India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative
theplankmag.com
theplankmag.com
- Narratives matter -- a lot . Second order effects of such subjective rankings are real . Imagine getting a credit downgrade because someone perceives the democracy to be under threat
- "the government had reverse-engineered the ranking, strategically identifying procedural tweaks that directly boosted India’s scores in Delhi and Mumbai—the two cities evaluated by the World Bank" .
I love the whole cynical nature of this. This is statecraft at it's finest ( I render no moral judgements here :) ). This is reminiscent of Machiavelli or Kautilya (Chanakya) [0]
A lot more to digest but will post them as a reply on this thread.
Their methodology for each country was different.
For India their methodology was to survey 36 important people in the country. They did not disclose who these people were.
The survey asked them to share whether democracy was "backsliding" or whether it was becoming stronger, than the past.
Why not just say which it is? Are you trying to give your post a veneer of unbiased-ness while retaining plausible deniability?
I don't remember with 100% surety which one it was. I think it was VDem.
The reason I called it a "deep dive" is because it took a huge amount of digging in their publications to find the specifics of the methodology.
Democracy doesn’t mean western democracy or liberal democracy. Shadi Hamid has done excellent work on this issue: https://www.brookings.edu/books/the-problem-of-democracy-ame...; see also https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/18/the-problem-of...
Are they, when people opposing one candidate are jailed?
> That’s all democracy requires.
That is certainly false. Democracy isn't mob rule, or as the saying go, it's not two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. Democracy is about self-determination for each person; if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.
And pray tell who that candidate is and what was their platform?
> Democracy isn't mob rule, or as the saying go, it's not two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. Democracy is about self-determination for each person; if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.
And what is the definition of minority to follow? Caste? Religion? Ethnicity?
Each one of these intersectionalities are represented in Indian electoral politics at the local, state, and national level.
The BJP itself lost it's supermajority in the Lok Sabha (Parliament) after Muslim voters in UP flipped to the Samajwadi Party in the 2024 election, and the opposition parties have won major state elections such as in Jharkhand.
In fact, after the 2024 election results, Indian electioneering is starting to stop using the "Hindu-Muslim" trope because it's been overused, and the primary swing voting bank at this point is women, as was seen with the results of the 2024 General, Maharashtra, and Delhi elections.
> if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.
I agree with you that Majoritarianism is NOT democracy.
But minorities are not uniformly opposed to the BJP either. Lower caste Muslims (Pasmanda) tend to lean towards the NDA (BJP's coalition) [0] and Muslim women have begun to lean in favor of the BJP due to women first welfare schemes [1]
Furthermore, assuming the BJP is India and India is the BJP is an extremely reductive take on Indian democracy that was clearly proven wrong in the 2024 General Elections. If it was then the BJP would have won a hypermajority ("Abki Bhar 400 Paar"), but got a severe drubbing forcing them to build a coalition with secular JD(U) in Bihar and TDP in AP.
[0] - https://carnegieendowment.org/2024/02/09/mapping-muslim-voti...
[1] - https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/elections/india/lok-s...
Actually a great filter to know who knows what they are talking about.
The amount of data collection and analysis is insane. Election Consulting Companies like I-PAC and Showtime Consulting would gather extremely granular religious (sect level), ethnic (sub-clan level), age, linguistic (sub-dialect level), economic, and social metrics and poll on a near weekly basis, and work with the parties that hired them to iterate on electoral messaging and promises based on the selected demographic intersection.
These consulting firms also pay Microsoft and Google India level salaries so they are attracting the best of the best at top Indian universities.
For this purpose, I like to mentally model a country (or territory which decided to hold an election of some kind) as a collection of points in a multidimensional space of values or policies which are up for election. Each point represents where a voting person would stand according to their personal principles.
