Last October, Indian authorities revived legal proceedings against the novelist and activist Arundhati Roy. In a case first registered against her in 2010, Roy stood accused of “provocative speech” that aroused “enmity between different groups” for having said that Kashmir was not an “integral” part of India. The charge carries a maximum sentence of seven years and kept her from traveling to Germany to deliver the opening address at the 2023 Munich Literature Festival.

The assault on expression, and on virtually every other mainstay of democracy, has become commonplace under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, and it is the backdrop against which Indians have begun voting to elect their next Parliament and prime minister. Of the nearly 1 billion eligible voters, perhaps more than 600 million will cast their votes over a six-week-long process. Modi, who heads the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is widely expected to win a third term as prime minister in his bitter contest against a motley alliance of opposition parties, the Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance (INDIA).

[Read: What has happened to the rule of law in India?]

The spectacle of hundreds of millions of Indians—many suffering severe material deprivation—performing their civic duty arouses both hope and wonder, often winning India the title of “world’s largest democracy.” But Indian democracy did not just begin to degrade under Modi: It has been eroding since the first years of independence. Modi has put that process on steroids and today presides over an autocracy in all but name.

For decades, the Indian state has used coercive legal powers to suppress dissent and constitutional mechanisms to delegitimize votes. The judiciary has largely acquiesced, money has gushed into Indian politics, and Hindu nationalism has cast a dark shadow of division. What are treated now as anomalies have been the trajectory all along.

Nonetheless, world leaders, including President Joe Biden, often describe India as a vibrant democracy. Even more nuanced analyses hold that Indian democracy will withstand the current crisis because Indians respect diversity and pluralism, the country’s democratic institutions are strong, and recovery is inevitable.

This romantic view of an inherently democratic India is a fairy tale. According to the Swedish think tank V-Dem, India was never a liberal democracy, and today it is sliding ever more decisively toward autocracy. Even under its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s impressive electoral apparatus did not guarantee equality before the law or ensure essential liberties to citizens. Subsequent leaders, rather than plugging the cracks in India’s constitutional foundation, expanded them, not least by using the state’s coercive power to circumvent democratic processes for personal or partisan advantage. Fraying democratic norms rendered free speech, dissent, and judicial independence casualties from the start.

The constitution that independent India adopted in 1950 defined the country as a democratic republic committed to justice, equality, and fraternity for its people. But the democratic conception of the state suffered its first blow when the constitution was just 18 months old. Nehru, frustrated that Indian courts were upholding the free-speech rights of his critics, amended the constitution in June 1951 to make seditious speech a punishable offense. Only one person was actually convicted of sedition before Nehru’s prime ministership ended with his death. But several suffered for extended periods after lower courts found them guilty and before higher ones reversed the verdicts. That long legal limbo had a chilling effect on speech.

The Indian constitution had other undemocratic features that Nehru deployed. It evinced a preoccupation with integrity and security, and emphasized the union, rather than autonomy, of the states it federated. If India’s central government deemed a state’s politics to be dysfunctional, it could place the state under a kind of federal receivership called President’s Rule, essentially disenfranchising the state’s electorate. Nehru imposed President’s Rule eight times during his tenure. The constitution had other significant gaps: It didn’t furnish social and economic equality to women, for example. Nehru tried to pass a bill that would override traditional Hindu patrimonial practices, but even in the postindependence glow of national unity, organized Hindu forces asserted their identity and political power. They stymied Nehru’s legislative efforts in 1951 and then the implementation of the laws that did pass later.

Nehru, for all his faults, valued tolerance and fairness. The same could scarcely be said of his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who followed soon after as prime minister and initiated a steep decline from such democratic norms as existed under Nehru. In 1967, she responded to a peasant protest in Naxalbari, West Bengal, by passing the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which allowed the police to arrest and hold people without trial, bail, or explanation. This legislation would become an instrument of repression for decades to come. She also placed West Bengal under President’s Rule, and her chosen governor used the police and armed forces to wipe out a generation of idealistic students who supported the peasants. In fact, Gandhi imposed President’s Rule nearly 30 times from 1966 to 1975, when she declared an internal emergency and assumed dictatorial powers. Gandhi called for elections in early 1977, hoping to legitimize her autocratic rule. But when a frustrated Indian populace threw her out, the University of Chicago political scientists Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph—echoing a commonly held view—happily concluded, “Democracy has acquired a mass base in India.”

