India Is Much Poorer and Far Less Free Under Modi Than It Would Have Been Without Him: Study

Through their study, the researchers test the claims made by the prime minister and his government empirically.

Through their study, the researchers test the claims made by the prime minister and his government empirically.

New Delhi: If Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party had lost the 2014 Lok Sabha election, India would have been more prosperous and democratic today, says a new research study. While this may sound like an everyday fact or lived reality to critics of the government, the new report backs its claims with data.

Comparing the prime minister's assurances with the outcomes over roughly a decade, they write, "Modi’s rule is, at heart, a tale of broken promises." The researchers behind the study are Kevin Grier and Robin Grier of Texas Tech University, and they call their study 'Promises, Promises: Governance and Growth in India under Modi and the BJP'. Kevin is with the Department of Political Science and Robin with the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the university.

Their report finds that a decade into the Modi-led years, India's performance dipped on ten critical governance indicators and, separately, in terms of GDP per capita.

Their report does this by exploring the counter-factual – what if no Modi or Gujarat model were at the helm in India – and it finds that India's per-capita income would have been $1,000 higher than it was in 2023 if India had stuck with its 'business as usual' approach until 2014.

Political corruption would have been far lower too, and India would have fared much better on rankings of freedom of expression and seven other crucial indicators.

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The indicators they examine include political corruption, democracy (polyarchy), liberal democracy, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of association, equality before the law, equal protection under the law, judicial constraints on the executive and legislative constraints on the executive. Another separate factor they study is economic performance, which they measure by real per-capita GDP, using a different pool of data.

"All 10 cases show significant worsening, and sizes of some are quite large. Half of the cases show a worsening of over 45% compared to the synthetic counterfactuals," says the report.

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Key findings

The primary question the report seeks to answer is whether the prime minister has delivered on promises after he had been in that position for close to a decade. Here are the findings for five of the indicators which are often talked about in India:

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As per the study, liberal democracy, freedom of religion, freedom of expression and equality before the law have fallen significantly, with freedom of religion marking the steepest decline.

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Political corruption, considered one of the primary reasons why the UPA government did not return to power for a third term, has also grown significantly since 2014 (up to 2023), and it is tellingly accompanied with a big fall in freedom of expression.

Also read: Modi Said 'Criticism is Soul of Democracy' So Why is His Govt Building a Digital Censorship Regime?

"It is worth noting that higher values for the corruption index mean more corruption, so that outcome is not a Modi success story. This is a telling result as Modi campaigned extensively on reducing corruption," says the report.

Setting up the discussion around a quadrant – the four possible routes that existed in 2014 for the Modi government to take, the report asks pertinent questions: Were the promises met? Did India make the quintessential “strongman bargain”? Or did something else altogether happen?

While there is a lot of anecdotal discussion of these issues, we really require a counterfactual analysis, they explain, adding, "We are not asking whether India in 2023 looks better or worse than India in 2013 on some absolute scale, but whether it looks better or worse than India would have looked absent the Modi government."

The method of the study

The authors wanted to know whether Modi has made India's economy and democracy better, as he had promised, or worse. However, an immediate problem arises: they cannot 'see' the India that would have existed if he had never become prime minister and in which the Bharatiya Janata Party was not at the helm.

So the researchers created a fake India or what they call "synthetic India". This India is made up of the performance indicators of some carefully-picked countries, a kind of cocktail of China, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Argentina, Brazil, Vietnam and many others, each prioritised depending on what was being analysed, to be as close to India before 2014 as possible.

They then looked at this synthetic India over the 30 years from 1984–2013 (the pre-treatment period) and 2014–2023 (the treatment period or Modi years).

Then the researchers studied how those countries would have performed (or their bits and pieces would have performed) had India not shifted gear to try and emulate the Gujarat model in 2014. After this analysis, the authors conclude, "India under Modi has broadly and significantly underperformed its counterfactuals on democracy, governance and institutions."

That is, synthetic India performed much better on all the indicators the report has studied, while actual India falls on all. Here are all of those indicators. Polyarchy refers to democracy, a system in which multiple parties compete and citizens play a participatory role:

The only indicator that increased was political corruption.