Now, I’d like to postulate that the act of voting corresponds to finding the center of the cluster of points. In this model, it’s easy to imagine the scenario where a very large portion of people (and possibly even the majority) are deeply dissatisfied with the result because they are too far on many dimensions from the center that was elected. This is actually further exacerbated by many factors in real life like the asymmetry of information between people.
The obvious solution would be to create more cluster centers instead of one fat cluster that leaves everyone not very happy. This corresponds to states or provinces within a country in the real world.
So coming from that line of thinking, it leads me to believe that sometimes to maintain a democracy, you need to cut the outliers away to move/make the center such that people are happy with the result. Essentially you enforce the will of the majority by cutting away the minority until it is no longer a tyranny to do so.
Of course this is gross simplification of real life. It is ignoring factors such as external threats, instability, unpredictability, information availability and so on. However, I think it’s useful to think this way for many purposes.
Addressing your extreme example of a criminal, that’s a point so far off in the space that you definitely want to cut it out of the system.
If you want to exempt certain decisions or categories of decisions from the majoritarian rule, that poses a conundrum: how do you decide what’s exempted, and how do you make decisions about issues within that exempted space?
But yeah yeah that's not "true democracy" because anything other than majoritarianism is a grotesque western perversion of the perfect immaculate glorious ideal of "simple majority rules on everything". Whatever.
What equivalent do you have in India (or Bangladesh or Iraq or Afghanistan)? You can try imposing the same ancient political norms that existed in Britain, and that’s what the Indian constitution did. But you can’t scream “you’re doing democracy wrong!” when Indians refuse to give much weight to those colonial impositions, as is happening.
And no matter how gleefully you celebrate the distress of liberal westerners when minority populations are abused and human rights are violated, the essential force driving towards the liberation of minorities everywhere is not some foreign tradition, but their own humanity. Until the Muslims and Sikhs of India are killed off entirely, they have their will to survive and to seek a better life. Modi may be popular, but short of genocide he cannot take that away.
Source? According to these sources Bukele beats Modi ~90% to 75%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_B...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1456852/world-leader-app...
It's something I disagreed with you about before, but have come to agree with you about Raynier.
Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Turkiye, and Israel have all begun falling out of the US orbit after we began pressing on the liberalism aspect.
We should fight for liberal democracy at home, but it is not something we should necessarily evangelize abroad, as elite and economic consolidation plays a greater role in building lasting ties with a country instead of ideological ties.
I had a convo with Mastro and Doshi about this during a seminar a couple months before the election, and it sounded like they also started agreeing with this view as well.
Elite and economic consolidation is a corrupting force, though. A country's actions are just as important as it's stated values - if it partners with others who don't share those values, then it's just performance. If your country signals that it doesn't actually care about its purported values, then why would any country which does care want to create long-term relationships or otherwise ally themselves with you? How would anyone be able to trust you if you compromise your foundational principles for economic gain? How could you trust them?
The US government funded social infrastructure like health clinics, schools, and sanitation systems, but the Chinese government funded hard infra projects like canals, highways, energy systems, and weaponry without human rights oversight [0].
When Cambodia decided to end their democratic experiment, the US condemned it, but the Chinese government was indifferent. And now Cambodia has solidly shifted to the Chinese sphere of influence.
This story has repeated all across ASEAN from Thailand to Malaysia to Indonesia.
The reality is it's only the economic, military, and poltical decisionmakers that matter, and if you needle them too much, they will try to find alternatives or build their own strategic autonomy.
France did the same thing in the De Gaulle era for the exact same reasons (military regime that didn't like getting needled about democratic backsliding).
> then why would any country which does care want to create long-term relationships or otherwise ally themselves with you
Cold hard cash, weapons, and legitimacy. Which is what ASEAN countries have begun to do by shifting closer towards China. They don't want or need lectures - they want to maintain their own power.
Notice how Europe has grown silent about Turkish democratic decline now that European nations require Turkish support to stabilize Ukraine. And if PiS wins the Polish elections, you won't hear similar complaints about "democratic backsliding" compared to the PiS barely 3 years ago. When push comes to shove, values don't matter much.