[From the April 1940 issue: India’s demand and England’s answer]

That proved wishful thinking. Upon reelection as prime minister in 1980, Gandhi accelerated the erosion of democratic norms. She imposed President’s Rule more than a dozen times in her second stint in power, from 1980 to 1984. She also began pandering to the sentiments of Hindus to win their votes, opening the door to the hard-line Hindu-nationalists who have since become an overpowering force in Indian politics.

Perhaps Gandhi’s most pernicious legacy was the injection of “black” money—unaccounted-for funds, accumulated through tax evasion and illegal market operations—into Indian politics. In 1969, she banned corporate donations to political parties. Soon after, her campaigns became extremely expensive, ushering in an era of “briefcase politics,” in which campaign donations came in briefcases full of cash, mostly filling the coffers of her own Congress Party. Criminals became election financiers, and as big-money (and black-money) politics spread, ideology and public interest gave way to politics for private gain. Legislators in state assemblies frequently “defected,” crossing party lines to bag ministerial positions that generated corrupt earnings.

And yet, for all the damage done to it, many analysts and diplomats still cleaved to the romantic view of Indian democracy. Upon Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, a former U.S. foreign-service officer, writing in Foreign Affairs, described the monarchical-style handover of power to her son, the political neophyte Rajiv, as proof of the “strength of the republic and its democratic constitutional system.”

Rajiv’s stewardship could rightly be seen in an entirely different light. He was the prime minister who let the gale force of Hindu nationalism blast through the door his mother had opened. He commissioned for the state-owned television network, Doordarshan, the much-loved Ramayana epic, which spawned a Rambo-like iconography of Lord Ram as Hindutva’s avenger. And he reignited a contest between Hindus and Muslims over the site of a 16th-century mosque called the Babri Masjid, which had been sealed since 1949 to contain communal passions. Hindu zealots claimed that the structure was built on Lord Ram’s birthplace, and Rajiv opened its gates. Then, in December 1992, Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao’s Congress Party–led government dithered as frenzied Hindu mobs demolished Babri Masjid, triggering bloody riots and further advancing the Hindu-nationalist cause.

The decade from 1989 to 1998 saw a series of coalition governments govern India—a development that the historian Ramachandra Guha has described as “a manifestation of the widening and deepening of democracy” because “different regions and different groups had acquired a greater stake in the system.” Democratic norms were, in fact, degrading at a quickening pace during this period. Big-money politics had bred mercenary politicians, who at the unseemly edge were gangsters providing caste representation, protection, and other services that the state could not supply. Politicians paid little attention to the public good—such as creating more jobs and improving education and health services, especially in the eastern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh—and learned that they could use plausible corruption charges against one another as a weapon.

Hindu nationalism swelled. From 1998 to 2003, the BJP led a coalition government that began aligning school textbooks with a Hindu-nationalist agenda. A Congress-led government from 2004 to 2014 arrested this trend but presided over a steep descent into corruption: During that decade, the share of members of the lower house of Parliament charged with serious crimes—including murder, extortion, and kidnapping—reached 21 percent, up from 12 percent.

[Read: India’s democracy is the world’s problem]

Both the BJP and the Congress Party embraced a model of economic growth driven by the very rich, and both dismissed the injury to the economic interests of the weak and vulnerable, as well as to the environment, as necessary collateral damage. In Chhattisgarh, a Congress Party leader, with the support of the state’s BJP government, sponsored a private vigilante army to protect business interests, which included the exploitation of minerals and the mowing down of pristine forests in the tribal areas. When the supreme court declared the private vigilante army unconstitutional, Indian authorities responded in the manner of Andrew Jackson, who famously waved off the United States’ chief justice with the statement, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

The anti-terrorism and anti-sedition provisions that earlier governments had supplied came in handy when the Congress-led coalition sought to suppress protests and intimidate opponents. The government also introduced and steadily widened the ambit of a new law, ostensibly for the prevention of money laundering, and it used the investigative powers of the state to its own benefit in whitewashing corruption: In 2013, a justice of the supreme court described the Central Bureau of Investigation as a “caged parrot” singing in “its master’s voice.”

India, on the eve of the election that brought Modi to power in May 2014, could thus hardly be described as a robust democracy. Rather, all the instruments for its demolition had already been assembled and politely passed along from one government to the next. In the hands of a populist demagogue such as Modi, the demolition instruments proved to be a wrecking ball.

