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Columbia University students participate in an ongoing pro-Palestinian encampment on their campus following last week’s arrest of more than 100 protesters, on April 25, 2024 in New York City. | Stephanie Keith/Getty Images The crackdown on protesters at Columbia and elsewhere lays bare the challenge of balancing academic freedom with student safety. Student protests are heating up around the country, just as the school year is winding down. At Columbia University in New York, a deadline is nearing for the administration to clear the student encampment off the campus lawn. The NYPD chief of patrol defended his department’s actions earlier this week in arresting over 100 student protesters on campus, writing “Columbia decided to hold its students accountable to the laws of the school. They are seeing the consequences of their actions. Something these kids were most likely never taught,” in a post on X. But the root of all the arrests and protests at Columbia is, arguably, free speech. In testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in Washington, DC, last week, Columbia President Minouche Shafik struggled to walk a line between ensuring student safety and protecting academic freedom. “We believe that Columbia’s role is not to shield individuals from positions that they find unwelcome,” she said, “but instead to create an environment where different viewpoints can be tested and challenged.” In light of the fierce debate over campus speech and student safety, Today, Explained reached out to the president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Irene Mulvey to get her view on the state of free speech on college campuses. AAUP is a nonprofit organization comprising faculty and other professionals in academia whose stated mission is to protect academic freedom and support higher education as a public good. Mulvey shared her insights into whether Columbia and other institutions where crackdowns of protests are happening are living up to those ideals. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. —Miranda Kennedy Sean Rameswaram Has protecting academic freedom and supporting higher education become more difficult since October 7? Irene Mulvey Yes, it has become more difficult since October 7. Although I would say our job of protecting academic freedom and protecting higher education from outside interference has always been difficult. There’s always been political interference into higher education, and that’s why we were founded. In the past, the interference into higher education has been targeting individual professors, you know, a wealthy donor doesn’t like somebody’s research and they want to get them fired. Or somebody speaks up at a faculty meeting, criticizing the administration and the administration doesn’t want them to get tenure. What we’re seeing now is an escalation in that the entire enterprise of higher education as a public good in a democracy is being attacked. We’re seeing attacks at the state level with legislation that will censor content — we call these educational gag orders, where there’s legislation that says what can be taught in a college classroom. That’s just outright censorship and the kind of thing you see in an authoritarian society, not a democracy. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce has dragged these presidents in front of the committee for a performative witch hunt of a hearing. And that is an escalation because those are private institutions. So it’s a remarkable escalation for the federal government to be intruding into what’s happening at private colleges. To think about how professors are feeling about these protests, we need to think about how professors feel about higher education. And what professors are thinking [is] that in higher education, we should have a robust exchange of ideas in which no idea is withheld from scrutiny or debate. Our students have very strong feelings about what’s happening in the Middle East. They are attempting to have that robust exchange of ideas about what’s happening. And I think as faculty members, we support that. Students on a campus, the students are learning from professors. They’re learning how to conduct research on their own. They’re learning how to analyze arguments. They’re learning how to think critically about complex matters. And they have thoughts about what’s happening in the world [and] on their campuses, with regard to what their campuses are doing to support what’s happening in the Middle East. Faculty members are supportive of this. This is what academic freedom means. Sean Rameswaram So it sounds like you don’t support the president of Columbia University calling in the NYPD to make arrests at a peaceful protest. Irene Mulvey That’s an understatement. I think what the Columbia president did was the most disproportionate reaction that I’ve ever seen. My understanding is these were peaceful protesters on an outdoor lawn on a campus where they pay a lot of money to attend, and she had them deemed as trespassers and invoked a statute where she has to argue that they are a clear and present danger to the functioning of the institution in order to allow the NYPD on campus. The most important thing is her response is doing the opposite of what’s supposed to happen on a campus. Her response silenced the voices of the students. Her response suppressed the speech and suppressed the debate. It’s the absolute opposite of what should happen on a college campus, and it was extremely disappointing. Sean Rameswaram If you had been in her position as the president of Columbia, and you were dealing with these protests and people [are] saying they feel unsafe, that there’s antisemitic slogans, that there was a protest outside where a Jewish student was told to go back to Poland, how would you have navigated these competing forces? Irene Mulvey Yeah, well, it’s not easy. Let’s be clear, there’s no easy answer to what’s going on here. But the principle behind anyone’s response should be education, should be speech, should be debate, should be ideas being put up for justification. And, you know, there could be some kind of forum for the students. Of course, they have to protect the safety of all students. But if the way you’re choosing to keep students safe is by suppressing somebody else’s speech, that’s a false choice. You don’t have to suppress speech to keep students safe. I agree that these are difficult situations. And I know all of these campuses where these things are happening — Columbia, NYU, Yale — these campuses and these presidents will espouse