In an era where great power politics has returned, values matter less than hard power.
[0] - https://www.iseas.edu.sg/articles-commentaries/iseas-perspec...
Regimes fall when subsets of the elite decide to defect to the opposition.
For example, Hosni Mubarak fell not because of protesters in Tahrir Square, but because Sisi didn't feel like shooting protesters at that time for Mubarak's sake (Sisi had ambitions). If Sisi and the Egyptian military didn't decide to return to the barracks, the Arab Spring in Egypt would have never happened.
The only solution to this is by actually cultivating multiple different factions within those elites. Yet this is something the US is not good at anymore because this kind of knowledge and understanding requires significant cultural background, and State Dept hiring regulations prevent people of the same ethnicity from working on relations for those countries.
> Consider the various examples of regime change and/or support for dictators/authoritarians enabled by the United States in South America and the Middle East
The most notable one in the post 1971 era is Iran 1979 where US cultivated the secular Shah's government and military leadership, but not the organized Shia clergy. If the US had cultivated Khomenini, we wouldn't have been in such a severe situation. The French on the other hand engaged Khomeini and Shia clergy, and it helped ensure that France could maintain relations until the sanctions regime began in the 2010s.
By the 1990s, US foreign policy in Latin America changed to democracy promotion due to the same points you brought up, and that caused Honduras to switch in favor of China after corruption investigations threatened their leadership, and Nicaragua switched in favor of China due to pushback for democratic backsliding in 2017-18.
I’ll leave aside my conspiracy theories about how much Anthony Blinken had to do with Hasina being overthrown last year. But we have a new government promising more liberalism but the security situation has deteriorated: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/3/4/gotham-but-no-ba.... Holding fair elections will be impossible, because the interim government has a tremendous incentive to ban Hasina’s party, which has long been the most popular party.
>How could theocratic states with no separation of religion and government score higher than India? How could a country with universal suffrage and constitutional rights rank below nations that didn’t even hold elections?
Since the article talks quite a bit about Sanjeev Sanyal, I think it might be interesting to point to some of his podcasts.
Like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiW-mH4qIOQ. Here he points out how the media has misrepresented India and exaggerated and sensationalized issues.
Similarly, India has taken criticism from the West over its more ambitious projects like Sardar Vallabhai Patel's statue, and the space program. So taking the West's word with a grain of salt is quite valid.
Further, the article points out that the government is trying to game the ranking while outwardly saying that they don't matter. This seems hypocritical at first glance but it also points out that having lower rankings affects investor confidence and borrowing rates. You can be against a broken system while still trying to appease it because it's not going to change immediately. The Indian Government needs to work within the system until something better can be created.
I am not fully supportive of everything the NDA government has done but I don't think there is another leader in India who can feasibly win an election right now and I refuse to support INC until they get rid of the Gandhi dynasty.
Also, please look at the podcast from this timestamp[2], where he further shows why people in general but Indians specifically should be skeptical of Western narratives. This is also supported by the book Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl
[2]:https://youtu.be/gNVMvlfMbCU?list=PLgZQtm7d9Z1K9TCynoA3S0QWv...
- Pt. Nehru wanted Socialism and State Control.
- Indira Gandhi brought the Emergency and all that came with that
- PM Vajpayee conducted the nuclear test
- PM Modi is viewed as an authoritarian and fascist
I think these cover the most influential leaders over the last 75 years. Only PM Manmohan Singh stands up to such scrutiny.
That's the western lens.
It's hard to define that - on average? In the long run? What would a Indian who is Muslim say - 'well, it's ok because on average or in the long run, it's ok'?
eg. overturning roe v wade, and allowing gerrymandering based on race
the most recent wpuld be executive orders stripping visas and greencards based on protected speech
I think this is core thrust of narrative of Indian state and its card carrying supporters. On ideological part this of course makes sense. But practical aspect of cheap cost of informational bit vs physical bit that makes state so obsessed with this. As it makes so easily achievable.
