India’s democracy has been downgraded. After being consistently ranked as a free country India that once took pride in naming itself the world’s biggest democracy has spiraled into a state akin to the repression of rights. This investigation is by Ajit Singh in The Leaflet:

History has never been easy for the French. 232 years after the fall of Bastille, the French Revolution still stirs passions of both agony & jubilation. This great revolution of 1789 led to the origin of the principle of liberty and the concept of Constitutional law. The struggle for the republic is a reminder for all of us that creative ideas and freedom of expression must be protected at all costs.

In a post-COVID world, strong populist leaders have emerged as victors, using this pandemic to further concentrate power and strengthen a personalised bureaucratic machinery. Democracies like India are not an exception to this phenomenon; although our election process may be intact and transparent (a notion put under a cloud by recent events in Assam and West Bengal), it is only one of several criteria used to determine whether a country is a functioning and liberal democracy.

Recently, it has been widely reported that India’s status has been downgraded from ‘free’ to ‘partly free’ in the latest Freedom House Report. Instead of introspecting on what went wrong that led to this, the Union Government of India has strongly rebuked the report, labelling it as “misleading, incorrect and misplaced”.

The full article can be found through this link.