Not published by India Today
The effectiveness of ECI in conducting a free
and fair poll is far more significant than realised; any mistake will have far
reaching consequences, endangering India’s democracy itself
In 2007, historian and author
Ramachandra Guha wrote in India after
Gandhi: The History of the World's
Largest Democracy that India is a 50-50 democracy. He wrote: “It mostly is (a
democracy) when it comes to holding elections and permitting freedom of
movement and expression. It mostly is not when it comes to the functioning of
politicians and political institutions.”
In 2016, he was saying: “My
worry is that we are not so much an electoral democracy as much as an
elections-only democracy. You win an election and you think you are immune to
criticism for the next five years. That was true of the UPA and that was true
of the NDA.”[1]
Yet, he still held that as a democracy India was “perhaps only 50 percent”.
India: A ‘flawed democracy’?
Guha is not far off the mark.
A free and fair election is India’s biggest marker of democracy.
The Economist Intelligence
Unit (EIU)’s democracy index has been providing a broad picture of the state of
democracy worldwide for 165 states since 2006. It measures the state of
democracy on five parameters – electoral process and pluralism, functioning of
government, political participation, political culture and civil liberties – and
classifies countries into four types: full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime
and authoritarian regime.
India falls in the category
of ‘flawed democracy’.
Its score (on a scale of 0 to
10) has remained the same (7.23) for the past two years, 2017 (ranked 42) and
2018 (ranked 41).
Among the five parameters, India scored the highest – a near perfect 9.17 – in ‘electoral process and pluralism’ as is shown in the table below.
In 2017, India witnessed a
drastic fall by 10 places – from 32nd to 42nd to place – which the EIU
explained in these words: “The rise of conservative religious ideologies also
affected India. The strengthening of right-wing Hindu forces in an otherwise
secular country led to a rise of vigilantism and violence against minority communities,
particularly Muslims, as well as other dissenting voices.”[2]
If plotted in a chart, India’s
democratic index graph since 2006 looks as the following.
‘Decline of democracy in India’ and creeping autocratization
The V-Dem dataset (of Gothenburg
University’s V-Dem Institute) on the health of democracies in the world is considered
one of the most rigorous and comprehensive one. Its latest report, Democracy for All?: V-Dem Annual Democracy
Report 2018,[3]
has a chapter on India headlined:
“The Decline of Democracy in India”.
It says India is “at risk”
not only because its “level of democracy has declined significantly over the
last decade, particularly concerning freedom of speech and alternative source
of information, civil society, the rule of law and some electoral prospects” but
also that “autocratization is now manifesting” here, along with some others like
Brazil, Russia, Turkey and the US.
It points out that “much of
these changes have taken place after the Bharatiya Janata Party won the Parliamentary
elections in 2014...”
V-Dem measures democracies
through five indices – deliberative democracy index, egalitarian democracy
index, electoral democracy index, liberal democracy index and participatory
democracy index. A graph plotting the data for each index from its database –
from 1900 to 2018 – is reproduced below.
As is evident, barring the
1975-77 Emergency years in the post-independence era, all indices are on a
nosedive. In fact, all the indices are very close to what obtained during the
Emergency years of 1975-77.
In this dataset too, India
scores the highest in the ‘electoral democracy index’ with a score of 0.56
(closer to 1 reflects better performance) while others range between 0.33
(egalitarian democracy index) to 0.42 (liberal democracy index).
How democracies die or survive
Two
Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have been teaching about
failures of democracy in Europe and Latin America and new forms of
authoritarianism around the world.
In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, they observe that most democratic breakdowns post-Cold War have been caused by the elected governments through subversion of democratic institutions, unlike classic coup d’état of the past.
They
say erosion of democracy takes place piecemeal, often in baby steps. Each
individual step seems minor – none appears to truly threaten democracy. And,
therefore, there may not be a single moment and the society’s alarm bell may
not ring.
They
argue that not all democracies have fallen into the trap of electing autocrats.
Some democracies defended themselves successfully, like Belgium, Britain, Costa
Rica and Finland at some or other time in their recent history.
What
saved them? The Harvard professors talk of two factors: (a) political parties played
democracy’s gatekeepers and (b) basic norms of the society (“Some of history’s
most tragic democratic breakdowns were preceded by the degrading of basic norms”).
By
‘basic norms’ they mean (i) “mutual tolerance” or the understanding that
competing political parties accept one another as legitimate rivals and (ii) “forbearance”
or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their
institutional prerogatives.
They
wrote that in America these ‘basic norms’ have weakened since 1980s.
They didn’t write about India. But discernible observers will note a similarity in recent years with the ‘basic norms’ falling like nine pins, particularly in the run up to and during the on-going poll campaign.
While a free and fair election is not the panacea for all that may ail India’s democracy, it remains a very critical factor. No wonder the Supreme Court has, in several of its orders relating to the electoral laws (Representation of the People Act of 1951) insisted on maintaining the “purity of the electoral process” – free of unhealthy practices.[4]
The
Election Commission of India (ECI) would do well to keep that in mind.
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