No country is a better exemplar of our global democratic recession than India.
Not Afghanistan, where an elected President had to run away and the Taliban came to power. Not Niger where there has been a coup. Not Ukraine which is having to fight for its life to eject brutal invaders. India, which has freer elections than the US, exemplifies something which exists only in this silly woman's imagination. She hasn't noticed that Congress has just come back to power in Karnataka and, assuming Rahul doesn't fuck up pre-poll pacts with other parties, looks as though it might give the BJP a run for its money in 2024.
Most unlikely at its founding, India’s democracy confounded legions of naysayers by growing more stable over its first seven decades.
Dynasticism is not democracy. Nehru presided over what was essentially a one-party state. Indira was offered the top job when her father died but wasn't keen. She only accepted a Ministerial post because otherwise it would have gone to her aunty whom she hated. Nehru himself would have retired if Congress hadn't threatened to bring in his son-in-law, whom he hated, under the guise of promoting his daughter. Rajiv and Sonia too were reluctant draftees who only wanted to keep out their sister-in-law Maneka. Rahul will embrace everybody except his cousin Varun. Maya thinks all this is normal in a democratic country. Why? Is she actually a Tudor from the sixteenth century? Perhaps she thinks chopping off the heads of your wives is a democratic procedure.
India’s democratic deepening happened in formal ways, through the consolidation of civilian rule over the military
WTF? There was no need for any such thing. The Indian Army was too narrowly recruited. Pakistan was a different story because a Punjabi/Pathan recruited army could dominate the country.
as well as decades of vibrant multiparty competition,
If so, how could the Dynasty have dominated Indian politics for so long? Why is the cretin Rahul still Congress's PM candidate for 2024?
and informal ways, through the strengthening of norms around Electoral Commission
which only occurred when TN Sheshan was appointed by Chandra Shekhar. Rajiv's assassination and Sonia's refusal to take over, meant that the Dynasty's grip on the country was relaxed. That was what permitted Sheshan's tough approach.
independence and the increasing participation of women and other social groups in formal political life.
Again, this happened during the Nineties, when the Dynasty's grip had relaxed, when people like Mayawati, Jayalalitha and Mamta (after she split from the INC) rose up.
India has also witnessed two significant democratic declines:
The moment Indira was appointed Congress President- so as to force her father to stay on as PM- democracy was out of the window. Indira started taking a hammer to the Constitution and the independence of the Bench six years before proclaiming a state of Emergency. Indeed there already was a state of external Emergency. Still, it was the fashion back then to impose Emergency. The Brits and Canadians had done so. But Heath's Emergency was a failure. Indira showed India wasn't a 'soft state'. It was well hard. But that was how the Brits had set things up.
The Dynasty has always had a Dictatorial approach. Nehru had already turned the President into a puppet and used the Planning Commission to centralize all power in his own hands. When he died, in addition to heading the Planning Commission he was also Foreign and Defense Minister. Indira decided her delinquent son was unemployable and thus felt she had to get him a job as her successor. That son died so the other son had to take his place.
the 21-month period from June 1975 to March 1977 known as the Emergency and a contemporary decline beginning with Narendra Modi’s election in 2014.
But Manmohan Singh was a nominated, not an elected Member of Parliament. He was a prone Minister. His colleagues weren't consulting him while Rahul tore up his ordinance on live TV. Tudor doesn't get that in a Democracy, the head of Government actually heads the Government. He isn't a puppet for the foreign born widow of the son and grandson of previous Prime Ministers.
During Modi’s tenure, key democratic institutions have remained formally in place while the norms and practices underpinning democracy have substantially deteriorated.
No. Democracy is working better. New parties- like AAP have come up. Institutions are stronger because it is possible that the Dynasty will never come back to power with an absolute majority. In other words, fear of its vengeance has declined. Officials can afford to take an independent line.
This informal democratic decline in contemporary India stands in stark contrast to the Emergency, when Indira Gandhi formally eliminated nearly all democratic institutions—banning elections, arresting political opposition, eviscerating civil liberties, muzzling independent media, and passing three constitutional amendments that undermined the power of the country’s courts.
Tudor doesn't say a word about what the massive extra-judicial killing which was a staple feature of Congress misrule. To be fair, Naxal violence in West Bengal wasn't a response to Congress thuggery which was directed at the CPM. But in Punjab and Kashmir, it was the Dynasty which directly created and fed on the violence and wholesale slaughter by men in khaki.
