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Indian Democracy at 75: Who Are the

Barbarians at the Gate?
30th August 2022 Comments (0)

Salvatore Babones

I
ndian democracy is under siege. As India celebrates seventy-�ve years as an independent country, major
international democracy rankings suggest that Indian democracy is in serious decline, or that India may no
longer be a democracy at all. �e alleged deterioration in the quality of Indian democracy has only accelerated
since the 2019 re-election of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. �e picture of
India that emerges from the major international democracy rankings, if accurate, is truly alarming. If it is inaccurate,
that may be more alarming still.

According to the in�uential Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Indian democracy has been in decline ever since
Mr Modi �rst took o�ce in 2014, with its international ranking falling from number twenty-seven in the world
(just below Belgium) to number forty-six (two spots below South Africa). �e EIU now labels India a “�awed
democracy” characterised by a “serious deterioration in the quality of democracy under leader Narendra Modi”.[1]
Sweden’s university-based Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-DEM) ranks India even lower, at 101st in the world
for electoral democracy (two places above Myanmar) and ninety-seventh in the world for liberal democracy (one
place above Papua New Guinea). Indeed, it claims that India is no longer a liberal democracy at all, but is now an
“electoral autocracy” on a par with Russia.[2] �e American government-funded think-tank Freedom House now
considers India to be only “partially free”, with an overall freedom rank of tied-eighty-�fth in the world. It lists the
Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir as “unfree”.[3]

Whether or not these evaluations are credible, they have the power to shape popular perceptions, and ultimately to
in�uence international a�airs. Governments in major democracies like the United States, the United Kingdom, the
European Union, and indeed Australia generally seek to conduct moral foreign policies, and frequently come under
pressure to reduce co-operation with countries that are widely perceived to be violating democratic norms. Should
India come to be seen as an “autocracy” that is only “partially free”, it might become more di�cult for Western
governments to co-operate with India on global and regional security. For example, the “Quad” alignment of
Australia, India, Japan and the United States is based on a “shared values” narrative that includes a commitment to
“the principles of freedom, rule of law, [and] democratic values”.[4] To the extent that India comes to be perceived
as falling short on these principles, Western support for Quad co-operation may decline.

Such consequences would be well deserved—if they are grounded in reality. If Narendra Modi and the BJP really
are the barbarians at the gate of Indian democracy, assaulting the country’s liberal institutions from within and
transforming the country into a Russian-style “electoral autocracy”, Western governments certainly should become
more wary of co-operating with India. If, however, the academics, intellectuals and think-tankers who sta� the
major rankings providers are themselves the barbarians at the gate, maligning a poor but proud country in a bid to
impose their own parochial political positions, then a moral reckoning is in order. Ordinary non-Indians, even
parliamentarians and business leaders who are not speci�cally focused on Indian a�airs, cannot realistically be
expected to form their own, independent evaluations of Indian democracy. �ey must rely on the opinions of
credible experts, and they inevitably turn to establishment organisations like the EIU, V-DEM and Freedom House
for insightful, impartial advice. Any abuse of that trust in the pursuit of partisan or particularist interests would call
into question the entire practice of rating democracies.

�ere is no such thing as an “objective” democracy ranking, and indeed concepts like democracy and freedom admit
of many di�erent meanings. But in publishing sensational downgradings of the world’s largest democracy, these
organisations are aware that their ratings will be widely reported—and subjected to intense scrutiny. Accordingly,
each of the major rankings organisations publishes narrative justi�cations alongside their quantitative scores. In view
of the fact that these narratives have been used to substantiate controversially negative rankings, it seems safe to
assume that the organisations will have picked out the most damning illustrative facts to serve as documentation for
their evaluations. �e narrative justi�cations that appear alongside India’s rankings can thus be used to test the face
validity of those rankings. A few shocking incidents in a country of 1.4 billion people do not necessarily add up to
an assault on democracy, but a lack of any truly compelling evidence of democratic backsliding in a country of 1.4
billion people would suggest that the negative rankings are, in fact, disingenuous.

