India downgraded to 'electoral autocracy', says Swedish institute

India registered a 23 per cent drop on its Liberal Democracy Index, marking “one of the most dramatic shifts among all countries in the world over the past 10 years"

An independent research institute based at University of Gothenburg in Sweden has branded India as an “electoral autocracy” in its latest Democracy Report 2021 – just days after the “Freedom House” of the United States downgraded it from a “Free Country” to a “Partly Free Country”.

The V-Dem Institute stated in its annual report 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.”

The institute, which was founded by Professor Staffan I Lindberg in 2014, noted that liberal democracies diminished from 41 countries in 2010 to 32 in 2020, with a population share of only 14 per cent. The electoral democracies account for 60 nations and the remaining 19 per cent of the population, it added.

India’s level of liberal democracy registered at 0.34 by the end of 2020 after a steep decline from its high of 0.57 in 2013. It represented a 23-percentage point drop on the 0 to 1 Liberal Democracy Index scale, making it one of the most dramatic shifts in the world over the past 10 years, alongside autocratizing countries like Brazil, Hungary, and Turkey, the V-Dem Institute reported.

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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. India is, in this aspect, now as autocratic as is Pakistan, and worse than both its neighbours Bangladesh and Nepal.

In general, according to the report, the Modi-led government in India has used laws on sedition, defamation, and counterterrorism to silence critics. It cited the example of over 7,000 people being charged with sedition after the BJP assumed power. It noted that most of the accused were critics of the ruling party.

The Freedom House, which is based in the US, recently gave 67 points out of 100 in its latest report, “Freedom in the World 2021”, — four points lesser than its performance last year. It scored 34 marks out of 40 in terms of “political rights” and 33 out of 60 in “civil liberties”. The country scored 51 out of 100 in a separate assessment of the extent of internet freedom.

Read full report here.