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Introduction: Democracy, civil society and journalism in India

An emerging economic superpower, India is courting high growth while battling poverty, corruption, and precariously poor governance. Political violence, disorder, and social conflicts are some of its recurring problems. “India has law and China has order, but a successful nation needs both,” writes Das (2012) in his book India Grows at Night. As India embraces the neoliberal economic and media model, the need is to answer the question that haunts critics like Das: can the country be governed effectively and remain the world’s biggest democracy? Since independence in 1947, India has remained a stable and functioning democracy in the face of enormous challenges. Proving the Western pundits wrong, India not only survived as a democracy but also evolved its own institutions of a diverse multi-party political system, strong judiciary, and vibrant media. It has managed to hold relatively free and fair elections and transitions of power have been peaceful. Unlike the more mature Western democracies, India’s political landscape had always been shaped by a strong electoral presence. For instance, voter turnout has, from the first elections held in 1952, been high with the more historically disadvantaged groups voting most steadily. Since 1962 voter turnout in India, for general and regional assembly elections, hovered between 55 and 64 percent. By 1989, voter turnout was higher in rural than urban areas and increased among the backward castes, dalits (the erstwhile untouchables), and tribals who were more likely to vote than upper-caste Hindus; this was also true of the poor and very poor relative to upper classes (Tudor 2013). Clearly, democracy had established very deep roots in what was to some critics the inhospitable soil of India. But despite its obvious advantages, democracy had not transformed the lives of the majority of its people. Excessive politicization of institutions at the grassroots has catalyzed clashes of conflict‐ ing interests, leading to what Kohli (1990, 27) describes as India’s growing “crisis of governability.” The egalitarian and liberal principles of governance enshrined in India’s constitution have come into direct conflict with historically rigid systems of disempowerment and exclusion. Since the country embarked on a path of economic restructuring in the early 1990s, the development trajectory of the world’s largest democracy has undergone dramatic transformations. New avenues for prosperity and mobility—social and physical—have opened up, and new technologies have shaped the imaginaries of rural and urban Indians in novel ways. Economic growth, rising income levels, and consumerism, coupled with technological advancements and policy initiatives taken by the Indian government, which encouraged the inflow of external investment, became the key drivers in the rise of a new transformed India. The stereotypical image of India in the West as an impoverished nation with Socialist leanings has gradually changed. “The political economic changes began to