As a candidate, Modi promised to right India’s feckless economic policy and countervail against the Congress Party’s corruption. These claims were not credible. Worse, as chief minister of Gujarat in 2002, Modi had failed to stop a bloody massacre of Muslims, thereby establishing himself as an avatar of Hindu-nationalist extremism. He couldn’t even get a visa to enter the United States.

Nonetheless, many of India’s public intellectuals were sanguine. Antidemocratic forces could be no match for the pluralistic disposition of India’s people and the liberal institutions of its state, some insisted. The political scientist Ashutosh Varshney noted that Modi had eschewed anti-Muslim rhetoric in his campaign—because, Varshney inferred, Indian politics abhorred ideological extremism. Another political scientist, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, asked the BJP’s political opponents to reflect on their own fascist tendencies. The Congress Party, Mehta wrote, “had done its best” to instill fear in citizens and corrode the institutions that protected individual rights; Modi would pull India out of the economic stagnation that Congress had induced.

Anti-Muslim violence spread quickly after Modi came to power. Prominent critics of Hindu nationalism were gunned down on their doorsteps: M. M. Kalburgi in Dharwad, Karnataka, in August 2015, and Gauri Lankesh in Bangalore in July 2017. And India was tumbling in global indicators of democracy. V-Dem has classified India as an electoral autocracy since 2018: The country conducts elections but suppresses individual rights, dissent, and the media so egregiously that it can no longer be considered a democracy in any sense of the word. Even the word “electoral,” though, in V-Dem’s designation, has become dubious since then.

[Samanth Subramanian: Indian democracy is fighting back]

Under Modi’s rule, India has taken a sharp turn toward autocracy, but to get there, the BJP had only to drive a truck through the fissures in the state’s democratic foundations that earlier governments had already widened. The government has seized the coercive powers of the state to fearsome ends, arresting activists and human-rights defenders under various provisions of the law. Successive Washington Post investigations have concluded that at least some of these arrests were based on planted evidence. One of those arrested, a Jesuit priest and human-rights activist, died in prison for want of medical attention when suffering from complications of COVID-19. Income and wealth inequalities have grown, in tandem with extraordinary expenditures even in state election campaigns. Demands for the demolition of more mosques have mounted. Inevitably, to woo Hindu voters, even opposition parties, including the Congress Party, have adopted a softer version of Hindu-nationalist ideology.

The BJP government regularly brings charges against its critics in the media for tax lapses or anti-nationalism, among other pretexts. Reporters Without Borders describes India as one of the most dangerous countries for journalists. In 2023, it ranked India 161 out of 180 countries in press freedom, citing the takeover of media outlets by oligarchs close to Modi and the “horrific” online harassment by Modi’s “army of online supporters.”

Can Indians really be said to vote freely under such circumstances? Even if the answer is yes, the government seems to have found the means to disenfranchise citizens after the fact. In August 2019, the government withdrew the constitutional provision that gave Kashmir special autonomy. It also downgraded Kashmir from a state to a territory, placing it under the direct control of the central government without consulting the people of Kashmir. Because the supreme court has refused to reverse this move, future central governments might similarly downgrade other states.

The chief ministers of Uttarakhand and Delhi are both in jail, awaiting trial on money-laundering charges, and the government has frozen the bank accounts of the Congress Party on allegations of tax evasion. Many opposition-party members who face criminal charges join the BJP, effectively giving the ruling party greater political power in exchange for the dismissal of the charges against them. A recent supreme-court directive requiring transparency in a segment of campaign financing revealed signs of extensive corruption primarily benefitting BJP politicians but also opposition leaders in charge of state governments.

Nevertheless, after Prime Minister Modi’s visit to the United States last June and his address to a joint session of the Congress, the White House’s joint U.S.-India statement read: “The United States and India reaffirm and embrace their shared values of freedom, democracy, human rights, inclusion, pluralism, and equal opportunities for all citizens.” In January, Secretary of State Antony Blinken referred to India as the “world’s largest democracy” and a vital partner, a position that the State Department continues to hold.

Such statements are at odds with the Indian reality. Over the seven decades since independence, Indian democracy has betrayed its people, leaving the majority without dignified jobs, foundational education, public health, or clean air and water. Alongside that betrayal, the death by a thousand cuts of democratic norms raises the troubling question: Is India now an autocracy?