Yet democracy watchdogs agree that today India resides somewhere in a nether region between full democracy and full autocracy.
But those 'watchdogs' are brainless. Still, when the West was slaughtering Muslims in far off places it made sense to pretend that the Hindus were doing the same thing. But this simply wasn't true. India gets on well with Arab countries. It is Biden's America which is increasingly in the dog-house.
While democracy-watching organizations categorize democracies differently, they all classify India today as a “hybrid regime”—that is, neither a full democracy nor a full autocracy.
Did they think Dynastic rule was 'full democracy'? Why?
And this is new. In 2021, Freedom House dropped India’s rating from Free to Partly Free (the only remaining category is Not Free). That same year, the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project relegated India to the status of “electoral autocracy” on its scale of closed autocracy, electoral autocracy, electoral democracy, or liberal democracy. And the Economist Intelligence Unit moved India into the “flawed democracy” category on its scale of full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime, and authoritarian regime. India’s democratic downgrading moved 1.4 billion of the world’s 8 billion people into the category of autocratizing countries. Its drop from Free to Partly Free fully halved the share of the world living in a Free country.
But if Rahul succeeds to his Daddy's position, then India will be Free. Why? Is it because he is only one quarter Hindu in terms of DNA? How fucking racist are these cunts?
Wherever you draw the conceptual lines between the land of democracy, the sea of autocracy, and the marshlands marking the hybrid regions, our democratic world is considerably less populous without India among its ranks. The question of whether India is a democracy today is not just pivotal to our analysis of the country’s political future but to our understanding of democratic trends more broadly. India, this year the world’s most populous country, is where the global battle for democracy is being fought.
Tudor thinks she and people like her are important. They draw a line on the map and suddenly the world either becomes much more free or much less free. Why is Zelensky wasting his time asking for F-16s? He should persuade Tudor to declare Donbas and Crimea once again free and democratic- i.e. once again sovereign Ukrainian territory.
Some disagree that India has substantively deteriorated into hybrid-regime territory. Unsurprisingly, the Indian government has reacted with accusations of Western bias, calling India’s democratic downgrade “misleading, incorrect and misplaced.”2 In August 2022, the Economic Advisory Council to India’s prime minister released a working paper calling out inconsistencies in democracy rankings. Yet there is reason why regime assessments, like a central bank’s interest rates, are best made by independent organizations.
of smart people- maybe. But Tudor & Co. are cretins. They don't get there is no fucking democracy if the PM is being controlled by the widow of a PM who was the son and grandson of previous PMs.
Notably, democracy watchdogs have not been shy about critiquing the quality of Western democracies.
And nobody cares in the West just as nobody cares in India.
But a minority of independent voices also resist India’s recategorization as a hybrid regime. In the article “Why India’s Democracy Is Not Dying,” Akhilish Pillalamarri writes that “cultural and social trends [in India today] are not necessarily evidence of democratic backsliding, but are rather evidence of social norms in India that are illiberal toward speech, individual expression, and criticism.”
Elected Indian leaders have been strengthening hate-speech laws since the Nineteen Twenties. Dynasticism is traditional- essentially an 'uncorrelated asymmetry'- e.g. male primogeniture- reduces conflict over who gets the top job and the associated 'rent dissipation' but it is not a democratic outcome. The BJP, like it or not, is a proper political party though whether it can win power without Modi remains to be seen. Perhaps, if Vajpayee hadn't been senile, they might have prevailed in 2004. Still, electoral competition has improved party performance in most States. Maybe Prashant Kishore will set up a new Bihar based party. There are plenty of talented Kejriwal types who can break the mould of Indian politics.
So has India really departed the shores of democracy? And if so, is India’s transition into a hybrid regime reversible? The answer to both questions is yes.
Yes, Tudor is a cretin.
What’s in a Name?
To evaluate India’s democratic downgrading, it is first necessary to define democracy,
No. It is first necessary to understand that Dynasticism is not democracy. A Monarchy which keeps winning elections by fair means or foul is not a Democracy even if the Dowager Queen doesn't wear a crown and appoints some elderly fellow to do her bidding.
both because adjudicating the debate over India’s democratic decline rests on conceptual clarity and because democracy undoubtedly connotes normative legitimacy. Democracy is a concept that instantiates a system of government that is “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” to quote Abraham Lincoln.
Sonia is definitely of the people- the Italian people. Rahul is half Italian, one quarter Iranian Zoroastrian and only one quarter Indian.
