evidence: India has long been described as "the world’s largest democracy," although in recent years, it has experienced significant backsliding: Freedom House, the V-Dem Institute, and the Economist Intelligence Unit have all downgraded India in their rankings, most acutely since 2019, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi began his second term. Successive Indian governments have weakened human rights, but the process has accelerated under Modi, who has held office since 2014 and limped back last month after an election that saw him lose his governing majority. [...] From early on, Modi saw India’s growing youth population as moldable. Fewer than 10 percent of today’s Indians were born before Nehru—who laid India’s foundational principles of socialism, secularism, and nonalignment—died in 1964. And under Modi, the government has destroyed physical edifices of the Nehru era, undermined norms that governed institutions, and appropriated past achievements as its own. [...] Under Modi, India has detained thousands of government critics, many of whom have yet to face trial. Given that many are arrested under anti-terrorism laws, courts have given the government considerable leeway. Investigative authorities take inordinately long to put together charges. The process is the punishment; according to a report by the Delhi-based People’s Union of Civil Liberties, almost all of those accused have been released or granted bail by the court, but often not until years after they were arrested. Such victims have no remedy; they can’t sue the state. This chills dissent.