POPULISM IN INDIA AND THE CYBERNETIC ECOSYSTEM

Abstract

India has seen a series of populist governments in recent decades. Most recently, the state has had to deal with a serious economic and health crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, the country has been the target of a considerable increase in cybercrime. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to raise hypotheses about the possible relationship between populism and cybersecurity, based on a case study of India. After collecting data on the country's cyber situation from the Global Cybersecurity Index, official documents and statistics on the case, and characterizing Indian populism by identifying the state of the art in the literature, with a special focus on the period of the Modi government, a detailed analysis was carried out using information triangulation and the process tracing technique. We hypothesized that, despite the good cybersecurity index and the problems identified, the improvement in cybersecurity is undermined by the growth of populism in the nation, as the regulation of the cybernetic ecosystem would generate difficulties for populist politicians to keep themselves in office. Among the results, we identified that populist politicians can use vulnerabilities in the cyber ecosystem to discursively undermine democratic institutions and get elected. Nevertheless, we discuss paths for the research agenda to investigate the impact of populism on cybersecurity.