Can India Remain The West's Democracy Poster Child By Lim Teck Ghee

Oriental Daily

Can India Remain The West's Democracy Poster Child

Lim Teck Ghee

“India - Mother of all democracies” according to Prime Minister Modi in his address to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2021. In a more recent address on the occasion of the unveiling of the logo, theme and website of India’s G20 Presidency, Modi elaborated on India’s role in the world.  

It is our responsibility to introduce the world to India's thinking and strength, to India's culture and social power. It is our responsibility to enhance the knowledge of the world with the intellectualism of our thousands of years old culture and the modernity contained in it. The way we have lived the idea of 'Jai-Jagat' for centuries and millennia, today we have to bring it alive and present it to the modern world.

India and Modi in fact have many admirers especially among Western political leaders,

policy analysts and media even if they may be sceptical about the “thousands of years old” intellectualism of Indian culture.

“Biggest democracy in the world”; “exceptional and exemplary model of development”; the West’s “preferred economic and strategic partner based on shared principles such as the rule of law”; “ a country “driven by norms, good governance, …openness, transparency and equality” - these and more accolades have been showered on the country.

Why India is the West’s Democracy Role Model

Those touting India as the role model for democracy and development have done this not because they are fans of Indian style democracy or because they believe in the pro-India platitudes regularly trotted out in the ‘free world’ media.

They have taken to marketing India to enlist its support to counter the rise of China and what they regard as the challenge by an autocratic system with limited rights and freedoms for its citizens but with the greatest poverty alleviation and development record in modern history and which provides a different role model for developing nations.

For them, the Communist Party governing China is an unacceptable single party system in contrast to India’s multi-party system based on western concepts of parliamentary elections.

This is especially repugnant to the West as China’s rise and development threatens to upset the current western dominated international world order. Thus bromides on India’s unique role in the enhancement of democratic governance and as a model of constitutional democracy for developing nations are sprouted particularly on occasions such as when India joined the Quad, the security partnership with the US, Japan and Australia, and during other similar initiatives aimed at condemning and containing China.

Playing to the Western gallery, Modi in his speech at the Quad summit in May 2022

described the Quad as “a force for global good” because “We [the four Quad countries] are united by our democratic values.”

India’s Electoral Autocracy

But what really is the value added democracy that Modi’s government has introduced to India and the rest of the world?

The reality - kept out of policy and general public sight - is now emerging that India’s

democracy is not only flawed.

It has also regressed into what the V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, calls "one of the worst autocratisers in the last 10 years". The Institute’s 2023 report placed India in the bottom 40-50% on its Liberal Democracy Index at rank 97; 108 on the Electoral Democracy Index (below Tanzania, Bolivia, Mexico, Singapore and Nigeria) and 123 on the Egalitarian Component Index. Perhaps the most disconcerting is the finding that religious freedom in India is at its lowest level since 1975. Long seen as a shining example of a secular state, in reality the Indian state has increasingly privileged Hinduism over other religions and religious communities.

An early warning of this development had in fact been provided in 2019 by the Carnegie

Endowment for International Peace, one of a very few American think tanks providing

independent analysis of major global problems.

Its special feature on “The BJP in Power: Indian Democracy and Religious Nationalism”

warned that the upsurge in Hindu nationalism ushered in by Modi’s government is reshaping Indian society, secularism, economics, and diplomacy.

(https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/04/04/bjp-in-power-indian-democracy-and-religious-nationalism-pub-78677 )

Since then, some Western media that have actively courted New Delhi during the past

decade are beginning to view Modi’s India through less rosy lenses.

An opinion piece which appeared in the New York Times, one of the most influential

newspapers had the following conclusion.  But a deeper and much older hindrance to the development of a healthy, resilient democracy has been India’s historical failure to ensure the welfare of its poorest citizens. Hundreds of thousands of children die each year from hunger, and more than a third are stunted even as Indian billionaires race up the global wealth charts.

Neoliberal policies have compounded inequality, with the state retreating from fundamental responsibilities such as health and education. This breeds a life of indignity and  powerlessness for millions who take refuge in group identity, gravitate toward strong leaders promising to defend them against other groups and easily become hooked on the mass opioid of religious hatred now being used to redefine secular India as a Hindu state.

(https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/24/opinion/india-modi-democracy.html)

India’s Response

India’s response to the downgrading of its democratic credentials can best be seen in this denunciation of the reports by Foreign Minister S Jaishankar in March 2021 at the India Today Conclave South 2021

"You use the dichotomy of democracy and autocracy. You want the truthful answer…it is called hypocrisy. Because you have a set of self-appointed custodians of the world, who find it very difficult to stomach that somebody in India is not looking for their approval, is not willing to play the game they want to be played,"

"So they invent their rules, their parameters, they pass their judgements and then make out as though this is some kind of global exercise".

Jaishankar's response sounds very much like what Wang Yi, the foreign minister of China, has been saying to the West on Tibet, Xinjiang, Hongkong, Falun Gong and other similar subjects of western criticism in the geopolitical sphere.

Now that India's honeymoon with the West seems to be over, perhaps this is the time for the two Asian nations to make peace on their boundary dispute and get their act together to take on the "self-appointed custodians of the world".

My Comments : Really? Then Modi must also explain why every year about 2.5 million Indians leave the country to seek a livelihood outside India and then never return home? 

How many Indians migrate to other countries every year?   According to an Indian Ministry of External Affairs report, there are 32 million NRIs and OCIs residing outside India and overseas Indians comprise the world’s largest overseas diaspora. Every year 2.5 million (25 lakhs) Indians migrate overseas, which is the highest annual number of migrants in the world.

They do not just leave India or 'migrate' from India. Actually they 'escape' from India - never to return. 

The uneducated and less educated go to the Arab countries or to Malaysia. Those with more education or connections go to Europe, US, Australia, Canada etc. In India (and Pakistan and Bangladesh) if they have a son or daughter living and working overseas it is a gigantic good fortune for their families. 

So the Indian prime minister must explain to the world why every year 2.5 million Indians 'escape' from India, never to return.

He should also explain why Indians make up the largest diaspora of people living outside their country of origin? 32 MILLION Indians living overseas? And this has been going on for how long? 100 years? 200 years? Here is the worse case scenario - it does not look like this flood of 'escapees' from India will stop anytime soon.

32 million Indians have "escaped" from India.

So what do you call all those Indians who still live in India? 

Non-escapees? Prisoners? 

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.