PM’s economic council challenges India’s downgrade by global agencies as ‘not credible’

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, November 23

The Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister on Tuesday released a working paper challenging India's consistent downgrading by top global perception based indices and said the government should request the World Bank to demand accountability from the western think tanks.

Arguing that the methodology adopted by the think tanks is subjective, authors Sanjeev Sanyal and Aakanksha Arora further recommended that independent think-tanks in India should be encouraged to research in these areas and come up with their own indices so that comparative indices are available to "break the hegemony of few western institutions".

The working paper looks at three indices which are inputs into the World Bank’s World Governance Indicators that, in turn, have approximately 18-20 per cent weightage in sovereign ratings and notes, "They can’t be completely ignored and will become even more important in future as Environmental, Social and Governance indices are introduced into global business/investment decisions."

The paper looks at Freedom in the World Index, Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) Democracy Index and Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) indices.

Freedom Index, published since 1973 by Freedom House, put India’s score on Civil Liberties at 42 till 2018. The score dropped sharply to 33 by 2022; that for Political Rights dropped from 35 to 33.

"Thus, India’s total score on the Freedom Index dropped to 66 which places India in the “partially free” category – the same status it had during the Emergency. Clearly, this seems very arbitrary," say authors questioning the same index giving Northern Cyprus a score of 77 which makes it a free democracy even when it is a territory only recognised by Turkey, not even by the UN.

This think-tank continues to treat Jammu-Kashmir as a separate territory since the early 1990s and now places it in the category of “not free”.

EIU Democracy Index published by EIU, the research arm of the firm that publishes the Economist magazine called India a “Flawed Democracy” dropping its rank sharply from 27 in 2014 to 53 in 2020 and then improving it a bit to 46 in 2021.

"India’s latest score for Civil Liberties lags that of Hong Kong (8.53). Similarly, India’s score for Political Culture is much lower than that of Hong Kong (7.5) and Sri Lanka (6.25). Clearly, this seems very arbitrary," the paper says.

It says V-DEM score analysis shows India's ranks on various subjective subindices have declined sharply since 2014. "India has been termed as an “electoral autocracy” in the 2021 report, same as it was during the period of Emergency. India’s rank on Liberal Democracy Index is 93. In contrast, Lesotho which started having democratically elected government only in the mid 1990s, has a rank of 60. Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia only in 2008 has a rank of 79," says the paper challenging the indices derived from perceptions or opinions of few "unknown" experts.

Authors say the questions these indices ask are not meaningful indicators of democracy.

"One question V-DEM asks is, 'To what extent is the direct popular vote utilised?” This is an indicator in which India scores zero! This is because it relates to the use of direct referendum which is obviously not possible for a large country like India," authors argue.

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