Clarity on the non-normative dimensions of democracy that operationalize this idea points us toward the criteria we can use to assess the state of India’s democracy.
Why was a country full of brown people being ruled, albeit by proxy, by a White lady who had only taken citizenship a dozen years previously?
Scholars mostly agree that five institutions are central to a country’s designation as democratic.
Stupid scholars- sure. The obvious test is to look at who is running things. If that person is either the widow or child of previous rulers, that is not a democracy. It is some form of dynastic rule.
Of these five institutions, elections for the chief executive and legislature are the first and most important.
No. Elections are irrelevant if the Chief Executive is a puppet.
The second institutional pillar of democracy is thus the presence of genuine political competition.
Don't you just hate the fake type?
Countries where individuals have the right to vote in elections, but where incumbents make it difficult for the opposition to organize are not generally considered democracies.
Nor are countries where political parties are dynastic heirlooms.
Democracy also requires governmental autonomy from other forces—such as a colonial ruler or powerful military elites—
or Dynasties
that can halt or wholly subvert democratic elections; this autonomy is the third institutional pillar.
No. It is perfectly possible for a country which relies on Super-power protection against a dangerous invading or insurgent force to be a Democracy. What matters is whether the head of Government has been elected on the basis of merit by a majority or plurality as stipulated by law.
Two more institutions are also conceptually crucial to democracy because they enable both citizens and independent branches of government to evaluate the government’s performance: civil liberties (both de jure and de facto),
So America wasn't a democracy till about 1965- right?
the fourth pillar, and executive checks, the fifth pillar.
No. This a particular type of Democracy though it also describes various constitutional Monarchies. If a country- or 38 states in the US- has an elected judiciary, is that actually a check on the executive? The US doesn't have an independent, Federal, Election Commission. There is plenty of voter suppression and gerrymandering. But the US is a democracy- that's the only way it can be ruled. True, there have been Presidents whose fathers were President. But there are no Presidents who were also sons and grandsons of Presidents.
Many prominent scholars have correctly argued that definitions of democracy which do not include basic civil liberties are inadequate.
They are wrong. A Democracy can do ethnic cleansing of a minority same as any other type of regime.
An independent press that enables the formation of critical public opinion is increasingly understood as being part of this civil-liberties pillar.
No it isn't. The Press exists to make money. Anyway, I'm a member of the public. Who the fuck would want my opinion on anything?
The final institutional pillar of democracy, executive checks, is what prevents an elected head of government from declaring l’état, c’est moi.
We don't give a shit what politicians declare. Kennedy said he was a type of doughnut. Actually he was a Frankfurter.
Democracy is a set of institutions that embed a practice of government accountability.
No. It may have no such thing. America was democratic but had the 'spoils system'. A tyranny may have more accountability than a democracy. The tyrant wants to know which officials have been slacking off or taking bribes or doing stupid shit.
This accountability takes two forms: vertical accountability between the people and the highest levels of elected government, typically elections and alternative political forces; and horizontal accountability between the executive and independent institutions, typically independent legislatures and courts that can constrain an elected executive from trampling on civil liberties.
In other words, lots of kicking the can down the road and everybody forming commissions of inquiry to exonerate them a couple of years down the line for shit they did which everybody has forgotten about. The plain fact is that reducing the scope of 'the doctrine of political question' is a recipe for a slow-motion car-crash.
Incidentally, Putin's excuse for invading Ukraine was that Zelensky was a Fascist trampling on the civil rights of Russian mother-tongue people like himself. Sadly, India has nukes, so nobody will listen to this stupid lady if she suggests it might be nice to do regime change in India coz Rahul is soooo sweet.
Two important points follow from this five-pillar conceptualization of democracy that are germane to our assessment of India’s contemporary democratic decline.
None are. India needs to grow out of dynasticism. The country has changed. Merit not heredity is increasingly become the determinant of success.
The first is that the scholarly definition of democracy has rightly expanded over time. In the past half-century, as authoritarian leaders have learned to adopt the window-dressing of democracy while quashing those institutions essential to its functioning, democracy watchdogs have wisely adapted by seeking to better assess whether government institutions embody accountability and whether institutional rights exist not just in law but in practice.
Nobody hired the 'watchdogs'. They may be barking but the caravan has moved on. Tudor has delusions of grandeur. At a stroke of her pen she can declare Freedom to have waxed or waned around the globe. But what has really happened is that the prestige of her discipline has hit rock bottom.
