This panel aims to explore the process of “autocratization” within the broader framework of decolonisation. It uses securitisation theory to critically examine the intersectionality of identity, religion, ethnicity, gender and caste in shaping and sustaining the democracy in India. Departing from the Western liberal democratic models grounded in Western secular ideas and individual rights, Indian democracy embodies a paradigm where identity, rather than mere individual autonomy, anchors civic participation. This echoes a decolonial perspective as an alternate to existing Eurocentric conceptualisation. By provincialising Eurocentric concepts of identity, citizenship and security, the panel seeks to highlight how securitising religious and caste identities, rather than erasing and neutralising them, enables indigenous democratic resilience, thereby making collective identity significant to political legitimacy and social cohesion.
Through the decolonial lens, this panel proposes to underscore how the securitisation of caste, religion and other facets of identity in India offers a unique form of autocratization that differs from Western democratic systems that focus on individualism and individual rationality instead of pluralistic, relativistic and community-driven frameworks of civic engagement. India’s model exemplifies an adaptive democratic framework where diversity is securitised as an asset, countering the homogenising tendencies often implicit in Western liberal democratic practices. By rethinking security and citizenship in non-Western contexts, this panel seeks to advance the decolonial discourse: how Indian democracy resists the reductionist principles of the Western world and instead emerges as a resilient, context-specific model that redefines and reworks democracy as a dynamic interplay of identities grounded in historical and cultural particularities in Indian sub-continent.