India has long presented itself to the world as the largest democracy, a secular republic, a rising power and a dependable partner. The evidence of 2025-26 suggests a widening gap between that self-portrait and the reality.
Democratic institutions are under strain at home, criminal networks and visa abuse are damaging India’s reputation abroad, and a transactional foreign policy is eroding trust among partners.
These are not three separate stories. They share one logic: image management over accountability, majoritarian power over institutional restraint, and short-term interest over principle.
The clearest signals come from the people who measure democracy for a living. V-Dem ranks India 106th on its Electoral Democracy Index, with a score of 0.38, the lowest since the Emergency of 1975, and classifies it as an electoral autocracy.
Freedom House gives India a historic low of 62 out of 100. The Indian government disputes such rankings, but the trend they describe is hard to wave away, and Indian scholars themselves are asking how long a political model built on Hindu-nationalist identity can sustain national cohesion.
Electoral integrity is the sharpest flashpoint. The Special Intensive Revision of voter rolls removed an estimated 13.3-13.4 crore names, with more than 71 percent marked “absent or shifted.”
Opposition parties in the INDIA bloc and a youth-led movement, the Cockroach Janta Party, took to the streets. The response was heavy policing and the detention of political rivals. Whatever the administrative justification, a purge of that scale, followed by crackdowns on those who question it, damages confidence in the ballot itself.
The protests are not confined to one issue. ACLED logged 20,606 demonstrations in India in 2025 and 18,074 through September 2026, about 17.5 percent of the global total. Behind the numbers are grievances over representation, jobs, equality and civil liberties.
Youth unemployment reached 16.2 percent in mid-2026, and the economic anger is compounded by a perception that the rules favour a few giant conglomerates.
When Elon Musk, during the Starlink regulatory standoff, jokingly asked whether Mukesh Ambani was the “real boss” and spoke of “Prime Minister Ambani,” he was voicing in public what many Indian critics say in private: that state protectionism shields a handful of billionaires at the expense of competition and ordinary citizens.
Minorities bear the heaviest burden. Critics point to the Citizenship Amendment Act, to “bulldozer justice” that demolishes Muslim homes and sites, and to a surge in hate speech: 1,318 anti-minority events recorded in 2025, 98 percent of them targeting Muslims.
In Manipur, ethnic violence has left between 260 and 306 dead, tens of thousands still displaced and more than 360 churches destroyed. In Kashmir, the unilateral revocation of Article 370 brought a military lockdown, a communications blackout and the silencing of local voices. Taken together, these developments lead many observers to conclude that constitutional secularism is being hollowed out in practice.
India’s image is shaped not only by what happens at home but by what happens in the countries where Indians live and work. It is essential to be precise here. The overwhelming majority of the Indian diaspora is law-abiding, hardworking and valued by host societies. The problem lies with specific criminal networks and with abuse of the visa system, and with the backlash these provoke against honest migrants.
The pattern in transnational crime is hard to ignore. In 2025, Canada designated the Bishnoi gang, linked to murders, extortion and drug trafficking, as a terrorist entity. In 2026, the US “Operation Hard Ball” produced 24 arrests and charges against 37 defendants in a network accused of terrorising Indian communities abroad.
The common thread is that syndicates directed from Indian jails reach into diaspora networks overseas.
Other indicators are troubling as well. In the UK, convictions of Indian nationals for sexual offences reportedly rose 257 percent between 2021 and 2024, from 28 cases to 100, the steepest increase among foreign groups. In the visa system,
Indians receive roughly 70-73 percent of H-1B approvals each year, and investigators have reported more than 100,000 fake degrees traced to 28 Indian universities. A former US consular officer has alleged fraud rates of 80-90 percent in earlier applications from hubs such as Hyderabad.
The human cost of this falls on ordinary migrants. Anti-South Asian hate posts on X have reportedly risen 240 percent since 2024, fueled by claims of job displacement and cultural imposition.
Allegations of election interference in Canada add to the resentment. The link to the domestic story is direct: weak accountability and scarce opportunity at home feed both the pressure to emigrate and the incentives for fraud, and the reputational damage lands on everyone.
India calls its approach multi-alignment. Its critics call it opportunism. The data shows why the second word gains traction. India kept buying vast volumes of Russian oil through the Ukraine war and into 2025-26, with peaks above 2.6-2.8 million barrels per day in mid-2026 before volumes fell to 1.1-1.7 million amid shifting prices and pressure.
It repeatedly abstained from UN resolutions about Ukraine. With Iran, large-scale oil imports were dialled back under sanctions pressure, yet strategic options were kept open. SIPRI data for 2021-25 confirm India as the world’s second-largest arms importer, at 8.2-8.3 percent of the global share, with Russia supplying around 40 percent, France 29 percent and Israel 15 percent.
In the Middle East, India has deepened defence and intelligence ties with Israel even as Gaza’s death toll has passed 74,000. At the same time, millions of Indian workers sustain Gulf labour markets and send home tens of billions of dollars in remittances each year. India wants the benefits of every relationship while accepting the obligations of none.
The more serious charge concerns intelligence activity on allied soil. Canada’s CSIS 2025 annual report lists India among the main perpetrators of foreign interference and transnational repression.
The United States prosecuted an alleged Indian-linked plot against Gurpatwant Singh Pannun. Australia expelled several RAW operatives accused of targeting defence technology, politicians and the diaspora.
Germany convicted Indian nationals of spying on Sikh and Kashmiri communities. In Qatar, eight former Indian Navy officers were arrested on espionage charges in 2022; most were released by 2024 after death sentences were commuted, though one reportedly remained detained into 2026.
The contradiction is stark. India lectures the West on democratic values while facing documented criticism on IIOJK, minorities and free speech, and while its alleged agents operate in the capitals of its partners.
Placed side by side, these stories reinforce each other. Domestic illiberalism weakens the moral authority India claims abroad. Incidents abroad draw attention back to what is happening at home. And partners are increasingly separating India’s economic opportunity from political trust: they will trade with it, sell it weapons and court its market, while quietly doubting its reliability.
Does this mean Modi’s downfall has begun? India’s government and supporters will point to high voter turnout, an assertive judiciary and press, a diaspora that contributes enormously to host economies, and a long tradition of strategic autonomy. But the cost of maintaining the facade is rising.
Every ranking downgrade, every overseas indictment and every expelled diplomat widens the gap between brand and reality. For South Asia, the stakes are high: a fractured, nationalist India is a source of regional instability, and its neighbors and partners will have to decide how much trust to extend.
