Time out for democracy?

It did not come as a big surprise when the V Dem Institute Report 2024 branded India as one of the ‘worst autocratisers’ in the world in recent years. Experiences on-the-ground clearly point to this negative trend in our body politic. People in social movements, human rights groups, NGOs that are critical of government and the now-and-then activist prompted by provocation by extremist right-winger get into fits of rage and fill the streets seeking justice and reprisal against wrong doers. This applies to the most oppressed groups- dalits, adivasis, urban poor, landless, workers, women, farmers, the transgender people, children-at-risk, LGBTQIA+, impoverished, and those who live in penury. The latter are invariably wedged in the web of law for simply trying to survive by any means they can access – begging or even pinching something to feed a hungry stomach, or that of a famished child.

Of course, our government spokespersons will rubbish the above claim. But V Dem is a respected source. V-Dem provides a multidimensional and disaggregated dataset that reflects the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of rule that goes beyond the simple presence of elections. We distinguish between five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collect data to measure these principles. It is authentic and we must drop this battering of the country’s critics by discrediting the source of such information. The excuses are bald and I have heard senior cabinet members rubbishing both the organizations and those who authored the reports as anti-Indian.

This is time to look at the mirror and choose to see the real image not with a view to apply make-up, but with intent to rectify and transform.  V-Dem is a unique approach to measuring democracy – historical, multidimensional, nuanced, and disaggregated – employing state-of-the-art methodology. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) produce the largest global dataset on democracy with over 31 million data points for 202 countries from 1789 to 2023. Involving over 4,200 scholars and other country experts, V-Dem measures over 600 different attributes of democracy

Ranjan Solomon is a political commentator