V-Dem a Swedish Institute that measures democracy in all countries that have democratically elected governments recently said, “India Is No Longer a Democracy but an Electoral Autocracy.” The V Dem Institute’s report notes that much of the decline in democratic freedoms occurred after the BJP and Narendra Modi’s victory in 2014. This is a worrying observation for a country that has long been hailed as the world’s largest democracy. Other than the 21-month period from 1975 to 1977 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi promulgated Emergency to keep her detractors at bay, India has held firm to the ideals of democracy as is proven by the orderly electoral processes to Parliament, state assemblies and all other representational bodies. If the domination of a dynasty for many decades raised question marks on India’s democratic system, that too is now defeated at least temporarily.
Yet, today there is a sense of oppressiveness felt by those in the media, by activists and civil society. Anti-CAA activists and those taking the side of the farmers’ protest have been jailed. Many are under arrests on charges of sedition. In this context, the scrutiny of India’s credentials by V-Dem merits a wide discussion in this country.
V-Dem Institute reports that India has registered a 23 percentage point drop on its 0-to-1 Liberal Democracy Index (LDI) scale; which is cited as “one of the most dramatic shifts among all countries the world in the past 10 years. Its observation formed part of a global scan on the state of democracy. It states that India has, during this period, turned into an electoral autocracy – a far cry from being an electoral democracy.
Since 2014 India has been under the BJP Government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. If the V-Dem assessment is admitted as a fact, it would mean that the PM must shoulder the blame. The Modi government has been tough on many counts, refusing to give ear to activists, as in the farmer protests lasting for months now, after the Centre introduced three new agriculture reform laws. It was with the same toughness that the Modi government handled the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and allied laws, resulting in massive riots in the national capital, Delhi. The present government and its supporters feel that in India freedom is taken as license to disrupt governance thereby preventing the government from undertaking any reforms measures that are in public interest.
However, criticism about the state of Indian democracy must be taken in the right spirit, and governments must restrain themselves from imposing more curbs on individual freedom as also on group activism for justified causes. National interests must be kept in mind by both governments and activists.