It would be very much clear to anyone who do not spend whole life on social media dream world in India that physical infrastructure will not be reaching of western standards at least in this century. On the other hand informational infrastructure very much reachable if not already reached. Consider Indian companies do so much information /data processing for West already.
Hence all emphasis and obsession on narrative building.
To be fair though it may be better than lot of other poorer nations.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
I mean, Jan 6th is directly the result of an “all speech is equal” approach. Intuitively we know this isn’t how speech works - the town dumbass is probably spewing BS, and the pharmacist might have a point. But when we distill it down to all the same thing and then throw in the immediate and vast nature of the internet, things get hairy.
It’s tough because, of course, nobody wants to let someone else decide who is right and who is wrong. But someone is actually right, and letting everyone decide for themselves isn’t currently working.
Your comment reads like propaganda.
The West do try to control India through these institutions and rankings, and Indian government is trying to use that to hide some of their shortcomings.
Narrative controlling is necessary, but I hope the actual work is done too.
There are important advantages to a social contract which is simple and unambiguous.
The decision to not stop at redoing the election but to then ban the candidate seems motivated by the fact that opinion polls show him to still be winning even today despite the alleged “election interference”, months after he won the first election.
It’s weird seeing the EU conduct elections sort of like Russia does, ironically. In the past I viewed the EU as supporting things like free speech and democracy in the same way America does.
I agree, and this reinforces my point about the ambiguity of the social contract. When the US constitution was written in 1787, the telegraph wasn't even invented. Now we all live in a single "global village". People from all over the world are commenting on politics in other nations in real time. Where do you draw the line for "election manipulation"? No one seems to know, exactly.
The problem is that we've made this intellectual laziness acceptable. Nobody knows exactly? We have pretty good ideas; we know the difference between legitimate media and propaganda; we just need to encode that in English in specific rules.
And before that, we need to get the people who benefit from propaganda, and therefore defend it, out of power. Look at the widespread, and effective campaign to shut down anyone studying disinformation. The problems with letting things like that fester and not doing anything - which is what we've done, mostly - is that people in power become invested in it.
Well, I encourage you to lead the way, fight this intellectual laziness, and propose specific rules. I suspect that you will find the task more difficult than you thought. Whatever rules you propose will be adversarially interpreted by your political opponents, and by actual propagandists. Ideally, the rules should also be simple enough for any voter to understand.
Eager to read your reply!
At another level, Russia is kind of waging war on Europe to try to engineer a fascist takeover. Some of us don't like that - remember Hitler was democratically elected and Putin is merrily killing thousands of innocents in his imperial quest.
There is other iffy stuff:
> ... evidence about a plot organised by former presidential candidate Călin Georgescu and a group of former French Foreign Legion fighters ... were planning to "infiltrate peaceful protests and trigger chaos through violent actions"
>Police found large amounts of lethal weapons, ammunition, and cash https://www.romania-insider.com/romania-prosecutors-georgesc...
>Russian Military Intelligence Behind Attempted Coup in Romania: The Shadowy Network Supporting Pro-Russian Candidate Călin Georgescu https://lansinginstitute.org/2025/03/10/russian-military-int...
etc. 6 charged with treason. I'm not sure how proven it is but Russian military coups are bad and all that.
It's not really; I've never heard someone say that, in fact. The nature of propaganda is to make everything uncertain, and then everyone is frozen and nobody has done wrong.
And there is much propaganda - especially now - used to sow hate, violence, and division.
We need clear language for each form (how many are there?). And I think we need a more serious word than 'discombobulation' - for one, it describes the effect, not the cause; and for another, people won't take the issue seriously.