One specific way in which scholarly conceptions of democracy have expanded is a newfound understanding of the importance of institutional norms in buttressing democracy.
The Brits set up those institutional norms. A decent dynasty could pretty much sleep-walk from election to election. They might lose but the opposition coalition would soon implode. There were two problems with Dynasties. Firstly, you need to do sex and beget a baby. Secondly, you must not appear to yourself be a sweet little baby though you are 52 years old and have a Dirty-Santa type beard.
As Nancy Bermeo prophetically wrote in these pages in 2016, we are living in an age of democratic backsliding characterized by the decline of overt democratic breakdown. Coup d’états are being replaced by promissory coups (presenting “the ouster of an elected government as a defense of democratic legality”);
That's what Trump things happened! Is this crazy lady a Trumpista?
executive coups are being replaced by executive aggrandizement (“elected executives weaken checks on executive power one by one, undertaking a series of institutional changes that hamper the power of opposition forces to challenge executive preferences”);
Maya is thrilled that SCOTUS overturned Roe v Wade. Trump kept delivering to his base even after he left office.
and election-day vote fraud is being replaced by preelection strategic manipulation (reflecting “a range of actions aimed at tilting the electoral playing field in favor of incumbents”). In other words, democratic decline is assuming the form of an incremental undermining of democratic institutions wherein “troubled democracies are now more likely to erode than shatter.
In the opinion of cretins. The truth is that social media is increasing the likelihood of grass-roots mobilization. Look at AAP in India.
And the clearest signs of such democratic erosion are that elected leaders question the legitimacy of all opposition and use every available legal tool to undermine it.
These cretins don't get that elected leaders hate their rivals within their own party much much more than the soi disant 'leader of the opposition'. If a head of Government doesn't have a credible official opponent, he is in big trouble. The knife in his back is already in the hand of his best friend.
Drawing on a broad range of historical cases, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that unwritten rules and norms of behavior toward political opposition are the key to preventing such democratic deterioration.
They are babbling nonsense. What matters is if an administration is cohesive. Britain is in big trouble because the Tory Party- at least at the Cabinet level- turned out to be a nest of vipers. The opposition can be a pile of shite or it can be sharp and focused. But the opposition does not matter. Only a fucking academic would not get this.
They argue that the two most important norms are opposition tolerance, meaning that political opponents are not treated as enemies
Opponents don't matter. Colleagues do.
but simply as political rivals, and forbearance, that is, limited use of the legal methods to steamroll opposition, such as executive orders, vetoes, and filibusters.
Rubbish! It is perfectly proper to display 'preference intensity' by jousting in that way. The thing creates drama and lets people vent.
Contemporary democratic backsliders tend not to transform overnight to autocracies.
They never do. These 'watchdogs' just like barking because they are barking mad.
Instead, democracies slowly die when opposition is no longer tolerated and when elected politicians use the full might of the law to quash rather than compromise with political opposition.
No. There is no need to compromise with the opposition. The law can only be used to quash illegal actions- e.g. homicide. It is not really the case that anybody is being killed- not even Democracy- when the Government does something you don't like.
India’s contemporary democratic decline is a paradigmatic case of these crucial democracy-supporting norms sharply eroding.
No. It is a paradigmatic case of academics telling stupid lies.
The formal institutions of India’s democracy (largely reflected in Freedom House’s political-rights category and corresponding to the elections, competition, and autonomy pillars of democracy) have remained relatively stable over the past decade. India’s civil-liberties ranking, in contrast, has eroded year on year since 2019, dropping from 42 (out of a possible 60) points in 2010 to 33 in 2023. It is this nine-point drop in Freedom House’s civil-liberties index that has moved India from the category of democracy (those generally score above 70) to the terrain of a hybrid regime (generally scoring between 35 and 70). And, as I detail below, the downgrade is warranted.
Freedom House- a Cold War initiative- has been captured by woke nutters. Since America's power has declined, it simply does not matter any more.
A second, related point is that the same regime can become autocratic in decidedly different ways at different points in time.
No it can't. The regime remains what it was. Circumstances change. We don't say the US became totalitarian when it entered the Second World War. It remained a Democracy. Circumstances had changed. It did things it would not have done when it was at peace. Stupid academics may not understand this but then there is very little they understand.
What changed in India was that Indira explicitly made the INC dynastic. It is that outcome which is now being reversed but only because Rahul is a moon-calf. The good news about Democracy is there's plenty of talent to choose from. The question is whether cohesive administrations can be formed. The opposition does not matter. Governance does.