�e democracy rankings marketplace is crowded, with dozens of organisations competing for the attention of the
world’s media. �e EIU, V-DEM and Freedom House are by far the most prominent rankings, with the �rst two
speci�cally focusing on democracy (and its components) while Freedom House produces freedom scores that have
long been used in academic research as a proxy for democracy. All three organisations have been staunchly critical of
the BJP and the role it plays in Indian politics, and the narrative justi�cations that accompany each of the rankings
feature speci�c examples of ways in which the BJP has undermined Indian democracy. �ese pro�ered examples
must, if taken to be typical representations of India’s political reality, bear the burden of justifying the shrill language
of the three organisations’ alarming appraisals of the state of Indian democracy.

�e Economist Intelligence Unit

�e EIU is the research and consulting arm of the �rm that publishes the Economist magazine. Its link to the
magazine gives it the widest reach of the major international democracy-ranking organisations. �e magazine has
taken a strong editorial stance against India’s current BJP government, running collectively-authored articles under
headlines like “Narendra Modi �reatens to Turn India into a One-Party State” (November 28, 2020) and “�e
Organs of India’s Democracy Are Decaying” (February 12, 2022). �e EIU’s rating of Indian democracy reached an
all-time low in 2021, when the organisation warned of “democratic backsliding under the leadership of Narendra
Modi … whose policies have fomented anti-Muslim feeling and religious strife [and] damaged the political fabric of
the country”. As primary evidence to support this claim, the EIU cited “the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019
[CAA] … [which] introduces a religious element to the conceptualisation of Indian citizenship, a step that many
critics see as undermining the secular basis of the Indian state”.[5]

�e CAA created a path to citizenship for non-Muslim religious refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and
Pakistan. All three of these countries are Islamic republics in which Islam is the o�cial state religion and non-
Muslims face serious o�cial or societal persecution. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the threats faced by non-Muslims
are constant and extreme; in Bangladesh, they are episodic but nonetheless serious. Prima facie, it seems quite
sensible for India to grant blanket protection to non-Muslim immigrants from countries where non-Muslims are
widely persecuted, but to continue to require Muslim immigrants from those countries to give speci�c evidence of
persecution in order to qualify for asylum. It is hard to see why Muslim immigrants from o�cially Muslim countries
should automatically qualify for refugee status upon immigration to India.

�e other major issue raised by the EIU in 2021 was the fact that “Mr Modi participated in a ground-breaking
ceremony for a Hindu temple on the site of a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh”.[6] �e EIU
correctly noted that the mosque had been “destroyed by a Hindu nationalist mob in 1992”—and it might have
added that the BJP governed the state of Uttar Pradesh at that time. But although the destruction of Babri Masjid
thirty years ago was clearly illegal, the BJP took no action towards building a Hindu temple (the Ram Mandir) on
the site until India’s Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the land (which had been the subject of a legal dispute since
the nineteenth century) should be handed over to a Hindu trust. �e illegal destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992
was indeed a historical crime, but there seems to be no clear reason why Modi should not have taken part in the
legally-sanctioned ground-breaking for the Ram Mandir in 2020.

�e EIU’s 2021 report also cited “erosion of civil liberties” during the coronavirus pandemic, but this was hardly
limited to India.

In its 2022 report, the EIU found a slight improvement in the quality of India’s democracy, citing “year-long
protests by farmers [that] eventually forced the government to repeal the farm laws that it had introduced in
2020”.[7] �is seems to show the EIU taking a political position on agricultural policy. �e EIU explained that “the
victory of the protesters, as well as some election defeats for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, showed that there are
mechanisms and institutions in place to allow government accountability to the electorate between national
elections”. �is assumes that the protesting farmers represented the opinion of the national electorate, an empirical
claim that is far from certain.[8] As for the implication that BJP electoral defeats demonstrate democracy in action,
the EIU seems to be unaware that the BJP holds only 303 of the 543 seats in the lower house of India’s parliament
(the Lok Sabha) and 91 of 245 seats in the upper house (the Rajya Sabha). India’s politics are highly competitive,
and although the BJP is currently the country’s governing party, its proportional hold on power is in line with that
of governing parties in other liberal democracies.

