India And It's Democratic Stature

Democracy decay has been used by various scholars to capture the gradual deterioration of the democratic rule.

 Marina Ottaway in her book on the rise of semi-authoritarianism used the term to describe the decline of democratic governance in Venezuela. But in this article, we will discuss the case of India. How India's democratic stature degrading? Or just rumours.

The report "The freedom in the world 2020" ranked India at the 83rd position, which is near the bottom of the pile among the countries categorised as "Free". This report was released by "Freedom House" a US-based watchdog, which has been tracking global political and civil liberties for almost half a century.

The report mentioned several reasons which pushed India to such a lower rank such as the report slammed the internet lockdown in Kashmir, termed the longest shutdown ever imposed by any democratic country of this planet. Freedom of expression is totally under threat in India, people from every section whether it's journalists, academicians and intellectual from various fields have been under threat and facing assault, harassment and intimidation by the government authorities whenever they tried to address politically sensitive topics. If by chance they succeed in addressing such topics they were being termed as Anti- nationals and traitor of the country.

Annulment of autonomy and subsequent shutdown of Kashmir, the National Register of citizens and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, as well as the crackdown on mass protests, have been mentioned as the main signs of declining freedom by the report.

Now, this is what mentioned in the report. This raises several questions in my mind about the ranking of freedom of expression which "Freedom House" has accorded to India. The first one, why only when a country begins achieving economic excellence the ranking of freedom of expression falls unprecedentedly? Why when a country begins classifying between citizens and immigrants the world starts blaming of bigotry or authoritarian regime is ruling? Why when a country pass laws to provide citizenship to minorities facing persecution in the country where a particular religion is the state religion, people say secularism declining?

These are the significant question which every citizen of the country has to ask themselves before relying on any report released by any western world countries. From centuries we have been suffering, living in poverty and facing unparalleled consequences of their past acts.

The several steps which India took to protect its sovereignty and integrity from foreign immigrant infiltrators, could not be the reason to degrade India's democratic prestige and eminence. The political reforms or new acts which are enacted by the government is to, isolate terrorists from Indian soil so that they could not be able to harm to country's citizens. Without these steps, India couldn't move ahead to achieve great strides in economic and commercial development.

Every country faces domestic political issues and sometimes prefer harsher ways to tackle the grievous problems but such issues are country's internal matter, interfering any country's internal affairs and even when the country is civilizational like India, then it is totally unacceptable. Our spokesperson from the ministry of external affairs Mr Ravish Kumar reiterated several times India is a sovereign country and it never interferes in others internal matters, the country will not allow anyone to speak India's internal matters.

I conclude democracy is the best form of government mostly because of its strong philosophical basis. It gives us the autonomy to choose who rules us and respect our rights of freedom and equality. Overall it's important for the individual, social and political welfare of everyone under the state. It's also true when circumstances demand strict rules to be enacted to sustain democracy, then its duty of the government to enact such laws. For such act, we can't blame any country a bigot, authoritarian and dictatorial.