Democracy, interrupted

It’s no use protesting against western watchdogs’ assessment of India’s democratic backsliding when the evidence for it is so strong and visible

According to the ‘Democracy Report 2024’ of the Gothenburg-based V-Dem Institute, which tracks democratic freedoms worldwide, India is “one of the worst autocratisers.” We also remember that India was downgraded to the status of an “electoral autocracy” in 2018 itself. If that was not bad enough, India’s decline even further on multiple metrics to emerge as an even worse offender merits a reality check.

In a liberal democracy, as classified by the watchdog, truly free and fair elections take place regularly, a truly independent judiciary exists and mechanisms to put a leash on executive overreach are in place, besides which there are mechanisms to protect civil liberties and equality before law, while in an electoral autocracy, levels of basic requisites such as freedom of expression and free and fair elections are insufficient, though multi-party elections may exist.  

What is plainly obvious and comes to both national and international attention is the weaponisation of the central agencies such as the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate, and the selective use of the Income Tax department to attack the Opposition.

Asked whether the BJP welcomes even tainted political leaders, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman recently informed us that the party is open to everyone.

The BJP recently welcomed Gali Janardhan Reddy back into the party, despite his alleged involvement in the Rs 35,000-crore mining scam and multiple cases pending against him. Meanwhile, Hemant Soren and Arvind Kejriwal, the Chief Ministers of Jharkhand and Delhi, were arrested just as the national elections approached. What is of particular concern, is the diminution of the criminal justice system. 

It’s no one’s case that the corrupt must not be brought to book. But the very perception that a corrupt politician escapes the clutches of the central agencies the moment he joins the BJP lends credence to the Opposition’s ‘washing machine’ jibe. This has happened so often that it is difficult to consider the BJP as a crusader against corruption.

The political bias of both the investigative agencies and the prosecution system has been called into question. Imputations of the ruling party undermining the Supreme Court and overturning its considered judgements via fresh ordinances or legislation are also not unfounded. 

Early this year, an article in the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece Global Times said India’s domestic and foreign situation had changed compared to four years ago and that it had achieved outstanding results in economic development and social governance and was on track to becoming one of the fastest-growing major economies.

We owned up to this praise as warmly as we responded to the IMF certifying India as a global growth leader.

Meanwhile, the response to the findings of a new study from the World Inequality Lab that found that  the present-day golden era of Indian billionaires has produced soaring income inequality in India – now among the highest in the world and starker than in the US, Brazil, and South Africa -- was not so positive.

Our policymakers, ever eager to shed off the colonial vestiges, did not have a word to say on the observation that the gap between India’s rich and poor is now so wide that by some measures, the distribution of income is more inequitable now than under British colonial rule. Isn’t such stark inequality a manifestation of severely undemocratic governance?  

When the Washington-based think-tank Freedom House demoted India’s freedom score from “free” to “partly free” in 2021, saying that rights and civil liberties “have been eroding since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in 2014”, specifically referring to attacks on Muslims, use of the sedition law against critics and dissenters, and the government’s coronavirus response, including the sudden lockdown, the ruling establishment felt irked and took serious objection to it.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar slammed them: “because you have a set of self-appointed custodians of the world, who find it very difficult to stomach that somebody in India is not looking for their approval, is not willing to play the game they want to be played...so they invent their rules, their parameters, they pass their judgements and then make out as though this is some kind of global exercise.”

India, described as a “flawed democracy”, slipped two places to 53rd position in the latest Democracy Index, published by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in 2021. The increased pressure on human rights groups, intimidation of journalists and activists, and a spate of attacks, especially against Muslims has led, according to the EIU, to a deterioration of political and civil liberties in the country. 

Why do the rankings routinely blame our PM and the BJP government for our democracy ‘backsliding’? Why do so many western think-tanks so uncannily concur in their assessment of the state of Indian democracy? Should we rule them out as moral posturing? If we’re questioning the wisdom of the ‘self-appointed custodians of the world’, let’s take the instance of the EIU, which is known to provide country, industry, and risk analyses based on the research and insights of a worldwide network of economic, political, and business experts which are rigorously tested and peer-reviewed. 

The anomalous nature of our responses to international assessments is interesting, varying between lapping up all praise and imputing bias and unfairness to all criticism. It just does not wash because the list of transgressions on the part of the government -- from blatant suppression of dissent to the utilisation of investigative agencies against political opponents to the introduction of deliberately opaque political funding instruments have been made not through “a dramatic coup or midnight arrests of Opposition leaders”, but instead, as observed by Maya Tudor, “through the fully legal harassment of the Opposition, intimidation of media, and centralisation of executive power”. 

Jaishankar’s strong reaction to a rather tame observation made by the US and Germany on the arrest of Kejriwal, calling for fair, transparent, timely legal processes, and to the invocation of the UN calling for protection of citizens’ rights, one suspects, stems from the minister’s shrewd understanding that India has already lost the perception war on the issue of democracy, notwithstanding the PM’s bid to arrogate the halo of ‘mother of democracy’.  

Democracy is a method of preventing those who govern from permanently appropriating power for their own ends. A true democrat must never try to subvert the method by fair means or foul. 

(The writer is a Kolkata-based commentator on geopolitics, development, and culture)