, called the Indian Constitution “perhaps the greatest political venture since that originated in Philadelphia in 1787.” but noted its “threatened elephantiasis a tendency toward endless procedural elaboration that would eventually suffocate the democratic spirit it claimed to protect.” India’s democracy was experiencing institutional gridlock that emerges when checks and balances become so elaborate that governance itself becomes impossible. Parliament had become not a deliberative body but a ratification machine. Take for instance, President’s Rule in Manipur. The suspension of an elected state government, a power so grave that the Sarkaria Commission (1988) recommended its near-abolition, was rubber-stamped faster than most municipal permits. The Rajya Sabha, passed multiple bills without proper discussion. The Nehruvian machinery, designed to protect federalism, had been reverse-engineered into its execution chamber. The Opposition, rather than offering a fundamental critique of the Nehruvian labyrinth and arguing for simpler, more robust democratic structures, demanded more checks, more procedures and more safeguards. The party that had built the labyrinth now found itself lost within it. The surreal “tea meeting” late last year where Prime Minister Modi, Priyanka Gandhi, and other leaders were photographed laughing together briefly seduced observers into imagining reconciliation. But it was theatre.
By 2025, Modi no longer spoke merely of policy cycles or electoral mandates. His rhetoric stretched across millennia. From the Red Fort, he invoked “a thousand years of resurgence.” The implication was clear: India’s democratic structures of Nehruvian checks and balances, the federal protections, the minority safeguards were themselves “slave mentality” institutionalised. True decolonisation required not preservation but purification. Modi occupies a position of dominance no leader had held since Nehru’s early years. A 2025 global survey ranked him the world’s most popular democratic leader.
Such a moment of absolute dominance also presents rare opportunity. Modi, precisely because he is unchallenged, does not need to govern through confrontation. He could prove Churchill wrong not by creating the perfect institutional machine, but by demonstrating that India’s civilisation is strong enough to tolerate imperfect democracy. He could prove Nehru wrong not by preserving every check and balance, but by showing that Indians can govern themselves through simpler, more robust structures that trust citizens rather than constrain them. If he chooses this path, he will have redefined Indian statesmanship not as victory over opponents, but as stewardship of a plural civilisation.