On December 18 and 19, 141 members of the two houses of India’s Parliament were suspended, as of December 19, by the Speaker of the lower house, Om Birla. Each of these members belongs to the parties that oppose the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The government said that these elected members were suspended for “unruly behavior.” The opposition had shaped itself into the INDIA bloc, which included almost every party not affiliated with the BJP. They responded to this action by calling it the “murder of democracy” and alleging that the BJP government has installed an “extreme level of dictatorship” in India. This act comes after a range of attempts to undermine India’s elected opposition.

Meanwhile, on December 18, the popular Indian news website Newsclick announced that India’s Income Tax (IT) department “has virtually frozen our accounts.” Newsclick can no longer make payments to its employees, which means that this news media portal is now close to being silenced. The editors at Newsclick said that this action by the IT department is “a continuation of the administrative-legal siege” that began with the Enforcement Directorate raids in February 2021, was deepened by the IT department survey in September 2021, and the large-scale raids of October 3, 2023, that resulted in the arrest of Newsclick’s founder Prabir Purkayastha and its administrative officer Amit Chakraborty. Both remain in prison.

In February 2022, the Economist noted that “the organs of India’s democracy are decaying.” Two years before that assessment, India’s leading economist and Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen said that “democracy is government by discussion, and, if you make discussion fearful, you are not going to get a democracy, no matter how you count the votes. And........

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