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Comments 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.
Now #covid vaccination certificate also contains his photo. Why not a single vaccine recipient of @MamataOfficial ji's Bengal couldnot get certificate? This is a step ahead of what we have witnessed nationally for the last six years: the staged interviews, the Man ki Baat radio address broadcast on All India Radio that aired its 74rd episode on February 28 and constant live feeds of Modi’s speeches and rallies offered to television channels that have bent over to crawl when being asked to bend. There has never been the possibility of an open press conference as the traditional media is apparently useful only for amplification of the image and not for asking real questions. The “fifth estate” or independent online media is now the space for hard analysis and questions but the new Information Technology rules, 2021, certainly seek to increase government control over digital media.
Times Now, with headlines announcing that the new laws now had US backing. In fact, the US State Department statement, while cautiously welcoming “steps that would improve the efficiency of India’s markets”, called for dialogue with the farmers and underlined that peaceful protests and freedom of expression are the “hallmark” of a democracy. That it is the foreign media doing investigative journalism in and about India should raise some difficult questions, said Ayyub, the Washington Post columnist. “Why have we not been able to do a single damning expose in Indian publications in the last five years?” she said. “…This is the time to take a stand and take an aggressive stand. Journalism is not even in danger, they have managed to intimidate us into silence, that process has happened.”