In an interview with Karan Thapar, Raghuram Rajan says that the image of India as a democratic nation globally has been eroded under the current dispensation.
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An analysis by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute headquartered in Sweden, has observed that India has gone from being an electoral democracy to an ‘electoral autocracy’.
“The world’s largest democracy has turned into an electoral autocracy,” it reads.
The report, which carries a data-based analysis measuring the erosion of democracy, has listed India as a ‘major autocratiser’ in its summary. Last year, the V-Dem report had said that India was on the verge of losing its status as a democracy.
A graph illustrating the decline of democracy in South Asian nations – India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka – shows that India’s descent to becoming an electoral autocracy began in 2014, when the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) first came to power.