The latest (2017) PEW survey gives weight to the thesis that Indians (mostly educated but not exclusively) tend to be very authoritarian. No other nation with comparable economic indicators comes close to Indian support for autocracy and technocracy.
With 65% support of “rule by experts” 55% for Strong Leader and no less than 53% for military rule, Indian elites should be proud of their education system which has inculcated such tendencies: meritocracy, competition, context-less thinking. This plus the patriarchal family relations and modern caste structures, I believe, are the most important factors that make India any commissar’s wet dream.
85% of Indians believe that the institution of government by its nature, more or less, always works in favor of its citizens – a view in exact opposition to the views of individuals who formulated the theories and institutions of modern representative democracies. Indians are well trained and “conditioned” to lust for political authority. The apparent complete lack of enlightenment values leads people like Chomsky to call, I believe correctly, the Indian mindset feudalistic. Any anti-authoritarian movement in India first needs to challenge this mind set and relationship and institutions that maintain it and form libertarian alternatives.