Lots of disputes within democracies consist of both sides implicitly claiming their position is "more democratic". E.g. how much power should the US president have over US bureaucracies? Some say that because bureaucrats are "unelected", the president should have more control. Others say that too much executive control is authoritarian. In both cases, the nature of "democracy" is what's [implicitly] at stake.
>propaganda
* I speak truth to power.
* He is exercising his right to freedom of speech.
* They spread propaganda.
I don't think the phrase "propaganda" is meaningless, necessary. But this reinforces my point from earlier, about how our social contract could use more simplicity and less ambiguity.
Indeed, it's quite easy! If I agree, it's brave truth-telling. If I disagree, it's propaganda.
Of course, but that's distinct from propaganda vs non-propaganda. A foreign actor can secretly pay for a marketing campaign that spreads the truth. A scientist can make an honest mistake and spread a falsehood.
>we can tell the difference with reasonable accuracy.
Depends on the claim. Suppose I tell you that exactly one year from now, at your current location, it will be raining. Is that true or false?
That's like saying 100% of people lie. Yes, but that's meaningless - people range from highly trustworthy to miserable frauds. What the democratic societies actually do, and the consequences, is what matters.
If you boil it down and peek beneath the many layers of complexity and misdirection, reality is disturbingly dark and you wonder how society functions at all and how so many people can be fooled into believing surface narratives... But in a way, it's because people are fooled that society can function as-is, in spite of its dysfunction. If people knew how the system really worked, it would have to change.
IMO, the good news is that generally, when the system is forced to change to become more transparent, things improve. But the system is always at the edge; constantly gaslighting the public as much as it can get away with at any given time. The state rarely apologizes for past mistakes; unless it serves some new agenda which it benefits from (e.g. the mistake happened under different leadership).
There should be some rule like "The state is precisely as corrupt as it can get away with." Or "The state is corrupt proportionally to how passive and delusional its citizens are."
Is that what is happening now?
The problem we have now is that the population is extremely propagandized/delusional due to powerful media, made possible by technology. But the same technologies can also create more transparency... Or the technology may cause more skepticism which is also good; e.g. As AI generates fake videos, people will adapt to be more skeptical.
That is really looking at the long run! :D I hope for improvement on a shorter timeline, myself. All those average people are dead.
> powerful media
If you include social media, I'm with you.
> As AI generates fake videos, people will adapt to be more skeptical.
You said, and I agree, that people have become "extremely propagandized/delusional" due to prior tech development; why would AI tech have different outcomes?
Then with the printing press, communication became a lot more reliable; people did not have to worry about 'Chinese Whispers' anymore, they knew that what was printed likely came directly from the source...
Then photography came along. People trusted photos completely for a time. It was high-resolution evidence; wars could be started over it. Then as photo-editing tech became more powerful, people started to doubt photography but then video came along and created a new medium for reliable communication which was hard to fake. CGI never got quite to the level that it could not be distinguished from reality.
Now AI is making video unreliable... We will have no way to verify the authenticity of detailed visual communication. So we will lose trust in it.
Maybe something like blockchain will help us to get back to a certain level of communication reliability in terms of source authentication... but the resolution has been lost permanently. We will never again be sure if something really happened with quite the same level of certainty. We go back to a kind of 'printing press' level of reliability.
The resolution of the communication (the amount of detail) doesn't add to its reliability anymore. We shouldn't underestimate how much of a role video has played in creating the highly centralized over-trusting society which we have today.
Would people give governments so much power if they couldn't even agree with certainty about who said what and even who won the election?
The party is headed by an alleged murderer (people died and cases against him conveniently disappeared as soon as the party came to power)[2][3]. He's the mastermind while Modi is just the face. Modi hasn't held a single unscripted press conference/interview in the last 10 years and can't handle questions that aren't pre-arranged.
Its not just related to India, Right wings across the globe have more or less figured this out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BJP_IT_Cell
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-68653573
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/16/amit-s...
Next up Nobel Prizes.