Institutions with a proven and long record of assessing the health of democracies, V-Dem and Freedom House, earlier have drawn India’s democratic backslide into sharp focus. Freedom House has classified India as only ‘partly free’, and V-Dem has called it an ‘Electoral Autocracy’ not using either democracy or freedom in the descriptor. But that is not all.
A report last week by Sweden’s International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or International IDEA, has shone a light on more specific issues that have worrisome implications. The institute is an inter-governmental think tank that has India as one of its founding members. It finds overall that “70 per cent of the global population now live either in non-democratic regimes or in democratically backsliding countries”. The report cites Brazil, India and the United States as the biggest backsliders globally.
India is only second to Cambodia in the region as the country with the maximum erosion of democracy in the past five years.
What makes this report worth one’s attention is that it compares countries according to their own experiences, too, not wishing to only rank them versus each other. It has points made about India that should serve as a wake-up call to all those interested in India’s democracy.