And different regimes can be equally undemocratic, but for different reasons. Democratic recessions need not assume a dramatic form, like military coups or the kind of autogolpe that India witnessed under Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. In 2023, Freedom House classified both Iraq and Mali as Not Free and gave them the exact same score of 29—but for radically different reasons. Mali ranks low on political rights (8 out of 40 possible points) because the country has not yet returned to having regular elections after military coups. But Mali ranks high among full autocracies for civil liberties (21 out of 60 possible points) because its media are relatively independent and it has broad rights to dissent and free speech.
Mali has 30 percent literacy. It has suspended broadcasts of France 24. That's cool- right?
By contrast, Iraq scores relatively high among full autocracies on political rights (16 out of 40 possible points) because it holds regular, competitive elections, and its various religious and ethnic groups maintain representation within the political system. Yet Iraq does less well on civil liberties (13 out of 60 possible points) because of frequently documented cases of militias depriving citizens and journalists of liberties.
Iraq, like other countries, may have one or two mentally retarded people. But they are friggin' geniuses compared to these clowns.
Countries can dip below the democratic threshold by declining sharply in some domains.
No. That's not how things work. Either a country is or it isn't a democracy just as I'm still an elderly Tamil man though the Netflix algorithm thinks I'm a teenage lesbian of East Asian ethnicity.
But they can also dip into hybrid-regime territory by declining only somewhat across a broad range of indicators—and this is what we see in contemporary India.
These people can't see shit.
Stable Rights and Declining Liberties
India’s democracy was never very high-quality.
Because it is Indians. Why can't those fucking darkies just try being a little fairer skinned?
The formal exercise of autonomous, competitive elections with a broad range of civil liberties—while it did translate into a mass poverty-alleviation program and the world’s largest affirmative-action program—always had plenty of shortcomings.
No. India's shortcoming had to do with most Indians being very poor.
But democracy also had a built-in autocorrect feature,
No. That is magical thinking.
which allowed incumbents to be turned out of power.
Not if the alternative was shittier.
That autocorrect feature is endangered today in mostly informal ways.
Nonsense! The barriers to entry are lower thanks to Social Media. Higher competition is a good thing.
In terms of Freedom House’s political-rights score (encompassing the pillars of elections, competition, and autonomy), India’s average for the nine years before Modi came to power was the same as for the nine years since 2014. Incumbent turnover remains electorally possible but improbable because the Modi government has substantially eroded the de facto protection of civil liberties and executive constraints
there is no evidence for this at all.
—the fourth and fifth pillars of democracy. It is the drop in India’s civil-liberties rating that accounts for its contemporary democratic decline.
No. It is prejudice.
The legal right to dissent, historically only erratically protected in Indian courts, remains legally in place while the practical possibility of vocal dissent free from overwhelming harassment has virtually disappeared.
Is this lady talking about sar tan se juda?
To be sure, India’s media, while generally vibrant and free, were sometimes censored before Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government came to power in 2014. But today, while the media remain legally free to dissent, widespread harassment of independent journalism and concentrating ownership structures have meant that journalists and individuals practice a high degree of self-censorship.
Modi is popular. Writing stupid lies about him alienates paying customers.
Checks on executive power, while formally in place, are rapidly falling away.
There is no check on the nonsense academics spout- if they teach worthless shite.
Radically constrained civil liberties. Since 2016, civil liberties have been curtailed, to some extent legally and to a significant extent practically. CIVICUS, an international organization that tracks global civil liberties in 197 countries, now classifies India as “repressed” on its declining scale of open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed, and closed. The downgrade from “obstructed,” which happened in 2019, meant that India’s civic space was, according to the organization’s website, one where “civil society members who criticise power holders risk surveillance, harassment, intimidation, imprisonment, injury and death.” Among its neighbors, India is now in the same ratings category as Pakistan and Bangladesh, and in a lower category than Nepal and Sri Lanka.
So, if Modi keeps getting re-elected it means that Indians don't want civil liberties and so forth. Why stop there? Why not suggest that Indians would prefer to go down the Chinese road? To be honest, it is probably true. The problem with stupid professors is that one comes to despise whatever it is they claim to favour. On the other hand, maybe Maya Tudor is only pretending to be stupid. She is actually a Chinese agent concerned to promote Dictatorship. That is why she depicts a popular, meritorious, democratically elected leader as the enemy of the very thing which gives him power- viz. India's vibrant democracy which, though a British legacy, the Indians have made their own.
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