Democracy Report 2021 of the V-Dem study has created a stir in India, but as expected, in a small circle. In ranking parlance, India has moved down from Electoral Democracy to Electoral Autocracy. V DEM stands for Variety of Democracy, but in gist, it is their version of democracy versus rest of the other versions.  The Report is produced by the V Dem Institute of Gothenburg University, Sweden. In a world where everything is outsourced, one area which should have never been outsourced but has become the fashion of the day is, outsourcing of the rating of core values like democracy, freedom, human rights, institutions, etc. Some Institutions have usurped these roles and surprisingly the international agencies which should have been the custodian of these, have gladly adopted these as they know that it would take them years and dozens of meetings before they can term any country anything. There is another agency, Freedom House which has taken upon itself the task of rating nations on political rights and civil liberties. Surprisingly, the Red Cross never thought of this and would not venture also because its interest lies in solving problems and helping victims.  

I said, it created an expected stir in a small circle. We don’t know if it got any traction in the country of its origin or in any other country. But, in India it got visibility because it slipped down into the next category; had it retained or moved up that would have been no news. The Authors of the Report also did not disappoint the critic, it has devoted an entire section on India. The Report bolsters it with enormity of effort and volume of data, but the conclusions converge around the polarized views. 

Democracy according to V Dem

Its categorization of countries are Liberal Democracy, Electoral Democracy, Electoral Autocracy and Autocracy. The categorization is based on the dimensions of:

●  Liberal Democracy Index

●  The Electoral Democracy Index

●  The Liberal Component Index

●  The Egalitarian Component Index

●  The Participatory Component Index

●  The Deliberative Component Index 

According to them the Report is based on, “…the largest global dataset on democracy with almost 30 million data points for 202 countries from 1789 to 2020. Involving over 3,500 scholars and other country experts, V – Dem measures hundreds of different attributes of democracy” (inside page). It does  not happen that all the 3500 will be commenting on each country, but only a few for each country I presume, and the rating lies in the selection of the experts for each country. You select the experts and the selection decides the rating. It is assumed that everybody understands what Democracy is, it is only autocracy which needs elaboration. According to the Report, the autocratization follows the similar pattern of, “Media and academic freedoms, and civil society, are typically repressed first. Alongside that, ruling governments often engage in polarization by official disinformation campaigns disseminated via social media” (p22).    

 Some of the observations it makes are:

● “Most democracies acted responsibly, but 9 democracies registered major and 23 moderate violations of international norms”.  The global scholars and the scholars sitting in Sweden have decided that while few democracies are responsible, many are violators of international norms. As I mentioned, except an outsourced agency, no international agency, no UN, no International Court could make such outlandish observations.

●  “The level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2020 is down to levels from the last found around 1990”. Two counter observations can be made. One, the power of media and social media today is not what it was in the 90s. The state’s power has also grown tremendously and the governments are also becoming sensitive increasingly if not prickly.  Two, the observations have to be appreciated in the context of the fact that complexities have grown and it is not the same world and the Governments that we are dealing with now, as those were in the 90s. The countries are far more developed than what they were in the 1990s. So, can we conclude that democracy runs counter to development? With development and egalitarianism, participation should have also grown. Is it that we are judging the world by newer standards, then shouldn’t we say it?   

● “Electoral autocracy remains the most common type of regime. Together with closed autocracies they number 87 states, home to 68% of the world population”. This picture emerges because India moved from Electoral Democracy to Electoral Autocracy. India belongs to electoral autocracy and China to closed autocracy, and these two itself form a significant share of the World’s population. The democracies constitute the 92 countries with 32 % of the population, accounting for all tiny Nations other than the US and UK. 

● “Several G 20 Nations such as Brazil, India and Turkey are among the top 10 decliners”. We are placed in the league of Turkey. So, India and Turkey are decliners, and even the most ardent critic of India will not put India and Turkey in the same bracket in electoral dimensions. Such is the power of bias.  

● “Poland takes a dubious first place and the three new nations join this group Benin, Bolivia and Mauritius”. Poland is dubious having taken the first place, because the analysts think so. Their countrymen may think anyway, in the eyes of the rating agency, it is dubious.

It does concede that, “Violations even occurred in a couple of liberal democracies such as the United States of America, where the government frequently engaged in disinformation about the pandemic” (p11). Even Americans think it was more than that, and there was a regime change on this count but for the report, it is just a case of ‘even elephants can slip’. I should appreciate the experts from the US who took a balanced view of their country and gave a balanced verdict rather than simply indicting.  

Some of the best performers according to the Report are Tunisia (population around 11.7 million) and Armenia (population around 3 million). Here is a sample of those countries:

	Country	Population (2019)
1	Barbados	287025
2	Cabo Verde	549935
3	Costa Rica	5047561
4	Cyprus	1198575
5	Estonia	1326590
6	Iceland	361313
7	Jamaica	2948279
8	Korea, Rep.	51709098
9	Lithuania	2786844
10	Latvia	1912789
11	Peru	32510453
12	Korea, Dem. People’s Rep.	25666161
13	Portugal	10269417
14	Slovak Republic	5454073
15	Slovenia	2087946
16	Uruguay	3461734
	Source: World Development Indicators, https://data.worldbank.org/

If tomorrow the UN were to be reconstituted, on the basis of democracy, then these countries will be the top contenders.

