Explained : India’s Second Republic – The Wire and Its Impact

As a concept and an institutional form of state, the republic embodies two principles: popular sovereignty, and a political community of equal citizens.

The republican doctrine, which owes its modern genesis to the French Revolution, was initially not framed explicitly as national sovereignty and a nation-state of equal citizens. But during the nineteenth century in Europe, the doctrine became nationalised. Popular sovereignty came to mean national sovereignty, and equal citizenship that of a nation-state. This is the form in which the idea of the republic was transferred to Asia and Africa, India included, after decolonisation in the twentieth century. Today, roughly three-fourths of the world’s countries are republics.

Because of India’s specific experience as an independent nation, our understanding of a republic often conflates it with a democratic system of government. But there is no intrinsic link between republicanism and democracy. For example, the Republic of Turkey, proclaimed in 1923, established an explicitly authoritarian form of government based on a single party and a strongman leader (Mustafa Kemal Ataturk). Republics can and do come in many authoritarian variants, whether overt or slightly camouflaged for the sake of appearances.

Many Indians also tend – or at least tended – to presume an intrinsic link between republicanism and secularism. That too is not necessarily the case. The Turkish republic, in its early phase, had a secularising agenda. In 1926, the Kemalist republic enacted a secular civil code derived from Switzerland’s 1912 code, and dispensed with both Sharia law and the 19^th-century Ottoman mecelle code. In 1928, the Kemalists deleted Article 2 of the republic’s 1924 constitution, which had stated that ‘the religion of the Turkish state is Islam.’ On the other hand, the Islamic Republic of Iran declared in 1979 established a theocratic form of government based on the doctrine of vilayat-i-faqih or the guardianship of the jurist, a role personified by the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini until his death in 1989. The Iranian Revolution replaced the Pahlavi monarchy with a clerical dictatorship.

Thus, the modern republic need not be democratic and/or secular. It is compatible with authoritarian and even totalitarian regimes of power, strongman authority, and interpretations of the nation’s essence drawn from theology, ancient and medieval history, and formulations of collective identity derived from religion, especially that of the majority.

The character of a republic is also susceptible to change over time. France has had no fewer than five republics in just two centuries. The first, revolutionary republic declared in 1792 was abolished by Napoleon in 1804. Catholicism, the religion of the large majority, banished from the public sphere by the fiercely anti-clerical revolutionaries, was reinstated as the state religion. The Catholic Church and its allied conservative forces dominated for the next one hundred years; the second republic was short-lived (1848-1852).

The scales turned midway through the third republic (1870-1940) when, in 1905, both chambers of parliament passed a law by majority vote that stipulated the separation of church and state. The third republic and its successor, the fourth republic (1946-1958) followed the parliamentary form of government. But the fifth and present republic, born in 1958 when Charles de Gaulle again took the helm amid a political crisis mainly precipitated by the Algerian War, did away with parliamentary supremacy and established a strong executive presidency.

Seventy-six years after the proclamation of the Republic of India, our country is unmistakably in a rapid transition to a de facto second republic. This republic, under purposeful construction since 2014, is based on a conception of political community – the nation – derived from pseudo-religious majoritarianism, and the effective denial of the principle of equal citizenship, particularly to Muslims. The construction of the Hindu nationalist republic has reached an advanced stage, and most of northern and western India can already be regarded as sovereign ‘Hindu Rashtra’ territory. We are in the throes of a transition marked by a leader cult and the growing concentration of power over 1.4 billion people in the hands of two strongmen from Gujarat. Our parliamentary democracy is at risk of being reduced to a hollowed-out shell, stripped of substance and reduced to trappings. The looming second republic poses an existential threat to the bases of a democratic polity and a civilised society.

What, if anything, can be done? It is difficult to be optimistic. Recent experience tells us that it would be naïve to hope that judicial interventions will contain and thwart the autocratic executive. The Supreme Court has at times tried to be a brake on the machinations of the strongman duo, but has at other times been grossly complicit – such as in the Ayodhya judgment of November 2019 or in upholding the Jammu & Kashmir Reorganisation Act in December 2023. The national legislature – the two chambers of Parliament – has also proved unable to check the Hindutva juggernaut, even after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost its Lok Sabha majority in mid-2024. In the Rajya Sabha, the BJP’s numbers are set to rise further in 2026.

Invoking the 1950 constitution and its defence against the Hindutva onslaught is a rhetorical device, not a political counter-strategy. The romanticisation – indeed fetishisation – of the constitution by some also obscures the hard truth that it is a most imperfect document, disturbingly alike the Government of India Act of 1935 and rife with tools and levers that abet the exercise of centralised and authoritarian power. This is what Sarat Chandra Bose warned his countrymen about in a forensic critique of the constitution published in the Indian Law Review in January 1950.

Then there’s the legal apparatus of coercion and repression built into the republic: the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), enacted in 1958, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), enacted in 1967, and the sedition law which was Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) from 1870 to 2023 and since 2024 is Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS). This constitutional and legal arsenal has been and is being thoroughly exploited by the architects of India’s second republic.

Saving what remains of our democratic republic requires an effective political opposition committed to an ideological charter. Instead, the disparate, fragmented, rudderless and leaderless opposition consists mostly of decadent and even degenerate parties run like family firms. Still, it is apposite to end by stressing that India desperately needs nationalist politics that categorically rejects and unequivocally opposes the Hindutva framing of the Indian nation and its identity – not weak, copycat imitations of Hindutva. Since such an ideological alternative is unlikely, the second republic may become an accomplished fact much before the first republic’s centenary.

Sumantra Bose is Professor of International and Comparative Politics at Krea University and the author of The Modi Era: India and the Story of a Democracy in Eclipse (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2026).     

This article went live on January twenty-fifth, two thousand twenty six, at zero minutes past two in the afternoon.

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.