US think tank downgraded India from ‘Free’ to Partially Free’ in the annual report

Published this week, the latest survey marks the 4th consecutive year of democratic backsliding in India.

According to the report, India, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, appears to be inching closer to authoritarianism.

“Rather than serving as a champion of democratic practice and a counterweight to authoritarian influence from countries such as China, Modi and his party are tragically driving India itself toward authoritarianism,” the democracy research institute said in its annual assessment.

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Political rights and civil liberties, the authors wrote, have eroded in India since Modi became prime minister in 2014.

The deterioration in political rights and civil liberties, the report said, had “only accelerated after the Indian prime minister’s reelection in 2019.”

The US government-funded NGO which has been a vigorous proponent of democratic values for almost eight decades assigned an overall score of 67 to India in its annual Freedom in the World report.

According to Freedom House’s report attacks on press freedom had increased significantly under the BJP government and that officials were aggressively using security, defamation, sedition, and hate speech laws, as well as contempt-of-court charges, to mute critical voices in the media.

CJ Werleman, a journalist, who actively reports on discrimination and injustices against Muslim communities around the world placed the blame squarely on Prime Minister Modi for India’s demotion by the Freedom House.

Referring to the Indian government’s actions against members of the Tablighi Jamaat, the advocacy group said Muslims were scapegoated by the Modi administration as potential spreaders of the coronavirus and subsequently exposed to attacks by vigilante mobs.

The authors of the report also highlighted that laws against religious conversions were being implemented in BJP-ruled states. “Under Modi, India appears to be elevating narrow Hindu nationalist interests at the expense of its founding values of inclusion and equal rights for all,” they said.

An increasing number of Hindutva activists claim that Hindu women are being forcibly converted by Muslim men through marriage.

SOURCE: Freedom house