 Since the election of Prime Minister Modi in 2014, India's ranking in the Democracy Index has steadily fallen. It is now considered a flawed democracy by institutions such as Freedom House and the Economic Intelligence Unit that compile and analyze data on the health of democracies around the world. The Swedish-based varieties of democracy project goes even further and calls the country an electoral autocracy. In the aftermath of World War II, there was a seismic shift in geopolitics. Colonialism was in retreat and a new world order emerged around two diametrically opposed ideological spheres. India became independent in 1947, just as the Cold War between the two sides was heating up. India chose democracy, basing its institutions and its constitution on that of the US and the UK. The Indian constitution guarantees equality to its citizens, including freedom of expression, religion, and the right to do process. Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, was an avowed secularist and made sure India followed progressive social policies that promoted women's rights and embraced its ethnic and religious diversity. But under the Modi government, minorities have been severely threatened. Hindu vigilantes have harassed and persecuted Muslims with impunity, while the Modi government has looked the other way. Prime Minister Modi, who took office in 2014, belongs to the RSS. This is the extreme right wing of the ruling nationalist BJP party, and their stated goal is to make India a Hindu nation. In the process, they have marginalized the Muslim community, which is 15% of the population. Now these translate into very large numbers. There are close to 200 million Muslims in India. This is as much as the combined population of France, Germany, and the UK. But the BJP has not one single Muslim member in parliament. When Prime Minister Modi was governor of the state of Gujarat, a riot broke out in 2002 that led to a massacre of Muslims in his state. Human Rights Watch was among the many NGOs and activists that blame the Modi government as being complicit. Modi was even denied a visa to the US for many years until he became Prime Minister. In 2019, Modi stripped Kashmir India's only Muslim majority state of its special constitutional status. Recently, the government introduced new rules to compel social media platforms to remove undesirable content. A media investigation also found that Pegasus spyware had been detected on smartphones belonging to journalists, activists and members of the opposition. But this is not the first time that India has slid off the democracy scale. Prime Minister Indra Gandhi, the daughter of Nehru, suspended democracy in 1975 for 18 months and declared an emergency. She arrested her critics and protesters, but her animus was directed towards her political opponents and had no ethnic dimension to it. When she held elections in 1977, the people spoke. She was removed from office by a landslide. In the 70s, India was just an afterthought in the US's strategic calculation. It was only during the very early period of the Cold War when India was viewed as a frontline state against communist aggression and expansion by the Soviets and China that the US paid some attention to the world's largest democracy. The rise of an increasingly aggressive China now, whose willingness to challenge US hegemony around the world, combined with India's emergence as an economic power in the last decade, has now made India a very desirable ally for the US, particularly in their efforts to contain China. Military cooperation between the US and India is at an all time high, but complicating the relationship going forward is the increasing distance between the political values of the two countries. The Biden administration sees the rise of autocracy as a threat to its belief that democracy is a better system of government. And Modi's disregard for human rights and increasingly autocratic tilt may create tensions going forward. We have already seen that India has been impervious to the Biden administration's efforts to have India sanction Russia's aggression in Ukraine. India, confident that it's used to the US outweighs any moral hesitations the US may have so far has resisted US pressure. 30% of India's population is under 30. They barely remember the high minded ideals of commitments to a multicultural state, governed by the rule of law that Nehru Mahatma Gandhi and many of India's founders fought so hard for.