India points to 'sweeping conclusions' and 'fallacious assumptions' in Global Democracy Report 2023

New Delhi: Slamming the methodology followed in the International IDEA Global State of Democracy Report (GSoD) 2023 which lowered India's extant ranking from 62 to 66, India's representative to International IDEA's advisory board and former Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora has written to the body pointing to "fallacious assumptions and sweeping unsubstantiated inferences" in the report's India segments.

The GSoD 2023 report - published in November 2023 - stated that India persists at the mid-range level on the criteria of "representation" with a "statistically significant five-year decline" as well as similar declines on parameters such as "credible elections and free political parties".

The report has clubbed India with Afghanistan, Cambodia and the Philippines in Asia, as countries that saw a decline in "credible election scores" over five years, while it said that Malaysia, Maldives, Sri Lanka and Thailand saw improvement over the same time span.


However, Arora has held that the rank drop for India is "completely out of sync with the complexity, diversity, scale and consistency of conduct of elections in India".

"This is completely ignoring more than 20 general elections to legislative assemblies of states and indeed the 2019 general elections which shows ever increasing participation, including the number of women electors overtaking the men electors in several parts of the country. A functioning Parliament with highly contested debates, all have been ignored and citations appear to have been picked out only selectively to substantiate priori conclusion," Arora is learnt to have written in an 18-page note to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in November 2023.

The GSoD report 2023 further cites concerns raised about how the ruling party allegedly benefited from unequal treatment by Facebook and resorted to hate speech in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

The CEC at the time of 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Arora has pointed to the "peaceful transition" of power in 2019 - both in the Lok Sabha elections and the "totally different outcomes" in the state elections held as early as July 2019 - showing that "Indian voters wield freely and fearlessly".

The report, however, shows India losing rank on several indices.

It points to "significant declines" in "civil liberties" in India, a three-rank drop in the global rankings for rights, besides decline in "freedom of expression and freedom of association and assembly", citing Amnesty India's exit from the country following raids.

A priori conclusions
Arora has said that "sweeping conclusions" have been made in the report on the basis of "secondary sources", and the citations chosen for the draft report had been "cherry picked in order to substantiate a-priori conclusion".

He also pointed out that while "mass public participation in the electoral cycles" is noted as "the most powerful countervailing force" and was accounted for favourably in case of Malaysia in 2022 and in the 2023 Thailand elections, it has "not been manifested in the Indian election outcomes".

Similarly, indicators used to weigh election performance such as "important party turnover" and "improvement of electoral atmosphere" and "participation index" have not been reflected favourably in case of India despite high voter turnout, expansion of electoral roll and "full media and judicial scrutiny", he notes.

Arora has underlined that India has a "robust and independent judiciary" and "does not need a certificate from any outside watchdog to view for protection of civil liberties and fundamental rights enshrined in the body of the Indian Constitution".