To be sure, the researchers are cautious to assess themselves. They repeatedly ask, are we seeing this kind of difference between real and counter-factual India just because our method produces incorrect results?

To eliminate this possibility (to the extent possible), they give the other countries in their dataset a dose of the 'Modi treatment'. That is, they apply the same tests on those countries as they did on synthetic India. And they find that the results confirm the initial data.

They find that India after Modi deteriorates on all these indicators in a much bigger way than the other countries, when compared with what the authors' model predicts would have happened without Modi.

As the report states, "...India’s effects are larger than any of our estimated placebo effects in each of the cases".

The GDP result

One striking aspect of the report is its conclusion about the impact of the Modi years on GDP, a metric that the Modi government has repeatedly emphasised to highlight a success story. Here, the researchers use GDP data that is officially accepted, not figures that the critics of the government have presented as alternatives.

The synthetic control for Indian real per-capita GDP is composed of 25% Bangladesh, 28% China, 38% Ethiopia, 7% Pakistan and 2% Philippines. Here is the result:

India would still have been below the upper-middle-income threshold of the World Bank ($4,466 per capita per year). But for a family of four, if this income were to be equitably distributed, the increase in earnings would have been roughly Rs 27,000 a month. And for the economy as a whole, $1,000 per capita is about $1.4 trillion more economic output in a year.

Also read: Far From Being the 'Fourth Largest', India Slips to Number Six on Global GDP Rankings

The report points out that concerns have been raised about India "systematically mismeasuring" its GDP since 2015. However, even after using the government's allegedly rosier data, the conclusion remained negative: India's underperformance could be even larger if the critics' data was used.

As a result, the report says, Modi promised an economic improvement that their model does not find.

Freedom of expression

The authors of the report don't look at freedom of expression as just the ability of poeple to say what they want. They measure the environment that exists (or doesn't) for people to say what they believe. Their "synthetic India" that closely resembles India without Modi before 2014 does very badly in the post-Modi years.

By the end of the study period, India's freedom of expression measure was 56.2% below its synthetic counterfactual.

Also, the deterioration the authors find in freedom of expression was not a gradual shift. It did not happen throughout the 30-year period they study. It was sudden, as the journalist Ravish Kumar suggested years ago: Not watching mainstream TV channels for four months would return India to its normal state.

Also read: The Evidence Is In: Freedom of Expression Is Dead in India

There's a caveat here. The authors use V-Dem to measure things like freedom of expression, democracy, freedom of religion, etc. But what if the experts at V-Dem are biased, or especially biased against India? The authors say it would have to be a "pretty well-organised campaign" against India for the results to be false.

This is because the report analyses the V-Dem scores against ten indicators, finding the same outcome each time, not just on freedom of expression.

Besides, the authors adjusted their donor pool for the governance-related analysis, removing China and Vietnam and including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ghana, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, South Africa and Sri Lanka for their governance-related measurements.

For each of the metrics studied, they also readjusted the weightage (or importance) given to each of these countries. China and Vietnam, as single-party-run countries, were not included in the governance comparisons with India.

Freedom of religion: a 168.7% gap

Before 2014, India and synthetic India track each other reasonably well in terms of freedom of religion, shows the report. After Modi took office, they diverge sharply. The report says there is a 168.7% gap relative to India's 2013 level in religious freedom in India.

As this, too, is based on V-Dem's measure, it assesses whether authorities respect people's and groups' ability to choose, change, practice and peacefully promote their religion without state interference. The graph below is self-explanatory:

If Modi's governments performed poorly, why are they re-elected?

In 2014, Modi and the BJP came to power in India after a campaign promising good governance ("minimum government, maximum governance") and on economic and developmental competence (the "Gujarat Model"), the report says. But if the performance has failed to match promises, why does the party get re-elected, they ask.

The researchers attempt to answer this in two ways, initially citing India's first-past-the-post electoral system and the fragmentation of opposition parties. "The BJP is the largest single party in India, but it does not have anything close to majority support. A splintered opposition has been a big help to their ability to govern," they write.

The authors also acknowledge another possible explanation for Modi's electoral success. Perhaps, they write, his supporters did not understand "maximum governance" or "good governance" in the same way as they do. "For example," they write, "to his supporters, it is possible that reducing freedom of religion was a positive development."

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