Finally, the 2022 EIU report notes that “the government’s failure to crack down on the persecution of religious and
other minorities by Hindu nationalists continues to weigh on India’s democracy score”. �is is a reasonable
criticism, but one that is couched in somewhat odd language. It implies that the EIU would be favourably impressed
by a government “cracking down” on its own citizens. It is not at all clear that India’s national government
systematically tolerates the persecution of religious minorities in India, although a close reading of the Indian news
does suggest that some state and local governments (not all of them run by the BJP) may tolerate, or even foster,
mob violence. No doubt the national government could do more to ensure justice for all, and it seems reasonable to
demand that the national BJP put more pressure on state and local branches to ensure the equal protection of the
law.
�e Varieties of Democracy Institute

�e V-DEM rankings are produced by the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg in
Sweden. Its academic origins and support from major scienti�c grants bodies like the European Research Council
and the US National Science Foundation give it a reputation for independence and objectivity. As a result, its
rankings have been integrated into semi-o�cial statistics produced by organisations like USAID and the World
Bank. �e last time V-DEM published a country brief focused on India was 2016, two years after the current BJP
government gained o�ce. �is brief only covered developments in Indian democracy through 2014, and mentioned
neither Narendra Modi nor the BJP.[9] �e 2017 V-DEM annual report brie�y raised concerns about India, but it
was the 2018 report that elevated these to the level of a two-page focus section, with Modi’s India being identi�ed
alongside Donald Trump’s America as “backsliders on democracy”.[10] �e 2020 V-DEM report similarly classed
India as a problem country, claiming that “India has continued on a path of steep decline, to the extent it has almost
lost its status as a democracy”.[11]

It was, however, the 2021 V-DEM report that sensationally reclassi�ed India as an “electoral autocracy”, with the
transition found retroactively to have occurred in 2019 (the year of the BJP’s re-election to a second term).[12] In
this report, V-DEM rated the quality of India’s democracy in 2019 and 2020 on a par with the level recorded
between 1975 and 1977. �is was the period called the “Emergency”, during which Indira Gandhi’s Indian
National Congress government suspended elections, ruled by decree, o�cially censored the press, jailed opponents
without charge, outlawed opposition organisations, banned labour strikes and introduced a forced sterilisation
program. Perhaps recognising that this comparison took the criticism of present-day India a bit too far, the 2022
V-DEM report mentioned India only in passing (although India’s low scores remained in place). A textual analysis
of the explanation of V-DEM’s India ranking must thus focus on the 2021 report, which included a two-page
special section on India.[13]

In reclassifying India as an “electoral autocracy”, V-DEM focused in particular on a decline in “the autonomy of the
election management body”, the Election Commission of India (ECI). �e V-DEM report did not provide any
details to back up this claim, and a search of India’s major media turned up few allegations of ECI malfeasance. �e
most serious complaint against the ECI was a 2019 open letter signed by a group of sixty-six retired civil servants
decrying “the ECI’s pusillanimity in coming down with a heavy hand” on alleged BJP violations of election law.[14]
�e speci�c allegations made by these o�cials were (1) that Modi had announced a successful weapons test during
the campaign period, (2) that a biographical documentary complimentary of Modi had been released during the
campaign period, (3) that a private broadcaster had aired a television series complimentary of Modi, (4) that a
private cable television service had added a pro-Modi news channel to its basic service package, and (5) to (9) that
further questionable statements and decisions had been made by BJP-a�liated o�cials on various technical points,
without being penalised by the ECI. Although vehemently opposed to the BJP, the signatories alleged no serious
violations of election procedures.

