Governance should engage people for leap of faith

GS Bajpai

Professor, National Law University, Delhi

INDIA'S ranking in the Economic Intelligence Unit’s annual Democracy Index has received a level of attention this year that it rarely did ever before. In the current political climate, where debates about India’s democratic processes have gained centre stage, the news of India’s ranking on the Index dropping from 41 to 52 is particularly disconcerting. Responses to this news have ranged from outright dismissal of partisan journalism to stern warnings about India’s descent into authoritarianism. Rarely, however, has there been a reasoned attempt to analyse the potential causes of this decline or to search for solutions.

The Democracy Index has been published on an annual basis by the Economist Group’s Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU) since 2006. There are several indicators on which the performance of all the countries is assessed. Some of them include indices like government functioning, political participation, political culture and liberties. The Index then also categorises these countries into full, flawed, hybrid and authoritarian regimes, based on how they perform. Since the inception of the index, India has been categorised as a ‘flawed democracy’. Our scores, however, have varied significantly across the years in all of the five categories.

In fact, India’s progression on the Democracy Index can be divided into two phases — the ‘rise’ from 2006 to 2014 and the ‘fall’ post-2014. In the first era, after some initial inconsistency, India’s score on the Index rose steadily from 7.28 in 2010 to a historic high of 7.92 in 2014. This came with a commensurate increase in ranking from 40 to 27. The year 2014, in this regard, was a landmark with unprecedented levels of public engagement with democratic processes. Post-2014, however, things changed drastically. With the exception of 2016, our score on the Democratic Index fell every year, with particularly sharp drops in 2015 and 2017.

Comparing India’s performance in these two eras yields several interesting lessons. First, civil liberties is the biggest area of concern for the Indian democracy with every significant drop in our ranking in the DI coinciding with comparable drops in our scores in this category. Prior to 2014, the increase in scores was powered, in part, by a consistently high score of 9.41 in this category. Our score in this category dropped to 9.12 for the first time in 2015 as a result of increasingly centralised rule. This resulted in our ranking dropping from 27 to 35.

The second drop, from 9.12 to 7.35, occurred in 2017 as a result of restrictions on freedom of speech, violence against journalists and the rise of right-wing ideologies leading to increased vigilantism and violence against minorities. India’s overall rank fell to 42 in this year. The third drop occurred this year, with our score going down from 7.35 to 6.76, primarily due to the controversies surrounding the revocation of Article 370 and the implementation of National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam.

Second, while the EIU’s analysis has always given primacy to civil liberties, the category of electoral processes and pluralism has also become a concern over the last few years. Our score in this category remained a high 9.58 for a decade before dropping to 9.17 for the first time in 2017. This was a year that saw both the Presidential and Vice-

Presidential elections as well as seven state legislative assembly elections. The second drop occurred this year with our score getting reduced from 9.17 to 8.67. The electoral processes and pluralism category measures the fairness, robustness and transparency of electoral processes. This includes the presence of multiple viable candidates that can compete on an equal footing. The last few years, however, have seen the gradual decimation of political opposition to the incumbent government resulting in what amounts to a single-party rule. Where coalition governments are formed, they are fraught with controversies such as in the Goa and Manipur elections in 2017 and the Maharashtra election in 2019. Numerous instances of defection and controversies around funding of political parties have further worsened the situation.

Third, India’s overall performance in the functioning of government category has declined with advances made in any year being immediately lost in the next year. In fact, this is the only category that saw a net decrease in scores in both the pre- and post- 2014 eras. Effective and corruption-free governance was a key electoral promise of the Modi government, both in the 2014 and 2019 elections. This promise initially seemed to have been borne out with our performance in this category increasing dramatically in 2016. However, 2017 saw a sharp fall in scores from 7.50 to 6.79 as a result of widespread protests by the farmers, the continued after-effects of demonetisation and dissatisfaction in several quarters with the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime as major factors.

Fourth, India’s performance is weakest in the political participation and political culture categories with our highest scores across all the years being 7.22 and 6.25. The year 2014 also saw our best performance in these categories, likely as a result of the popular push for a regime change and high hopes for the new government. Political participation scores rose to 7.22 and stayed at that level till 2018. However, in 2019, this score fell to 6.67. Taken together, our scores in this category present a grim picture — at a time when other aspects of our democracy are in need of attention, the Indian public seems to be disengaging with democratic institutions. More importantly, it shows that despite the ideals laid down in our Constitution, despite the Supreme Court jurisprudence, despite popular rhetoric, the Indian public has yet to place full faith in democracy itself.

Analysing these trends makes it clear that the fall in India’s ranking in 2019 is not an isolated or anomalous event but the result of a continuous downward spiral caused by stagnation in political culture and decreased performance in all other categories. It is also important to note that the reduction in India’s score is a part of a global pattern of what has been termed as a ‘democratic regression’ by experts. In 2019, the world average reduced from 5.48 in 2018 to 5.44. Further, out of the 165 countries surveyed, a 102 showed either reduced or stagnant scores. However, EIU reports have been noting a decline in democratic institutions and practices in countries across the globe since 2006 itself.

It can even be argued that, despite the setbacks, it speaks about the strength of Indian democracy that we have been consistently scoring higher than the global average since the inception of the Democracy Index. The average, however, is a notoriously inaccurate measure. While it reflects the sheer range of democratisation across the globe, from Norway’s 9.87 score to North Korea’s 1.08 in 2019, it does little to provide us with a standard we should aspire to. A comparison with Norway, or even our own previous performance, shows clearly that we still have a long way to go. In reality, the most important lesson to be drawn from an analysis of India's performance as well as global trends is simply this — that democracy cannot be safeguarded without a people that, by popular consensus, are willing to actively work towards a democracy.

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