Deborah J. Yashar

The Content of Democracy: Nationalist Parties and Inclusive Ideologies in India and Indonesia

India and Indonesia are the two largest and unlikeliest democracies in the postcolonial world. Southern Asia’s two greatest demographic behemoths have both long been riddled with almost every imaginable hypothesized malady for democratic development, such as severe poverty and inequality, extreme ethnic heterogeneity, violent separatist movements, and putatively “undemocratic” dominant religions. Despite these shared handicaps, India has remained a democracy nearly without interruption since independence, while Indonesia has surprisingly emerged as the steadiest and least endangered democracy in Southeast Asia over the last fifteen years. In the familiar parlance of democratic consolidation, democracy in both India and Indonesia today appears to have become “the only game in town.” What lessons might we learn from this surprising commonality in contemporary democratic robustness against similarly long odds? Despite the obvious importance of these two cases for world democratization, political scientists are yet to inquire whether India’s and Indonesia’s parallel outperformance of democratic expectations might have broader implications for democratization theory. The primary argument developed herein is that India and Indonesia possess a shared but heretofore unrecognized historical source of democratic strength: the inclusive ideology of their founding political parties. As leaders of incipient nationalist movements, India’s Congress Party and Indonesia’s Nationalist Party (PNI) responded to the historically specific imperatives of colonial rule by mobilizing active and direct support across