New Delhi: Protect Democracy, a non-profit, anti-authoritarianism group which acts as a watchdog for US democracy maintains an Authoritarian Threat Index which counts India as among countries facing a “severe” authoritarian threat.
The index was last updated today, July 10.
According to the project’s website, the index surveys a randomly selected sub-sample of the respondent pool of around 1,000 scholars each weekday and calculates daily a rolling average of these responses. The index has done this since 2017. It functions as a live measure of democracy scholars’ views on threats to mainly American democracy, but it also tracks five other countries. Among them – as recently highlighted by the Financial Times in a report – India’s threat is deemed “severe” at 3.5.
India’s rating is the highest. The US currently scores 2.1 with a “significant” threat warning. Poland has a score of 2.3. Germany has a score of 1.5, Canada 1.5 and the UK, 1.8. These countries face a “low” threat.
The rating defines “severe threats” as violations that signal significant erosion of democracy quality and warn of high potential for breakdown in the future.
The score from 1 (healthy democracy) to 5 (total dictatorship) compiles ratings from democracy experts across the country and political spectrum on six key metrics – treatment of media, executive constraints, elections, civil liberties, civil violence, and rhetoric.
In all, India veers towards severe threat. A comparative picture with the US is below.
India’s track record on democracy indices is dismal. Earlier this year, the V-Dem (or Varieties of Democracy) report found India to be in the bottom 40-50% of the 179 countries reviewed, and now situated between Niger (better) and Ivory Coast (worse). India is no longer termed a democracy, but “dropped down to electoral autocracy in 2018” and remained there at the end of 2023.