This is the size of the population that India vaccinates daily. Comparing these Nations with India is like comparing startups with Ford and Walmart, and say startups follow a more informal and collegial culture in contrast to global enterprises which follow rigid bureaucratic structure.  

If we sum up the classification, we can say the authors seem to decide ‘You join this line and you belong to that line’.

If one were to reclassify their rating which could be running in their minds, I would classify the countries as: 

Electoral Anarchy, Electoral Paralysis, Western Democracy, Electoral Autocracy, Autocracy.

If at all one wants to denigrate India, one can say India has slipped from Electoral Paralysis to Electoral Autocracy. But that would have needed a good understanding of the past and progress so far.

Impact of Covid

One important factor the Report failed to consider is the influence Covid had on the functioning of democracy. The study team did construct a PanDem measure which measured seven types of violations during the pandemic period; factors they considered as violations of democratic principles. By that standard, even a pandemic which is a global calamity is an assault on the global society and is a violation. Imposing restrictions on the movement of people, closing schools and conducting examinations, closing down factories leading to massive migrations, social distancing, making social warriors work, are all unavailable violations. What they fail to consider is that the pandemic is an emergency requiring countries to undertake harsh measures that require curbing normal activities or even individual liberties in certain areas. The countries treat it as a health emergency and do take interventions which can impinge on individual liberty.

Their report says, ‘the emergency measures must be ‘proportionate, necessary and non-discriminatory’, have a clear time, and not be implemented in an excessive manner” (p10). Unfortunately, the pandemic is non- proportionate for a nation of our size, prolonged and was not a one-shot affair. So, a Nation responds as it deems fit, and it is beyond the capacity of any study team sitting in a University to judge what is proportionate, necessary and within permissible limit. It is beyond the capacity of the team, even if they have been advised by scores of experts.  

 On India             

The report has been generous with India and has devoted a whole section on it under the heading Democracy Broken Down: India. We can say no other country has been bestowed with this honour.  Let me cite some important quotes of this Report on India:   

“There are alarming reports of harassment of journalists covering Covid-19 in India”. From this, we are to conclude there have been alarming instances of massive harassment of journalists. Is this some new name for this country which was earlier called as the country of snake charmers?

India followed the usual pattern of “a gradual deterioration where freedom of the media, academia, and civil society were curtailed first and to the greatest extent” (p 20).

“Narendra Modi led the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to victory in India’s 2014 elections… and most of the decline occurred following BJP’s victory and their promotion of a Hindu – nationalistic agenda”. On indicators of shift to autocracy, “The overall freedom and fairness of elections (''Elections free and fair”) was also hard hit, with the last elections held under Prime Minister Modi’s reign in 2019, precipitating a downgrading to an electoral autocracy” (p20).

“Yet the diminishing of freedom of expression, the media, and civil society have gone furthest. By 2020, this score (censorship) is close to 1.5, indicating that the censorship efforts are becoming part of the routine and is no longer restricted to the sensitive (to the government) issues. In this aspect, India is now as autocratic as Pakistan is, and worse than both its neighbour countries Bangladesh and Nepal. Incidentally, Bangladesh and Nepal also got damned in the process and are more autocratic than Pakistan. In general, the Modi led government in India has used laws of sedition, defamation and counterterrorism to silence critics” (p20).

“The UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act) has been used to silence dissent in academia. Universities and authorities have also punished students and activists in universities engaging in protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).Civil society is also being muzzled in the autocratization process” (p20).

“The BJP have increasingly used the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA) to restrict the entry, exit, and functioning of Civil Society Organization (CSO)” (p21).

So, finally the cat is out of the bag. The CAA, Hindi nationalistic agenda are the major reasons why it got downgraded. Also, because it came down on the foreign funding of dubious CSOs. Indian Government has long back decided not to take any grants from any Nations. It is not clear why the CSOs are still being allowed to raise funds in the name of poverty. Even then, this Government has only curbed the fraudulent CSOs and fraudulent usage of funds.  Do these quality India to be called as an autocratic country.

It cites several articles in support of its conclusions. First, let some experts write something in selected magazines, then it becomes an authentic source for giving Nations names. Wonder which experts had advised them on the Election Commission which led to the lowered rating. Only a highly prejudiced mind could have done this. Election Commission is one institution that India is always proud of. In any case, I see no way to downgrade Indian democracy attributing it to the Election commission. The Problem is as Nehru said, “those who can see dirt in others eyes, can’t see moat in their eyes.”

One could have even agreed if it has raised questions about ownership of media and biased reporting of media against poor and third world countries.  It could have factored about internal party democracy. It could have talked about the weaker opposition parties that leads to the overpowering of ruling parties which in turn results in more concentration of power with the ruling party.

But the authors would have started with the proposition of indicting India which makes it a good copy, and especially for introducing CAA and CSOs funding.

Tail Piece

I started writing on this when I read in some papers that the Government or some Institution in India should come with its own rating. That will be a poor response to it. If we do want to develop some index we should take different indices like ranking of Think tanks, Media Democracy, Social Media Democracy, etc.  We should beat them in their own game, but on our turf. 

Finally, I wish they had placed Pakistan and China above us in Democracy. Then it would not have required us to prove anything.

Ref:  Autocratization Turns Viral: Democracy Report 2021, V Dem Institute. 2021.

https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/74/8c/748c68ad-f224-4cd7-87f9-8794add5c60f/dr_2021_updated.pdf

 

Image Credits: wikimedia commons

 

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