India is still secular. That's why we have a constitution.
Less and less of a Democracy:
'Electoral autocracy': The downgrading of India's democracy
Three different reports have downgraded India's democracy recently - and the government is not happy.
www.bbc.co.uk
India’s Worsening Democracy Makes It an Unreliable Ally
The treatment of Muslims, who form 14% of India’s population, has worsened.
A 2019 report by Human Rights Watch documented 44 murders (36 of them being Muslim) by lynch mobs who killed people they suspected of possessing beef, consuming it, or trading cows. Muslims find it hard to buy or rent property, are denied permission to build mosques in some cases, and prevented from praying in public. Vigilantes prevent Muslims from praying at home. Female Muslim students in one state were banned from wearing head-scarves. A senior politician from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party
had welcomed convicted cow protectors with garlands. BJP-ruled states have passed laws
to make it harder for inter-faith marriages from taking place. Right wing Hindus
celebrated the early release of 11 men who were convicted of having raped a Muslim woman and murdered some of her family members during the massacres of 2002. Those incidents occurred when Modi was Gujarat’s chief minister and had failed to stop Hindu violence against Muslims. Modi was then barred from entry into the
U.S. or the
E.U. until India’s Supreme Court said Modi did not have a case to answer. A recent BBC film which blamed Modi for complicity, is
banned in India.
Organizations that measure democracies have concluded that India’s democratic record has worsened. Freedom House has down-graded India to
‘partly-free’ status. India has fallen from 27 in 2014 to 46 in 2022, as per the
Economist Intelligence Unit’s democracy index. The V-Dem project of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden has relegated India to
“electoral autocracy.” The Civicus Monitor calls India’s civil society environment to be “
repressed.” The Pew Research Center survey shows India’s
social hostility score has worsened. And the World Press Freedom Index of Reporters Without Borders places India
at 161, a historic low, down from 150, of the 180 countries it surveys. In the global impunity index of the Committee to Protect Journalists
, India ranks 11th, with 20 unsolved murders of journalists.
More broadly, India’s rank in the U.N.’s Human Development Index has fallen slightly, from 130 the year Modi took office to
132, the International Food Policy Research Institute’s world hunger index shows India ranked at
107 out of 121 surveyed countries. the World Economic Forum’s gender gap index shows India ranked
135th of the 146 surveyed countries. Thomson Reuters Foundation calls India
the world’s most dangerous country for women. Unsurprisingly, Cato Institute, which measures human freedom, downgraded India between 2015 and 2022 from
75 to
112.
These organizations are drawn from different countries, use different methodologies, and are not ideologically aligned. Yet, they present a consistent image of a country where freedoms are under peril. No doubt, such rankings can be arbitrary and subjective, and there may indeed be some methodological problems. For its part, India
disputes many such findings.
This is hardly a report card any government should be proud of. But while such report cards annoy Modi, and his feisty foreign minister Dr S Jaishankar dismisses them pithily, Modi realizes two things: these organizations do not matter in India, and western governments note these concerns and privately might even agree, but publicly they are not about to challenge India. And so he goes on, his party members whip up religious passions to divert attention and he organizes picture-perfect spectacles. By raising the toast for Modi this week, the U.S. is helping him write the script of his re-election campaign and providing him excellent visual footage, which Modi will use to silence critics back home as his party prepares the script for the elections in 2024.
India’s interests are not aligned with Western interests
time.com