Maya Tudor is associate professor of politics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan (2013)and Varieties of Nationalism: Communities, Narratives, Identities (with Harris Mylonas, 2023).
Under Narendra Modi, India is maintaining the trappings of democracy while it increasingly harasses the opposition, attacks minorities, and stifles dissent. It can still reverse course, but the damage is mounting.
Long prone to coups, Pakistan now for the first time has seen a freely elected government duly serve out its full term and peacefully hand the reins of power to another.
