India :
One of the worst autocratizers
Democracy is sliding

Recently,the ‘Democracy Report 2024’ released by the Gothenburg-based V-Dem Institute that tracks democratic freedoms worldwide.

The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem report ) categorises countries into four regime types based on their score in the Liberal Democratic Index (LDI): Liberal Democracy, Electoral Democracy, Electoral Autocracy, and Closed Autocracy. Their annual report, which maps each country on a matrix of whether they are turning more democratic (‘democratising’) or more autocratic (‘autocratising’), stated that in 2023, 42 countries (home to 35% of the world’s population) were undergoing autocratisation.

The report observes that a “
“India, with 18% of the world’s population, accounts for about half of the population living in autocratising countries,”Democratisation was taking place only in 18 countries, accounting for just 400 million people, or 5% of the world’s population.it
notes that India is no longer termed a democracy, but “dropped down to electoral autocracy in 2018” and remains there at the end of 2023.

According to the report, 71% of the world’s population – 5.7 billion people – live in autocracies, an increase from 48% ten years ago. The level of democracy enjoyed by the “average person in the world is down to 1985-levels”, the report said, with the sharpest decline occurring in Eastern Europe, and South and Central Asia.

India, which was downgraded to the status of an “electoral autocracy” in 2018, has declined even further on multiple metrics to emerge as “one of the worst autocratizers”,
India is also a flawed democracy according to Global Democracy Index prepared by the Economist Intelligence Unit, India is placed abysmally at 161 out of 180 countries in World Press Index.

Other rankings have also raised concerns. In 2021, the US-based not-for-profit Freedom House downgraded India’s status from a free democracy to a “partially free democracy”.

The Indian government has been secretly working to keep its reputation as the “world’s largest democracy” alive after being called out by researchers for serious democratic backsliding under the nationalist rule of Narendra Modi, according to internal reports seen by the Guardian.

Despite publicly dismissing several global rankings that suggest the country is on a dangerous downward trajectory, officials from government ministries have been quietly assigned to monitor India’s performance, minutes from meetings show.

Since 2015, the Economic Intelligence Unit has noted that India has experienced a deterioration in democratic norms.

In its 2020 report, the organisation wrote: “In India, democratic norms have been under pressure since 2015. India’s score fell from a peak of 7.92 in 2014 to 6.61 in 2020 and its global ranking slipped from 27th to 53rd as a result of democratic backsliding under the leadership of Narendra Modi …

“The increasing influence of religion under the Modi premiership, whose policies have fomented anti-Muslim feeling and religious strife, has damaged the political fabric of the country.”