�e V-DEM report went on to decry “the diminishing of freedom of expression, the media, and civil society”. To
support this claim, V-DEM noted that “over 7,000 people have been charged with sedition after the BJP assumed
power and most of the accused are critics of the ruling party”. Sedition laws are a controversial topic in India, and
few outsiders have any knowledge of their role in the Indian justice system. In India, almost anyone can “charge”
someone with sedition by �ling a First Information Report (FIR). Despite the large number of FIRs �led, only 399
sedition cases have actually been �led by prosecutors since the BJP came to o�ce in 2014, not all of them in BJP-
administered states. Relatively few of these have resulted in convictions.[15]

Whatever the merit of these cases, it should be noted that the number of sedition FIRs (the focus of V-DEM’s
criticism) has been relatively constant over time. �e source cited by V-DEM as documentation claimed that “of the
11,000 people accused of sedition in the past decade [construed as the eleven years 2010–2020], nearly two thirds of
charges have been �led since 2014, when Modi was �rst elected prime minister”.[16] A close analysis of the
underlying data reveals the reason for the odd construction of eleven years as a “decade”. When the conventional
de�nition of a decade is used (2011 to 2020), it turns out that 66 per cent of FIRs were �led during the BJP’s time
in government, which constituted 66 per cent of the decade.[17] Considering the alternative period 2010 to 2019 as
the relevant decade, 48 per cent of FIRs were �led during the BJP’s time in government, which constituted 56 per
cent of the decade. In short, there has been no increase of FIRs under the BJP’s watch.

Along similarly obfuscatory lines, V-DEM claimed that the “law on defamation … has been used frequently to
silence journalists and news outlets that take exception to policies of the BJP government”. A 2016 report from
Human Rights Watch was cited in support of this claim. �at report itself cited a series of cases from 2002, 2012
and 2013—that is, before the BJP took o�ce.[18]

A more serious allegation is that the government has used “the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) … to
harass, intimidate, and imprison political opponents”. Of the four sources cited in support of this claim, one did not
mention the UAPA. A second merely demanded that activists accused under the UAPA be released in response to
the risk of contracting coronavirus in prison. A third complained that “nine prominent human rights activists …
[were] accused of being members of a banned Maoist organisation and of inciting violent protests”.[19] �is source
noted that the activists had been previously arrested on similar charges in 2013—before the BJP took o�ce. �e
fourth criticised the arrest of “several scholars accused of a�liations with Communist Party of India (Maoist) … a
group banned under the UAPA in 2009”—before the BJP took o�ce, although the arrests occurred in 2020.[20]

Finally, the V-DEM report claimed that “civil society is also being muzzled in the autocratisation process” through
the use of the “Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA) to restrict the entry, exit and functioning of Civil
Society Organisations”. �e FCRA was passed in 2010 (four years before the BJP took o�ce) but was amended in
2020. �e main purpose of the amendment was to require �ling organisations to disclose the national identi�cation
numbers of their o�cers. Like many countries (including Australia and the United States), India closely regulates
the use of foreign funds by domestic civil society organisations. Whether or not India’s foreign contribution
regulations are too tight is a matter for debate, but considering that the main substance of the FCRA was in force
before the BJP took o�ce, it cannot realistically be considered evidence of democratic backsliding that the current
government has improved the administration and enforcement of this existing law.

Freedom House

Freedom House is a quasi-o�cial Washington think-tank that is primarily funded by the US government. It has
published an annual report, Freedom in the World, since 1973, originally rating countries’ political rights and civil
liberties on scales that ran from 1 (most free) to 7 (least free). For several decades, these were the only
comprehensive democracy-related indicators available, and so the average of countries’ Freedom House political
rights and civil liberties ratings came to be used as a rough-and-ready proxy for the quality of democracy. In 2014,
Freedom House started publishing the detailed numerical data behind its ratings, yielding an informal index that
runs from 0 to 100 points. India’s score on this index was relatively stable throughout the BJP’s �rst term in o�ce,
bouncing between 75 and 78 points, but dropped precipitously after the 2019 election, bottoming out at 66 points
in 2022. �at corresponded to an international rankings drop from tied-seventy-seventh to tied-eighty-�fth in the
world. Interestingly, America’s own democracy ranking on this US-government-funded index is only tied-�fty-
seventh, below Argentina, Mongolia and all of Western Europe.

