Announcing “Dharma Democracy” by ICR Executive Director Salvatore Babones
Dharma Democracy: How India Built the Third World’s First Democracy by Indian Century Roundtable executive director Salvatore Babones will be published in May by Connor Court books. Preorders are now open at:
Dharma Democracy is the only book on the market that drills down from India’s headline democracy rankings to uncover what they mean on an indicator-by-indicator basis. The book also includes a thorough reevaluation of the birth of Indian democracy in 1947 and the reasons for its survival until today. And it addresses head-on the role of Muslim Indians in the social construction of the Indian nation.
Another distinctive feature of the book is its coverage of recent Indian books on Indian nationhood — books that are rarely read and almost never reviewed outside India.
For a taste of what to expect, there’s a 1000 word excerpt below comparing freedom of expression in India under the prime ministership of Jawaharlal Nehru in 1951 (when India was ranked 32nd in the world) and under Narendra Modi in 2023 (when India ranked 138th, just below Kazakhstan). This captures the empirical flavor of the book, which is grounded in cross-national and inter-temporal comparisons.
For those who would prefer something a little more literary, don’t worry: the later chapters include deep dives into the writings of Swami Vivekananda and the message of the Bhagavad Gita! For history fans, there’s a close telling of the culminating crisis of India’s independence struggle. And in the middle there’s a crucial chapter analyzing why democracy succeeded in India when it failed in nearly every other postcolonial state.
Enjoy the excerpt, and please do consider preordering the book!
Excerpt on the evaluation of “Freedom of Expression” in India conducted by the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)
The V-Dem methodology is not kind to India. According to V-Dem's flagship Electoral Democracy Index, Indian democracy reached its zenith in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a period of political instability and weak coalition governments. At its highest point, in 1998, Indian democracy was ranked only forty-fifth in the world. By the time Narendra Modi took office in 2014, India had fallen twenty-five places to number 71. Over the next nine years, India fell another thirty-nine places to number 110. Over the full quarter-century of decline, India's scores on V-Dem's two objective component indices (universal suffrage and elected leaders) remained exactly the same. India fell 52 places on the quality of its elections and 45 places on freedom of association, both serious drops. But the catastrophic decline that put India over the edge from "democracy" to "autocracy" was a 97 place fall in its global ranking for freedom of expression.
The conclusion (repeatedly emphasized by V-Dem over multiple reports) that India and China merely represent different varieties of autocracy – one an "electoral autocracy" and the other a "closed autocracy" – can mainly be attributed to this one component of democracy.[i] At number 138 in the world, India's freedom of expression is ranked sixteen places below Pakistan's and exactly halfway between Palestine's West Bank and Gaza. It is ranked far below Brazil (number 36), where freedom of online speech has come under serious threat and mainstream publishers have faced arbitrary enforcement and potentially gratuitous prosecutions.[ii] Similar accusations have been leveled at India, but India's online publishing takedown orders have been more narrowly focused, and its prosecutions of journalists have mainly targeted non-traditional news outlets.[iii] Another big difference is that Brazil's restrictions have come overwhelmingly from the political left, while India's have come from the right.
At issue is not whether or not it is proper for democracies to censor – clearly, more censorship means less freedom of speech, and by implication less democracy – but the degree of additional censorship that is required to justify a difference in the rankings of 102 places. The censorship allegations made against India and Brazil seem to be broadly similar, and a close observer of both countries might be puzzled by the huge gap in their freedom of expression scores. Whether both countries belong in the 30s or the 130s (or somewhere in between), it seems like their scores should fall into the same range. Similarly, it is reasonable to compare evaluations of freedom of expression in India over multiple decades. India's 2023 V-Dem score for freedom of expression is only marginally higher than during Indira Gandhi's Emergency (1975-1977), and much lower than the scores given for the Nehru years (1950-1964). This seem indefensible.
The Emergency speaks for itself. But the Nehru years are much less well-known. One of Nehru's first act as prime minister was to amend the constitution to restrict freedom of speech. He did this in 1951, before independent India had even held its first elections, ensuring that he went into those elections with the new restrictions already in place. The First Amendment to the Indian Constitution (1951) included a "statement of objects and reasons" in which Nehru frankly admitted that:
During the last fifteen months of the working of the Constitution, certain difficulties have been brought to light by judicial decisions and pronouncements specially in regard to the chapter on fundamental rights. The citizen's right to freedom of speech and expression guaranteed by article 19(1)(a) [the personal freedoms clause] has been held by some courts to be so comprehensive as not to render a person culpable even if he advocates murder and other crimes of violence. In other countries with written constitutions, freedom of speech and of the press is not regarded as debarring the State from punishing or preventing abuse of this freedom.[iv]
Nehru's First Amendment permitted the government to impose "reasonable restrictions" on personal freedoms (including freedom of speech and expression) "in the interests of the security of the State." It was fiercely resisted by the press at the time, with journalists staging nationwide protests.[v] The Times of India editorialized that "Mr. Nehru, once the spirited advocate of civil liberties in India, is now presiding over their obsequies."[vi] The Washington Post editorialized that the First Amendment would usher in "dictatorship in the strictest, most literal, sense of the word."[vii] The New York Times called the ensuing Press (Objectionable Matters) Act of 1951 "a repressive code as stringent as any that ever existed under the British."[viii] Under the act, journalists were treated like a "criminal tribe" who "lived in a state of 'perpetual terror'," according to period accounts.[ix]
Yet Nehru's India under the 1951 Press Act, like Brazil today, gets top marks from V-Dem's expert coders for freedom of expression. This final V-Dem component index is based on nine indicators, all of them highly subjective. Is press censorship "limited" or "routine"? Is media self-censorship "common" or does it occur only "on a few highly sensitive political issues"? Does the media "cover all newsworthy parties" equally at election time? Is it possible to code the extent to which people "are able to openly discuss political issues in private homes"?[x] These are the kinds of questions that must be answered by V-Dem's country experts, whose answers are aggregated via a statistical model to create its freedom of expression component index. This is, perhaps, a challenge that must be faced, but it is not a process on which a high degree of confidence can be placed. Wherever possible, objective indicators should be used to validate these subjective expert evaluations.
[i] Multiple authors, 2024, Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot, Varieties of Democracy Institute, page 13.
[ii] Christopher Hernandez-Roy and Michael McKenna, 2023, "Brazil's Misaligned Censorship Policy Risks Cutting Off Free Speech to Spite Disinformation," Center for Strategic and International Studies, 25 May; Murillo Camarotto, 2024, "Under Attack from So Many Quarters, Press Freedom in Brazil Is Now Threatened by Some Judges Too," Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 9 April.
[iii] Karishma Mehrotra and Joseph Menn, 2023, "How India Tamed Twitter and Set a Global Standard for Online Censorship," Washington Post, 8 November; unsigned, 2023, "16 Indian Journalists Have Been Charged Under UAPA, 7 Are Currently Behind Bars," The Wire, 6 October.
[iv] The Constitution (First Amendment) Act, 1951.
[v] Unsigned, 1951, "Freedom of the Press," Times of India, 21 May.
[vi] Unsigned, 1951, "Freedom of the Press," Times of India, 23 June.
[vii] Unsigned, 1951, "Talking Too Much," Washington Post, 28 June.
[viii] Unsigned, 1951, "India's Press Law," New York Times, 8 October.
[ix] Unsigned, 1954, "Journalists Treated Like 'Criminal Tribes," Times of India, 11 March.
[x] Multiple authors, 2024, V-Dem Codebook V14, Varieties of Democracy Institute, pages 207, 210, and 188-189.
