An alarming new report from the V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute at the University of Gothenberg in Sweden states that by the end of 2022, 72% of the world’s population (5.7 billion people) lived in autocracies, out of which 28% (2.2 billion people) lived in “closed autocracies”. The report titled Defiance in the Face of Autocratization has further asserted that “advances in global levels of democracy made over the last 35 years have been wiped out.” The report is a cause of global concern for politicians and policy-makers and United Nations. The report states that presently there are more countries which are closed autocracies than liberal democracies and only 13% of the world’s humans (approximately one billion people) live in liberal democracies. The report emphasised on freedom of expression (declining in 35 countries), increased government censorship of the media (declining in 47 countries), the worsening state repression of civil society actors (going downhill in 37 countries) and a decline in the quality of elections in 30 countries. It also lists Armenia, Greece India and Mauritius as “democracies in steep decline” the last decade has seen the increasing power of autocratic political regimes.
During Covid many countries scrambled to centralise power and suspend parliamentary decision-making in an attempt to manage the pandemic. Such countries used the pandemic to pass legislations that impinged on their citizens’ rights and freedoms. Regimes used the pandemic as an excuse to allow the executive in those countries to assume disproportionate power, vis-à-vis citizens. In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu suspended the Knesset and postponed his own corruption trial by suspending the courts and increasing surveillance. In India, the government wasted no time in announcing a new domicile law for Jammu and Kashmir in April 2020 that allowed people who have resided there for 15 years or those who have studied there for seven years and appeared in Class 10 and 12 exams, from acquiring permanent residence.
The trend towards autocratisation in many parts of the world began intensifying in 2020. The V-Dem report lists 42 countries as “autocratising” at the end of 2022. This, it says, is a record number. India is not an exception to this trend. A sudden lockdown in 2020 displayed how easily the lives of people at the margins of Indian society could be disrupted. In 2021, the V-Dem institute classified India as an “electoral autocracy”, while in the same year, Freedom House listed India as “partly free”. Also in 2021, the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance classified India as a backsliding democracy and a “major decliner” in its Global State of Democracy (GSoD) report. The data made available by the GSoD report demonstrated that between 1975 and 1995 India’s representative government score moved from .59 to .69. In 2015 it was .72. However, in 2020 it stood at .61, i.e, closer to the score India had in 1975 when it was under Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. The GSoD report also listed India alongside Sri Lanka and Indonesia for the lowest score on the religious freedom indicator since 1975.
The 2023 V-Dem report refers to India as “one of the worst autocratisers in the last 10 years” in a blurb on page 10 and places India in the bottom 40-50% on its Liberal Democracy Index at rank 97. India also ranks 108 on the Electoral Democracy Index and 123 on the Egalitarian Component Index. some characteristics of autocratising countries. are increased media censorship and repression of civil society, a decrease in academic freedom, cultural freedom and freedom of discussion. The report states that media censorship and repression of civil society are “what rulers in autocratising countries engage in most frequently, and to the greatest degree”. It finds also that academic freedom and freedom of cultural expression have declined severely in India Indonesia, Russia and Uruguay. The V-Dem report extends its analysis to indicators that bolster autocratisation. It says that disinformation, polarisation and autocratisation reinforce each other. It flags those countries that increased their democracy scores (The Dominican Republic, Gambia and the Seychelles) as countries that were able to check disinformation and polarisation. The report aptly targets disinformation as a tool to “steer citizens’ preferences” that is actively used by autocratising regimes to increase political polarisation. It classifies Afghanistan, India, Brazil and Myanmar as autocratising countries that have seen the “most dramatic” increases in political polarisation.