academic freedom and free speech at the drop of a hat. But if you’re not standing up for those principles at times like these, then those words are completely meaningless. Sean Rameswaram It’s interesting because I think what we’re seeing here is the clearest evidence that we haven’t quite figured out where the line is on protecting students versus free speech versus the open discussion of ideas. I think the president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, made that point in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, that universities haven’t figured this out. The Supreme Court hasn’t figured this out, and it shouldn’t be on universities to figure this out. Do you have some idea of where the line is between the open academic discussion of ideas and something that could be dangerous for students and thus not permitted? Irene Mulvey The way to think about it is in situations like this where there are polarized views, there are really strong feelings for very good reasons. Not all the speech is going to make you comfortable. Academic freedom and free speech can be messy. And so I think you have to err on the side of allowing the speech and allowing the debate and allowing the discussion. When it veers into something that doesn’t feel good, then someone should speak up and say that. But silencing voices because you don’t like what they’re saying is a very dangerous, slippery slope that we do not want to get onto. Sean Rameswaram One thing I’ve found heartening following these protests on college campuses for six months is that they’ve mostly been peaceful. Now, that being said, if I’m a Jewish student walking across campus and someone says, “Go back to Poland!” I might start to feel unsafe. If I’m a Muslim student and someone’s doxxing me because of my attending a protest, I might start to feel unsafe. How do college administrators navigate safety, which feels sort of amorphous sometimes, in a free-speech environment? Irene Mulvey Administrations — universities — have an obligation to address issues of harassment and hate speech through their policies that have been in place for decades. Because hate speech didn’t just arrive on campus since October 7. We’ve had to address issues like this for decades. So campuses have policies to address issues like that, and their obligation is to keep the campus safe. For the most part, I feel the protests that I’ve seen have been peaceful. But again, it’s a messy situation. The important way to handle it is to stand back on principles of academic freedom, free speech, and keeping the campus safe, and addressing issues of hate speech through policies that are developed with the faculty. Sean Rameswaram You were a professor of mathematics for 40 years — for four decades. I imagine before that, maybe you were a student at a college protest, trying to voice your opinion and embracing free speech. Do you think with all the perspective that you have that this is just a rough patch that we get over and we’re stronger because of it? Or do you think we’re really going to get bogged down here? Irene Mulvey Oh, that’s a good question. I did participate in protests as a student during the Vietnam War. I was in high school. But this is definitely a rough patch. And where we come out on the end of it is an open question. I think what’s happening is part of an agenda to control what happens on campus, not just about the history and policies of Israel. What’s happening now is part of a larger movement, the anti-DEI movement, the anti-CRT movement, which is intended to censor or control what can be learned in a college classroom and what can be taught on campus. I think that’s the real danger, that broader movement, which I think would really damage higher education and the role it’s supposed to play in a democracy — to be a check and balance on politics. Be sure to followToday, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Paige Vickers/Vox Years ago, scientists made a devastating prediction about the ocean. Now it’s unfolding. More than five years ago, the world’s top climate scientists made a frightening prediction: If the planet warms by 1.5 degrees Celsius, relative to preindustrial times, 70 to 90 percent of coral reefs globally would die off. At 2°C, that number jumps to more than 99 percent. These researchers were essentially describing the global collapse of an entire ecosystem driven by climate change. Warm ocean water causes corals — large colonies of tiny animals — to “bleach,” meaning they lose a kind of beneficial algae that lives within their bodies. That algae gives coral its color and much of its food, so bleached corals are white and starving. Starved coral is more likely to die. In not so great news, the planet is now approaching that 1.5°C mark. In 2023, the hottest year ever measured, the average global temperature was 1.52°C above the preindustrial average, as my colleague Umair Irfan reported. That doesn’t mean Earth has officially blown past this important threshold — typically, scientists measure these sorts of averages over decades, not years — but it’s a sign that we’re getting close. David Gray/AFP via Getty Images Marine biologist Anne Hoggett swims above bleached and dead coral on the Great Barrier Reef in April 2024. David Gray/AFP via Getty Images Tourists snorkel above a section of the Great Barrier Reef full of bleached and dead coral on April 5, 2024. So, it’s no surprise that coral reefs are, indeed, collapsing. Earlier this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that the planet is experiencing its fourth global “bleaching” event on record. Since early 2023, an enormous amount of coral in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans has turned ghostly white, including in places like the Great Barrier Reef and the Florida Keys. In some regions, a lot of the coral has already died. “What we are seeing now is essentially what scientists have been predicting was going to happen for more than 25 years,” Derek Manzello, a marine scientist at NOAA who leads the agency’s coral bleaching project, told Vox. The recent extreme ocean warming can’t solely be attributed to climate change, Manzello added; El Niño and even a volcanic eruption have supercharged temperatures. But coral reefs were collapsing well before the current bleaching crisis. A study published in 2021 estimated that coral “has declined by half” since the mid-20th century. In some places, like the Florida Keys, nearly 90 percent of the live corals have been lost. Past bleaching events are one source of destruction, as are other threats linked to climate