On Tuesday, while castigating GOI over reports claiming decline of democracy in India, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said that Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi used to win elections as well.
In an online interaction with Brown University, Rahul Gandhi said, “Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi used to have elections. They used to win them. It was not like they were not voting but there was no institutional framework to protect that vote.”
Professor Ashutosh Varshney of Brown University posed questions on reports by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), a Sweden-based institute which downgraded India to an “electoral autocracy,” citing a decline in democratic freedoms and Freedom House analysis which shifted India’s status from a ‘free’ country to ‘partly-free.’ While reacting to the question, Rahul Gandhi added in his comment, “Bharatiya Janata Party MPs in Parliament tell me that they cannot have an open discussion. They say they are told what to say.”
The Indian government, however, had disproved the report by Freedom House and called it “misleading, incorrect and misplaced.”
Freedom house report
India’s status has been downgraded from ‘Free’ to ‘Partly Free’ By the US government-funded NGO Freedom House due to “a crackdown on expressions of dissent by the media, academics, civil society groups, and protesters”. India’s score in the organization’s annual Freedom in the World report this year, based on data from 2020, was 67, a drop from 71/100 from 2020, which downgraded it from the free category.
It further cited the abrupt and the highly mismanaged Covid-19 lockdown “which left millions of migrant workers in cities without work or basic resources” and “resulted in the dangerous and unplanned displacement of millions of internal migrant workers”. The lockdown had led to destitution, deprivation of millions of migrant workers, and deaths of thousands, with some being crushed by the trains.
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The lockdown, which had been announced by Modi on March 24, 2020, with no pre-planning for the migrant workers, prompted thousands of migrant workers, who were stranded, to undertake long journeys home on foot. Many workers also died of starvation, exhaustion, and rail accidents.
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The democracy advocacy group noted that India’s fall from the upper ranks of free nations could “have a particularly damaging impact on global democratic standards”. The report said that the deterioration in political rights and civil liberties had “only accelerated after Modi’s re-election in 2019” and that judicial independence had also come under strain.
Referring to the transfer of Justice S. Muralidhar from the Delhi high court in February 2020, the report said, “In one case, a judge was transferred immediately after reprimanding the police for taking no action during riots in New Delhi that left over 50 people, mostly Muslims, dead.”
The report also made a note of Uttar Pradesh’s ‘love jihad’ law to prohibit forced religious conversion through interfaith marriage and said that a number of Muslim men had been arrested for allegedly forcing Hindu women to convert to Islam.
