The escalating farmers’ protests in India have received international attention and shone a spotlight on the country’s commitment to its democratic roots. These misgivings have been further solidified by the annual Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Democracy Index report, titled “Democracy in Sickness and in Health?”, which reports a further decline in India’s ranking and on parameters such as democratic political culture and civil liberties. The details of the report stand in opposition to how India has positioned itself as “like-minded” to Western democracies by highlighting its shared commitment to democratic values and the rule of law to collaborate on several foreign policy issues, like China’s growing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific. In light of India’s widening global influence, the EIU rankings cannot be dismissed out of hand and must instead be used as a toolkit to recalibrate New Delhi’s path towards becoming a regional and international powerhouse. If India truly sees collaborating with other democratic heavyweights as a crucial step in expanding its diplomatic, strategic, and economic capital, it must be cautious of abandoning the very principles that it applauds itself for.
To determine a country’s ranking, the EIU relies on four factors: electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. These five overarching parameters are made up of a total of 60 sub-factors, such as public confidence in government, women in parliament, adult literacy, religious tolerance, and freedom of the press. Each of these four factors is then given scores out of ten, and the average of these scores determines the overall score, which then dictates the country’s ranking.
The EIU ranking is particularly important as it is published by The Economist, a highly reputed magazine that is read by policymakers and investors from across the world. Moreover, the EIU, the research and analysis unit of The Economist, consults with several stakeholders, including businesses, financial firms, and governments to determine its scoring, making it one of the most extensively researched democracy rankings. Furthermore, the ranking is also determined in consultancy with The Economic Corporate Network, which has experts from several regions across the globe, including the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific.
In the EIU’s 2020 report, India’s ranking has fallen from 51st in 2019 to 53, with its score dropping from 6.9 to 6.61. The EIU held the Narendra Modi-led government responsible for the country’s “democratic backsliding”, particularly because the country’s average score has dropped from 7.92 since the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) came into power in 2014. Over the years, the report has largely been ignored by the Indian government. Nevertheless, it is crucial to understand what events in 2020 resulted in this drastic deterioration.
Despite its overall drop in performance, its scores for two factors—electoral process and pluralism, and political participation—have remained unchanged from 2019. Despite numerous logistical and political challenges, such as inaccessibility to remote regions, high levels of illiteracy, and social and economic disparities, India continues to successfully conduct large-scale national and state elections with a rising voter turnout, even touching the most remote regions of the country. Moreover, with over eight national parties and 52 state parties having a wide range of political and social ideologies, India also has a highly pluralistic political system.
Meanwhile, the functioning of the government has in fact seen a significant improvement, with the score on this parameter going up from 6.79 in 2019 to 7.14 in 2020. The ruling government’s high popularity, due in large part to India’s huge middle-class community and the Hindu religious majority, has contributed to this rise, thereby resulting in an increase in public confidence in the populist government. The EIU’s findings are corroborated by a 2017 Pew research study, which found that 85% of Indians ‘trust’ their government. At the same time, the Modi-led administration continues to be considerably uninfluenced by its military, foreign powers, and other international institutions, all of which contribute to an improvement in this score.
However, despite these relative successes, the Indian government’s performance in democratic political culture and civil liberties has resulted in an overall drop in its ranking. While the democratic political culture, which is assessed by the population’s continued belief in the democratic system and process, saw a marginal drop from 5.63 in 2019 to 5.00 in 2020, civil liberties took a massive hit in 2020, with India’s score dropping from 6.76 to 5.59.
This “backsliding” has been informed by several troubling incidents over the past year. One of the reasons cited in the 2020 report is the “increasing influence of religion under the Modi premiership,” which has impacted the government’s performance on religious tolerance. To reach this conclusion, the report has cited two incidents.
The first was the passage of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) in December 2018 that spurred widespread protests across the country. The law included religion as a factor to determine citizenship in India, thereby weakening its commitment to secularism. Furthermore, in combination with the National Register of Citizens that was introduced in Assam, it also resulted in 1.9 million individuals being stripped of their citizenship.