change, including ocean acidification. The past and current state of corals raises an important but challenging question: If the planet continues to warm, is there a future for these iconic ecosystems? What’s become increasingly clear is that climate change doesn’t just deal a temporary blow to these animals — it will bring about the end of reefs as we know them. Will there be coral reefs 100 years from now? In the next few decades, a lot of coral will die — that’s pretty much a given. And to be clear, this reality is absolutely devastating. Regardless of whether snorkeling is your thing, reefs are essential to human well-being: Coral reefs dampen waves that hit the shore, support commercial fisheries, and drive coastal tourism around the world. They’re also home to an incredible diversity of life that inspires wonder. “I’m pretty sure that we will not see the large surface area of current reefs surviving into the future,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, who was involved in the landmark 2018 report, led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that predicted the downfall of tropical reefs at 1.5°C warming. “Every year is going to be worse.” NOAA A map of coral bleaching “alerts,” which indicate where the ocean is unusually warm and bleaching is likely to occur. Red areas have a risk of reef-wide bleaching; magenta and purple regions are at risk of coral death. But even as many corals die, reefs won’t exactly disappear. The 3D formation of a typical reef is made of hard corals that produce a skeleton-like structure. When the polyps die, they leave their skeletons behind. Animals that eat live coral, such as butterfly fish and certain marine snails, will likely vanish; plenty of other fish and crabs will stick around because they can hide among those skeletons. Algae will dominate on ailing reefs, as will “weedy” kinds of coral, like sea fans, that don’t typically build the reef’s structure. Simply put, dead reefs aren’t so much lifeless as they are home to a new community of less sensitive (and often more common) species. “Reefs in the future will look very different,” said Jean-Pierre Gattuso, a leading marine scientist who’s also involved with the IPCC. “Restoring coral reefs to what they were prior to mass bleaching events is impossible. That is a fact.” On the timescale of decades, even much of the reef rubble will fade away, as there will be no (or few) live corals to build new skeletons and plenty of forces to erode the ones that remain. Remarkably, about 30 percent of the carbon dioxide that we pump into the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans. When all that CO2 reacts with water, it makes the ocean more acidic, hastening the erosion of coral skeletons and other biological structures made of calcium carbonate. Jennifer Adler for Vox Bleached staghorn coral in a nursery run by the Coral Restoration Foundation off the coast of the Florida Keys in September 2023. Buying time For decades now, hard-working and passionate scientists have been trying to reverse this downward trend — in large part, by “planting” pieces of coral on damaged reefs. This practice is similar to planting saplings in a logged forest. In reef restoration, many scientists and environmental advocates see hope and a future for coral reefs. But these efforts come with one major limitation: If the oceans continue to grow hotter, many of those planted corals will die too. Last fall, I dived a handful of reefs in the Florida Keys where thousands of pieces of elkhorn and staghorn — iconic, reef-building corals — had been planted. Nearly all of them were bleached, dead, or dying. “When are [we] going to stop pretending that coral reefs can be restored when sea temperatures continue to rise and spike at lethal levels?” Terry Hughes, one of the world’s leading coral reef ecologists, wrote on X. Ultimately, the only real solution is reducing carbon emissions. Period. Pretty much every marine scientist I’ve talked to agrees. “Without international cooperation to break our dependence on fossil fuels, coral bleaching events are only going to continue to increase in severity and frequency,” Manzello said. Echoing his concern, Pörtner said: “We really have no choice but to stop climate change.” Jennifer Adler for Vox A collection of bleached “planted” staghorn coral on a reef in Florida in September 2023. But in the meantime, other stuff can help. Planting pieces of coral can work if those corals are more tolerant to threats like extreme heat or disease. To that end, researchers are trying to breed more heat-resistant individuals or identify those that are naturally more tolerant to stress — not only heat, but disease. Even after extreme bleaching events, many corals survive, according to Jason Spadaro, a restoration expert at Florida’s Mote Marine Laboratory. (“Massive” corals, which look a bit like boulders, had high rates of survival following recent bleaching in Florida, Spadaro said.) Scientists also see an urgent need to curb other, non-climate related threats, like water pollution and intensive fishing. “To give corals the best possible chance, we need to reduce every other stressor impacting reefs that we can control,” Manzello told Vox. These efforts alone will not save reefs, but they’ll buy time, experts say, helping corals hold on until emissions fall. If those interventions work — and if countries step up their climate commitments — future generations will still get to experience at least some version of these majestic, life-sustaining ecosystems. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via GettyReaching for an example of her unflinching preparedness to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it needs to be done, Kristi Noem landed on a chilling example: the time she killed her pet dog, Cricket, in an execution-style gravel pit slaying.The South Dakota governor, whose unbreakable devotion to Donald Trump has propelled her to somewhere near the top of his list of his potential 2024 running mates, reportedly included her disturbing tale of canicide in a book set to be published next month. “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” Noem writes, according to The Guardian, which obtained a copy.According to the newspaper, Noem recounts the story of how she not only killed Cricket—a female “wirehair pointer, about 14 months old”—but then also proceeded to botch the killing of an unnamed goat that she owned to which she had taken a disliking. Read more at The Daily Beast.

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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.