�e Freedom House score is based on a system that awards up to four points on each of twenty-�ve di�erent
dimensions, with the Freedom in the World report providing narrative feedback on each dimension. In 2022, India
was awarded full marks (4/4) on �ve dimensions and strong marks (3/4) on an additional six dimensions. On each
of the remaining fourteen dimensions it received an evaluation of 2 out of 4. Focusing on these laggard dimensions,
the �rst criticism raised by Freedom House is that “Muslim candidates notably won twenty-seven of 545 seats in
the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, up from twenty-two previously. However, this amounted to just 5 per cent of the
seats in the chamber, whereas Muslims make up some 14 per cent of the population”.[21] Even if it is taken for
granted that equal religious representation is a desirable goal, the increase should be seen as a sign of improvement,
not of regression. Freedom House continues with a claim that “the political rights of India’s Muslims continue to be
threatened” by the CAA and the creation of a national registry of citizens. Freedom House notes that “many
observers believe that the register’s purpose is to disenfranchise Muslim voters by e�ectively classifying them as
illegal immigrants”. �is suggests that Freedom House has proactively downgraded India on suggestions that it
might disenfranchise Muslims in the future.

A more serious set of charges relating to the status of India’s minority Muslim population is concerned with
freedom of religion and equal protection of the laws. Freedom House acknowledged that “the Indian state is
formally secular, and freedom of religion is constitutionally guaranteed”, but expressed reservations about laws
against cow slaughter and forced religious conversion. On its face, there is nothing here to violate freedom of
religion, and indeed the laws against forced conversion could be taken to represent a strengthening of secular values.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that, in the Indian context, both of these policy initiatives are directed at Muslims,
even if the laws themselves may be right and proper. Freedom House further notes that “In parts of the country,
particularly in rural areas, informal community councils issue edicts concerning social customs” that may
discriminate against women and minority groups. While this is undoubtedly a potential problem, it is not a problem
that has arisen in recent years. If anything, increasing rural development, education, electri�cation and road building
are likely to be diminishing these historical discriminatory practices, not exacerbating them.

A second set of serious charges against Indian democracy involves the suggestion that “journalists risk harassment,
death threats, and physical violence in the course of their work”. Here Freedom House cites �gures from the
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) showing that �ve journalists were killed in India in 2021, “the highest �gure
for any country”. Referring to the CPJ’s own data, India’s �ve journalist deaths represented 11 per cent of the world
total.[22] Yet India constitutes 18 per cent of the world’s population, and 21 per cent of the world’s population
outside China—whose journalist deaths are not included in the CPJ data. �is implies that journalists may in fact
be safer in India than elsewhere, particularly in other developing countries.

Along similar lines, Freedom House alleges that “academic freedom has signi�cantly weakened in recent years, as
intimidation of professors, students, and institutions over political and religious issues has increased”. �is is
di�cult to quantify, and claims of declining academic freedom are a perennial feature of university life. An
investigation by Times Higher Education highlighted anecdotal accounts of declining academic freedom in India, but
cited only one concrete case: a dispute over whether or not civil service rules against government employee
participation in political protest apply to academics.[23]

With regard to freedom of assembly, Freedom House deplored the suspension of “mobile and internet service to
curb protests in recent years”, which is certainly a cause for concern. In the Indian context, these information
blackouts seem to have been used as an alternative to direct confrontation with protesters. In a country where deadly
riots have always been a common feature of public life, it is arguably pragmatic to turn o� communications in an
e�ort to prevent violence. From the standpoint of democracy evaluation, however, it must be admitted that such
suspensions do curtail both political rights and civil liberties.

