Rights bodies downgrading India to 'partly-free' are 'hypocrites', says S Jaishankar

'We have a set of self-appointed custodians of the world,' the external affairs minister said in an attack on the think tanks

After US-based human rights think tank Freedom House deemed India to be 'partly-free' a step down from the earlier 'free' status, Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar slammed the report, calling it "hypocrisy" by a group of "self-appointed custodians of the world".

Also Read | US index downgrades India from 'free' to 'partly free'

"We 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 play. So they invent their rules, their parameters, pass their judgments and make it look as if it is some kind of global exercise," he said at the India Today conclave.

“India’s status declined from Free to Partly Free due to a multi-year pattern in which the Hindu nationalist government and its allies have presided over rising violence and discriminatory policies affecting the Muslim population and pursued a crackdown on expressions of dissent by the media, academics, civil society groups, and protesters,” the Freedom House stated in the latest report.

In his sharp response to the report on terming the BJP a "Hindu nationalist party," Jaishankar told India Today, "We are the nationalist guys. We have given vaccines to 70 countries in the world. Tell me, how many vaccines have the internationalist countries given? Which one of these countries have said that while I do (vaccinate) my own people, I will do (inoculate) other people who need it as much as we do. Where are these people?”

Also Read | Upholding Free Speech | The need to speak up

In response to the accusation of the Central government "shrinking civil liberties" he said that the reality is different, "Whatever you may say, nobody questions an election in this country. Can you say that in those countries?" he added in what seemed like a veiled attack on the hullabaloo around the 2020 US Presidential election where former president Donald Trump claimed election fraud was committed to win the polls.

India scored 67 out of 100 in the latest report, “Freedom in the World 2021”, published by the organisation – four points lesser than its performance last year. It secured 34 marks out of 40 in terms of “political rights” and 33 out of 60 in “civil liberties”.

Days after the Freedom House report, independent research institute based at University of Gothenburg in Sweden branded India as an “electoral autocracy” in its latest Democracy Report 2021.

Also Read | India downgraded to 'electoral autocracy', says Swedish institute

It stated that India, which was the largest democracy in the world, turned into an “electoral autocracy”. “A major change is that India — formerly the world’s largest democracy with 1.37 billion inhabitants — turned into an electoral autocracy,” it stated, adding, “With this, electoral and closed autocracies are home to 68 per cent of the world’s population.”

It claimed that India’s decline on the Liberal Democracy Index started after Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged victorious in the 2014 parliamentary elections.

“The Indian government rarely, if ever, used to exercise censorship as evidenced by its score of 3.5 out of 4 before Modi became Prime Minister. By 2020, this score is close to 1.5 meaning that censorship efforts are becoming routine and no longer even restricted to sensitive (to the government) issues,” the V-Dem (or Varieties of Democracy) Institute noted.