If Modi wins this election, his victory will surely strengthen autocratic tendencies in India. But in the unlikely event that he loses, the erosion of democracy will merely have paused. Democracy is a fragile construct. When deviation from democratic norms persists for as long as it has in Indian politics, deviance becomes the norm. Reversing it becomes a monumental task. Especially if a winning opposition coalition fails to improve the quality of Indian lives, an electorally resurgent Modi and his Hindutva supporters could potentially seal democracy’s fate.

At today’s hearing on Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority appeared poised to give him what he most desires in the case: further delays that virtually preclude the chance that he will face a jury in his election-subversion case before the November election.

But the nearly three hours of debate may be even more significant for how they would shape a second Trump term if he wins reelection. The arguments showed that although the Court’s conservative majority seems likely to reject Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, four of the justices appear predominantly focused on limiting the possibility that future presidents could face such charges for their actions in office, with Chief Justice John Roberts expressing more qualified sympathy with those arguments. Among the GOP-appointed justices, only Amy Coney Barrett appeared concerned about the Court potentially providing a president too much protection from criminal proceedings.

The conservative majority appeared determined to draw a lasting line between presidential actions that could and could not be subject to criminal prosecution; Justice Neil Gorsuch at one point insisted, “We’re writing a rule for the ages.” But many observers fear that any grant of immunity, no matter how the majority tries to limit it, would enormously embolden a reelected Trump to barrel through constraints of custom and law in pursuing his self-described agenda of “retribution.”

“The Supreme Court may be inclined to split hairs, but Donald Trump is not,” Deana El-Mallawany, the counsel for the bipartisan group Protect Democracy, told me after the hearing. “The arguments today made clear that Trump seeks absolute unchecked power. Trying to rein in an imperial vision of presidential power like that with an opinion that draws fine lines would be akin to trying to hold water with a net.”

After today’s hearing, the hope that a trial could proceed expeditiously now “seems fruitless, and the question is whether the Court will issue an opinion that will provide expansive, albeit not unlimited, immunity, which would be a giant step toward rejecting the idea the president is not a king, a fundamentally anti-constitutional principle,” the former federal prosecutor Harry Litman, the host of the podcast Talking Feds, told me.

In claiming absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, Trump’s lawyers relied heavily on the 5–4 1982 Supreme Court decision Nixon v. Fitzgerald, which ruled that former presidents could face civil suits only for actions that could not be defined as official, even under a very broad definition of that term.

Although providing that expansive protection from civil litigation, the Court in that earlier case did not address whether the president should enjoy comparable immunity from criminal prosecution. The majority opinion dropped only fleeting and somewhat contradictory breadcrumbs about the Court’s view on criminal prosecution. At one point, the decision implied that the president deserves less protection from criminal charges. But later, the decision omitted criminal charges when it listed means other than civil suits that could hold a president accountable for his actions.

The three-judge panel on the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals, in its ringing ruling earlier this year denying Trump’s immunity claim, concluded that the Nixon v. Fitzgerald limits on civil cases should not apply to criminal allegations against a former president. At the hearing, though, Roberts openly disparaged the circuit-court opinion for failing to provide enough protection to a president.

[Read: The Supreme Court goes through the looking glass on presidential immunity]

Groups of both constitutional-law scholars and historians of early America filed briefs to the Supreme Court arguing that there is no evidence that the Founders intended to provide the sweeping protection Trump is seeking and asserting that they had consciously omitted from the Constitution any grant of immunity to the president for official acts. “The President’s susceptibility to prosecution was an express theme of the ratification debates,” the historians wrote in their brief. “Critical figures in multiple [state ratifying] conventions converged on the same understanding: The President can be prosecuted.”

To varying degrees, the Republican-appointed justices seemed to accept the idea that former presidents could be prosecuted in theory, while devoting much of their question time to minimizing the circumstances in which they actually would be. Today’s hearing validated the predictions of legal analysts who told me earlier this week that the conservative majority would be drawn to a version of the Fitzgerald distinction immunizing the president against legal challenge for some circle of acts within his official responsibilities but not against acts that fall outside that boundary.

“I think they will do what they should do, which is they will hold that Nixon v. Fitzgerald applies to criminal as well as civil matters against the president, which means that Trump will get part but not all of what he wants,” Michael McConnell, the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, told me before the hearing. “Nixon v. Fitzgerald distinguishes between presidential acts that are within ‘the outer perimeter’ of his presidential authority and acts that are private. I think it is clear that some of what he is being charged with falls into each category.”