Freedom House further criticises India for strengthening FCRA enforcement (covered above), for the fact that
“several key Supreme Court rulings in recent years have been favorable to the BJP”, for not making su�cient
progress in reducing corruption, for not making su�cient progress in suppressing violent insurgencies, for lack of
support for migrant workers during the coronavirus emergency, for widespread domestic violence, for the
persistence of child labour, and for the death in custody (of natural causes) of an eighty-four-year-old Jesuit priest
who had been arrested on charges of supporting terrorism. It is not clear how any of these are directly related to
political rights or civil liberties. In any case, Freedom House does not claim that these problems have substantially
worsened over the last three years, the period when it claims India fell down the scale from “free” to only “partially
free”.

Challenges and reform

Everyone knows that India is the world’s largest democracy. Few realise that it is one of the world’s oldest. When
India was born a democracy in 1947, fewer than a dozen countries had well-institutionalised, continuously
functioning democratic governments. In the list of countries with unbroken records of free and fair elections under
the rule of law, India’s seventy-�ve years actually make it one of the oldest in the world. Even the period of the
Emergency (1975 to 1977) did not technically break India’s record of democracy; it was declared in accordance with
India’s Constitution, and elections held towards the end of the Emergency saw Gandhi swept from o�ce in a
landslide defeat.

Even fewer people realise that India is by far the world’s poorest democracy to have achieved a meaningful record of
repeated elections and peaceful transitions of power. In fact, India is the only major post-colonial state to have
remained a democracy throughout its period of independence. Yet India’s GDP per capita is only slightly higher
than the average for sub-Saharan Africa, and at the time Modi took o�ce in 2014 it was actually lower than sub-
Saharan Africa’s. Many of the attributes of Indian society that appear from the perspective of Washington, London
or Gothenburg to be failures of democracy may actually re�ect the challenges of maintaining order in a low-resource
environment. To cite one relatively trivial example, V-DEM downgrades India’s score on its “egalitarian democracy”
scale because India’s social programs tend to be targeted to help the neediest, whereas the political scientists at the
V-DEM Institute consider universal social welfare programs to be more inclusive. But would universal social
programs really be more “democratic” for a poor country like India? �e answer is not obvious.

�e need for a frank reassessment of Indian democracy is real. �e social exclusion of Muslims—to be speci�c, of
poor Muslims—in India is a serious problem, and one that should be addressed. Prime Minister Modi is generally
careful to be inclusive in his public statements, but some BJP politicians at lower levels are culpable of using
blatantly anti-Muslim rhetoric.[24] Nonetheless, the international assumption that all Muslims are estranged from
the BJP is a lazy generalisation. Survey data from America’s highly-respected Pew Research Center show that 19
per cent of India’s Muslims actually voted for BJP candidates in the 2019 national elections, which is all the more
impressive in light of the fact that only 49 per cent of the country’s Hindus voted for the supposedly “Hindu
nationalist” BJP.[25] Mr Modi has recently made the recruitment of poor Muslims to the BJP an electoral
priority.[26] While many anti-Modi political commentators have responded to Modi’s Muslim outreach with
scepticism, this is certainly a move that should be applauded by neutral observers.

Although India does face many challenges, the stridently negative appraisals of Indian democracy published by the
three major democracy rating organisations seem wildly disproportionate to the actual evidence marshalled to
support them. In several instances, they smack of intentional deceit. Given that all three organisations rely heavily
on expert evaluations, it is di�cult to escape the suggestion that they may have unwittingly (or perhaps even
wittingly) been drawn into taking sides in India’s domestic politics. It is well established that intellectuals
overwhelmingly hold liberal and socialist (as opposed to conservative) political a�liations, and that this bias is
strongest among the elite humanities scholars and social scientists who are likely to populate the expert pool for
democracy evaluations.[27] India’s BJP is not only conservative in orientation, but generally perceived to be
religious, nationalist and anti-intellectual. It would come as no surprise if the pool of experts who were asked by the
EIU, V-DEM and Freedom House to evaluate Indian democracy strongly preferred other parties over the BJP.

