India is Now an “Electoral Autocracy” as Definition of “Democracy” Continues to Get More Confusing

Indians collectively became super gang-rapey around the time Modi was elected, which I’m sure is just a coincidence

It’s really easy to misunderstand the term “democracy.” People think that it means “the people vote for who they want,” but it actually implies a set of values, which are constantly shifting.

If people in a country vote against these shifting values, that country is “against democracy.”

Ultimately, India is being granted permission to have a nationalist leader, because globalists are attempting to stir up anti-China hysteria. But they want to make it clear to everyone that this is a special case, and no one else is allowed to have nationalism just because India does.

BBC:

India’s democracy is taking a rankings battering these days.

For a country which prides itself as the world’s largest democracy, this is troubling news.
So what’s going on?

Earlier this month, in its annual report on global political rights and liberties, US-based non-profit Freedom House downgraded India from a free democracy to a “partially free democracy”.

Related: Freedom House Says India is Now Only “Partly Free” Because of Nationalist Leader

Last week, Sweden-based V-Dem Institute was harsher in its latest report on democracy. It said India had become an “electoral autocracy”. And last month, India, described as a “flawed democracy”, slipped two places to 53rd position in the latest Democracy Index published by The Economist Intelligence Unit.

The rankings blame Mr Modi and his Hindu nationalist BJP government for the backsliding of democracy. Under Mr Modi’s watch, they say, there has been increased pressure on human rights groups, intimidation of journalists and activists, and a spate of attacks, especially against Muslims. This, they add, has led to a deterioration of political and civil liberties in the country.

Freedom House said civil liberties have been in decline since Mr Modi came to power in 2014, and that India’s “fall from the upper ranks of free nations” could have a more damaging effect on the world’s democratic standards.

V-Dem said the “diminishing of freedom of expression, the media, and civil society have gone the furthest” during Mr Modi’s rule, and that far as censorship goes India was “as autocratic as Pakistan and worse than its neighbours Bangladesh and Nepal”.

This NGO is not run by a Jew but by a Swede, which is arguably worse

And The Democracy Index said the “democratic backsliding” by authorities and “crackdowns” on civil liberties had led to a decline in India’s rankings. Mr Modi’s policies, it said, had “fomented anti-Muslim feeling and religious strife and damaged the political fabric of the country”.
How has India’s government reacted?

Not surprisingly, the flurry of downgrades have riled Mr Modi’s government and cast a shadow on the global image of India’s democracy.

Really?

People all over the Western world, who are being locked in their houses and banned from inviting other people into their houses, are sitting around gazing at a shadow over India’s democracy?

How is this arbitrary nonsense useful to anyone?

The BBC interviewed someone who admitted that this is just a subjective academic designation that doesn’t affect anyone’s life.

Rohan Mukherjee, an assistant professor of political science, at Yale-NUS College, says these rankings are useful for research and identifying very broad trends that academics are interested in.

“They are unhelpful if one wants to minutely parse differences in scores from one year to the next, or between countries with very similar scores,” he told me.

Some of this also gets to the heart of how we define democracy and who gets to define democracy.

Prof Mukherjee says most non-academics would be incredulous that a handful of research assistants and country experts get to decide that a country is an “electoral autocracy” while hundreds of millions of that country’s citizens would disagree.

“So really this is an instance of academic discourse and concepts operating at a considerable distance from lived experience. The operational concepts across the two domains are very different.”

Democracy in the V-Dem dataset, says Prof Mukherjee, has a precise and multi-faceted definition, many aspects of which the vast majority of Indians do not keep in their heads as they go about their lives and think about the political system in which they live.

“That’s not to say that their experience is any less valid, but it explains the disconnect,” he says.

“Lived experience” in this context means “actual life.”

These metrics are simply designed to force a certain situation on people. Nothing about it is objectively linked to people’s general understanding of what the word “freedom” means.