Congress MP Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday attacked the Centre’s Narendra Modi government after a Swedish institute downgraded India from ‘world’s largest democracy’ to ‘electoral autocracy.’
Taking to Twitter, Gandhi wrote, “India is no longer a democratic country.”
In its annual Democracy Report titled Autocratization Turns Viral, the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute changed India’s status from the world’s largest democracy to an ‘electoral autocracy.’ It simply meant that whilst India may have had a democratically elected government in the recent past, but the government led by PM Modi has been autocratic.
The annual report by V-Dem observed that ‘India’s autocratization process has largely followed the typical pattern for countries in the “Third Wave” over the past ten years: a gradual deterioration where freedom of the media, academia, and civil society were curtailed first and to the greatest extent.”
The report said that India was as autocratic as Pakistan when it came to censorship and worse than Bangladesh and Nepal.
Authored by Shreeya Pillai and Staffan I. Lindberg, the report further added, “Narendra Modi led the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to victory in India’s 2014 elections (marked with a vertical dashed line in the figure above) and most of the decline occurred following BJP’s victory and their promotion of a Hindu-nationalist agenda.”
The damning report on India by V-Dem came just days after US watchdog Freedom House downgraded India’s status to from a free country to ‘partly free’ country.
Several international celebrities had recently expressed their outrage over the brutal crackdown against the protesting farmers near the Delhi borders. Days later, the British parliament debated the farmers’ protest and the attack on press freedom in the country. In a statement, the MEA had termed the debate in the British parliament as ‘gross interference’ in India’s internal politics.
The British parliament on Monday had held a long debate when MPs from the Labour party, Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party expressed their concern over the Indian government’s response to the ongoing farmers’ protests.
Earlier, the US administration under President Joe Biden had urged for a dialogue to resolve the ongoing farmers’ agitation in India and expressed concern over the blocked access to the internet. According to the State Department, ‘any differences between the parties be resolved through dialogue.’