If, as seems likely after today’s hearing, the Court majority seeks to establish such a distinction between some official acts that are protected and private acts that are not protected, it would virtually extinguish the chances that Trump will face a trial before the November election on the charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election.

“Even if it’s pellucidly clear that the standard [for immunity] wouldn’t apply to Trump, I do think he likely would get another trip back up and down the federal courts, very likely dooming the prospect of a trial in 2024,” Litman said.

The longer-term implications of a ruling providing immunity for some substantial portion of official conduct, though, could be even more profound. The hearing suggested that the conservative Supreme Court majority is unwilling to consider, or simply unconcerned, that the real-world political context of a second Trump term could undermine any distinction it draws between presidential behavior that is and is not protected from criminal prosecution.

“As we heard today, Donald Trump is trying to take the most maximal approach to executive power,” El-Mallawany told me. “If the Supreme Court is willing to give an inch, then I think he’ll take a mile in a second term.”

Trump has already made clear that he views presidential authority as essentially unlimited. Responding to the dramatic hypothetical that Judge Florence Pan raised during the proceedings in the D.C. Circuit Court, Trump’s lawyer D. John Sauer said that a president could not be criminally prosecuted unless first impeached and convicted even if he ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival.

[Read: Trump’s misogyny is on trial in New York]

At today’s hearing, Sauer again insisted that Trump could not be criminally prosecuted for killing a rival, selling nuclear secrets to an enemy, or even staging a coup unless he was first impeached and convicted. “They took assassinating an opponent and upped it to a full-bore coup,” John Dean, the White House counsel under Richard Nixon who helped expose the Watergate scandal, told me after the hearing.

Even short of that extreme, Trump has indicated that in a second term he intends to send federal forces into blue states and cities over the objections of local officials and deploy the Justice Department and the FBI against his political opponents.

If he wins in November, Trump would inevitably interpret the victory as a public endorsement, or at least acceptance, of his views about presidential power. And all signs suggest Trump has already concluded that hardly any elected officials in his party have the stomach to confront him. That degree of loyalty functionally eliminates the possibility that Congress could impeach him and remove him from office, almost no matter what he does.

As El-Mallawany told me, that means the reality facing the Supreme Court as it considers this case is that a second Trump term would come only after “defeat at the ballot box, impeachment by Congress, and self-policing by the party” are all effectively eliminated as prospective checks on Trump’s actions.

If, against that backdrop, the Court also chooses to weaken rather than fortify the last legal barriers against egregious presidential actions, Trump could easily conclude that he faces few practical limits on his authority. Given Trump’s baseline inclination to view his presidential authority as virtually unlimited, Dean said he didn’t think the Court could distinguish between protected and unprotected presidential actions in a manner that will constrain Trump’s behavior if he wins again.

“That’s why it is very troublesome for the Court to try to fashion some sort of immunity even with the core functions [of the presidency], because it’s all hypothetical and speculative at this point as to what it would mean, and lawyers have a wonderful facility for finding permission for actions that are not really permissible,” Dean told me.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, echoing such concerns, forcefully raised the risk in the hearing that broad immunity from criminal prosecution could leave a president “emboldened” to undertake illegal acts, because he would arrive in office aware that he was immune from criminal accountability. Maintaining the possibility of criminal charges, she argued, was essential to deterring a president inclined to misuse his or her authority.

But several justices in the conservative majority seemed more concerned, however implausibly, about the opposite risk. Justice Samuel Alito argued that opening a president to criminal liability would not deter illegal activity but actually increase the risk that he or she would break the law. In Alito’s somewhat head-spinning logic, a president who feared potential criminal prosecution after he left office would undertake illegal acts to stay in power and avoid that legal exposure.

After the hearing, the prospect that Trump would face trial before November seemed minimal. Barrett surprisingly joined Jackson in suggesting that while the courts sorted out which of a president’s official actions deserved immunity, a trial could proceed around the elements of Trump’s behavior that were clearly private in nature. However, four of the other Republican-appointed justices appeared entirely uninterested in that idea, and Roberts seemed more inclined to send the case back to lower courts.

As Harry Litman noted, those who went into the hearing wishing to preserve a preelection trial against Trump emerged from the proceedings reduced to hoping that the Court doesn’t eviscerate the possibility of criminal consequences for any president who breaks the law. Even a decision that allows Trump to delay any further criminal trials until after the election could look relatively small next to the consequences of a ruling that causes him to conclude that, if he wins again, the Supreme Court would lack the will to restrain him.