No expert is unbiased, and it is inevitable that any properly credentialled pool of democracy experts would be
disproportionately atheist, internationalist, pro-intellectual and of a liberal or socialist bent. But experts have a
responsibility to strive for objectivity by being aware of their biases and consciously struggling to overcome them.
�e narrative justi�cations that accompany the international rankings of Indian democracy show little evidence of
such humble re�exivity. Instead, they are su�used with wanton speculation, misleading statistics, and uncritical
reproductions of activist accusations. It is entirely appropriate to criticise Indian democracy for its faults and to urge
positive reforms, but to argue (as V-DEM does) that in 2021 India was substantially less democratic than such
troubled countries as Argentina, Armenia, South Africa and Sri Lanka is patently absurd. �e lack of any
compelling case against Indian democracy re�ects very poorly on all three of the major international democracy
rating organisations. �ey are the true barbarians at the India gate.

Salvatore Babones is an associate professor at the University of Sydney. His 2013 bookMethods for Quantitative
Macro-Comparative Research is a standard source for the statistical analysis of international comparisons. His
current academic research focuses on the political sociology of authoritarianism.

[1] Economist Intelligence Unit, 2022, Democracy Index 2021: �e China Challenge.

[2] V-DEM Institute, 2022, Democracy Report 2022: Autocratization Changing Nature?

[3] Freedom House, 2022, Freedom in the World 2022.

[4] Prime Minister of Australia, 2022, “Quad Joint Leaders” Statement”, May 24.

[5] Economist Intelligence Unit, 2021, Democracy Index 2020: In Sickness and in Health?

[6] Economist Intelligence Unit, 2021, Democracy Index 2020: In Sickness and in Health?

[7] Economist Intelligence Unit, 2022, Democracy Index 2021: �e China Challenge.

[8] Salvatore Babones, 2021, “India’s Rich Farmers Are Holding Up Reforms Designed to Help the Poor”, Foreign
Policy, March 30.

[9] Valeriya Mechkova and Sta�an I. Lindberg, 2016, “Country Brief: India”, Varieties of Democracy Institute,
University of Gothenburg.

[10] V-DEM Institute, 2018, Democracy Report 2018: Democracy for All?

[11] V-DEM Institute, 2020, Democracy Report 2020: Autocratization Surges—Resistance Grows.

[12] V-DEM Institute, 2021, Democracy Report 2021: Autocratization Turns Viral.

[13] V-DEM Institute, 2021, Democracy Report 2021: Autocratization Turns Viral.

[14] “Letter to Hon”ble President of India”, 2019, constitutionalconduct.com.

[15] Deeptiman Tiwary, 2022, “399 Sedition Cases since 2014, Pendency High”, Indian Express, May 31.

[16] Samar Halarnkar, 2021, “India Is Turning to Colonial-Era Laws to Silence Journalists”, OpenDemocracy,
February 3.
[17] Article14, undated, “A Decade in Darkness”, article-14.com.

[18] Jayshree Bajoria, 2016, “How India’s Archaic Laws Have a Chilling E�ect on Dissent”, Human Rights Watch,
May 24.

[19] Human Rights Watch, 2020, “India: Events of 2019”, World Report 2020.

[20] Scholars at Risk Network, 2020, Free to �ink: Report of the Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring
Project.

[21] Freedom House, 2022, “India”, Freedom in the World 2022.

[22] Committee to Protect Journalists, 2021, “45 Journalists and Media Workers Killed”, cpj.org.

[23] Pola Lem, 2022, “Scholars “Reprimanded by Universities” for Criticising Indian Government”, Times Higher
Education, July 20.

[24] Alishan Jafri, 2022, “As UP Polls Continue, BJP MLAs Dial Up Anti-Muslim Hate Speeches”, �e Wire,
February 18.

[25] Jonathan Evans, 2021, “In India, Hindu Support for Modi’s Party Varies by Region and Is Tied to Beliefs
about Diet and Language, Pew Research Center, August 5.

[26] Rakesh Mohan Chaturvedi, 2022, “PM Modi Reaches Out to Pasmanda Muslims; Asks Cadre not to Make
Mistakes of Opposition”, Economic Times, July 3.

[27] Mitchell Langbert, 2018, “Homogenous: �e Political A�liations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty”,
Academic Questions, National Association of Scholars.

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