The second incident that was cited in the report was that of the inauguration of the Ram mandir, with Indian premier Narendra Modi setting the foundation stone for the construction of the temple on August 5, 2020. Modi’s move was perceived as a clear affiliation of the country’s head of state with a particular religion. Additionally, the temple is being built on the site of the Babri masjid, which was destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992. Hence, Narendra Modi’s participation in the event can be seen as indicative of the government’s validation of one of the most disturbing episodes in India’s history.
Another factor that impacted the Indian government’s EIU performance was its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the EIU placing significant importance on countries’ continued commitment to democratic principles through the pandemic. While India has been applauded for its ability to enforce large-scale lockdowns and initially control the spread of the virus, the report suggests that the lockdown policies resulted in a “further erosion of civil liberties”, and rightly so. The COVID-19 lockdown was imposed with a more punitive tone, wherein defaulters of the rules on restrictions on movement faced abuse and violence at the hands of authorities. For example, several migrant workers who were left stranded in cities and compelled to walk thousands of kilometres to return to their homes were apprehended and even beaten by the police. Furthermore, in June, there was also an incident wherein a father and son were killed in police custody after being arrested for violating the lockdown protocol. Moreover, the lockdown’s opaqueness, along with the failure of the centre to consult with state governments and authorities, also contributed to the policy’s detrimental impact on civil liberties.
There are several issues that were not mentioned in the report but are likely additional factors that resulted in the drastic drop in India’s performance in the EIU report. One such major contributor to the erosion of basic freedoms in India is the government’s use of Internet shutdowns, which it justifies under the garb of protecting public safety. With over 83 such curbs in 2020 alone, India once again topped the list of the number of Internet shutdowns by a democratic country. Further, 2020 also saw India’s most prolonged shutdown of the Internet, with the state of Kashmir being deprived of Internet facilities for 213 days. Not only is access to the Internet a factor relied on by the EIU to determine a country’s commitment to civil liberties, but such shutdowns also impact a whole host of democratic rights and principles by pushing the impacted population into a complete “information vacuum”.
Another contributing factor is the recent crackdown on the press’s freedom and journalists in the country. During the CAA protests and the early stages of the lockdown, several journalists were arrested for criticising the Central and state governments. According to The Wire, 55 journalists were “threatened, arrested, and booked” for speaking against the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is thus no surprise that India has dropped from rank 133 in 2016 to 142 out of 182 countries in the Reporters Without Borders’ 2020 World Press Freedom Index, and now ranks among the world’s five deadliest countries for journalists.
Moreover, the situation for press freedom appears to have only worsened in 2021. Following the violent turn taken by the farmers’ protest on January 26, there has been a renewed attack on freedom of expression. For instance, Twitter was asked by the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information to take down several posts and accounts for their alleged role in instigating violence during the farmers’ protests. Concerningly, a lot of these accounts are of activists, journalists, and digital news platforms such as The Caravan, who were actively providing information about the farmers’ cause. In fact, the founding editor of The Wire, Siddharth Varadarajan, has been booked for “assertions prejudicial to national integration”; at least eight other journalists are facing such charges too. This sorry state of affairs reflects poorly on the Indian government’s commitment to protecting press freedoms, particularly from dissenting voices.
Against this backdrop, several global citizens are raising doubts about India’s commitment to democracy, and the Indian government has responded in kind by releasing a statement saying that such criticisms are “propaganda” and disrespect India’s “democratic ethos and polity”. One suspects that in the unlikely circumstance that the Indian government does respond to the EIU’s report, it will offer similar retorts. If India wishes to keep its rising star alight then its government must seek to listen to the concerns of its people without silencing their voices, removing their access to information, or beating them into submission. This would be the most fitting response to what the Ministry of External Affairs has referred to as “sensationalist social media hashtags and comments” from “celebrities and others”. In the absence of such efforts, India risks losing its moral high ground that it currently uses to attack undemocratic countries like China. Yet, given the government’s aversion to criticism and the fact that it is ably supported by what appears to be a majority of the country’s citizens, the EIU’s report and criticism of India’s commitment to democracy is likely to be ignored once more. One can only assume what this will mean for India’s ranking next year.
The Economist’s 2020 Democracy Index: Why Did India Slip Down the Rankings Again?
While India has arguably performed well in several factors in the EIU’s Democracy Index, the deteriorating condition of civil liberties in the country has resulted in its ranking dropping once again.
February 11, 2021
SOURCE: PTI