Some countries are moving towards more democracy – like Bolivia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Moldova, Dominican Republic, Gambia and Malawi. the Maldives, North Macedonia, South Korea and Slovenia as countries are making a positive democratic U-turn. It is a little puzzling to see the Maldives listed here as reports from 2022 demonstrate that President Ibrahim Solih (the 2019 election of whom the V-Dem report sees as an indicator of democratisation) did outlaw the anti-India protests that had taken root in some parts of the archipelagic nation. Maldivian civil society actors questioned whether a president had the power to criminalise dissent. The V-Dem report states that democracies can bounce back from autocratisation when a certain set of criteria are satisfied. the V-Dem report thinks that there is a shift in the global balance of economic power. It finds that inter-democracy world trade has declined to 47% in 2022 from 74% in 1998. 46% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product now comes from autocracies and democracies’ dependence on autocratic countries has doubled in the last three decades. It sees this dependence of democratic countries on autocratic countries for trade as an emergent security issue for democracies. India’s ranking apart from being abysmally low on the Liberal Democracy Index (LDI), has even achieved the dubious distinction of dipping from the 100th position in 2022 to 108th this year, barely two spots above Pakistan.
The report has slammed one of the world’s largest democracies particularly India for descending into an electoral autocracy by curbing freedom of expression, indulging in government censorship of the media, and repression of civil society organisations. India has now been ranked at the 108th spot globally for electoral democracy, way below countries such as Tanzania, Bolivia, Mexico, Singapore and even Nigeria, which comes in at a modest 91st slot by V-Dem Institute in its Democracy Report for 2023 released on Thursday March 2. The aspect which may make democratic and patriotic Indians feel better (albeit temporarily), is that neighbouring Pakistan has been ranked barely two steps lower at 110 despite being in the thick of a tumultuous economic crisis. The George Soros funded V-Dem Institute in its latest report has claimed that the level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2022 dipped to 1986 levels, a claim many would find difficult to believe given that there have been several dramatic geo-political changes all over the world in the 35 years following the mid-1980s. The report called ‘Defiance in the Face of Autocratization’ goes on to say that the current wave of autocratization spans almost all regions of the world, but specifically in the Asia-Pacific, the level of democracy has taken a beating and nearly 3.5 billion people in these regions now reside in what it calls “electoral autocracies”. Needless to say, it cites India high among them.
Closed autocracies with sizeable populations include China, Iran, Myanmar, and Vietnam. This regime type accounts for 28% of the world’s population, or 2.2 billion people. In the most populous region, Asia and the Pacific, almost nine out of ten individuals – or 89% – reside in autocracies and are denied some or all democratic rights and freedoms. This includes closed autocracies such as China and electoral autocracies like India. Only 11% live in liberal democracies like Japan and South Korea, or electoral democracies such as Indonesia, Mongolia and Nepal,” the report states. the report has slammed India one of the world’s largest democracies for descending into an electoral autocracy by curbing freedom of expression, indulging in government censorship of the media, and repression of civil society organisations. V-Dem claims that autocratization often occurs due to democratic weakening and cites countries like El Salvador and Hungary to justify India’s low ranking as a democracy in its report. the global balance of economic power is shifting.
the report highlights that elected autocracies, among which it counts India, are rapidly becoming more powerful economically, and their numbers are growing. On the flip side, democracies are gradually declining in their share of global economic wealth. If these trends continue, it says, autocracies will surpass democracies in economic power over the next few decades. India with right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the helm as cited in the V-Dem institute for democracy report is responsible for curbs on religious freedom and diminishing democratic rights, but it does not take into account that people in India enjoy a significant amount of freedom and fundamental rights as compared to neighbouring Pakistan, Afghanistan and even China which is state-run and autocratic in the truest sense of the term. India, that descended into electoral autocracy in recent years, since assent of PM Modi has more than doubled its share of the global economy since 1992. It now accounts for 7.2% of global GDP, which corresponds to one-third of the share of GDP generated by all electoral autocracies,” V-Dem points out in its report. V-Dem stands for Varieties of Democracy, and the Institution was created in 2014 by Professor Staffan I. Lindberg as an independent research organization. Among its tall claims, it promises to be a new way of thinking and assessing democracy. It provides a variety of studies that rate countries on a variety of topics.
