Liberal Democracy Index

The Liberal Democracy Index is a weighted average of 5 sub-indexes. The scores in each year's index are based on the observations made in the preceding year.

• India is currently classified as an "Electoral Autocracy" based on its performance on the Index
• India's rank dropped by 4 places, and it was placed at the 104th position amongst 179 countries on the Index in 2023
• India's overall performance level in Liberal Democracy is at 33% in 2023, a significant drop from the level of 57% in 2013.
• As quoted in the Liberal Democracy Index report in Mar 2024, "India’s process of autocratization begins in earnest from 2008 and characteristically proceeded in the incremental, slow-moving fashion of the “third wave”. Over the years, India’s autocratization process has been well documented, including gradual but substantial deterioration of freedom of expression, compromising independence of the media, crackdowns on social media, harassments of journalists critical of the government, as well as attacks on civil society and intimidation of the opposition. The ruling anti-pluralist, Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with Prime Minister Modi at the helm has for example used laws on sedition, defamation, and counterterrorism to silence critics. The BJP government undermined the constitution’s commitment to secularism by amending the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) in 2019. The Modi-led government also continues to suppress the freedom of religion rights. Intimidation of political opponents and people protesting government policies, as well as silencing of dissent in academia are now prevalent."

• In comparison to its benchmarked G20 peers, India's overall performance score is amongst the lowest with only Turkey, Russia and China below it on the Index in 2023.
• India's overall performance in Liberal Democracy is lower than the current world average of 38%.

The Electoral Democracy Index is one of the five sub-indexes of the Liberal Democracy Index. It reflects a relatively ambitious idea of electoral democracy and captures not only the extent to which regimes hold clean, free and fair elections, but also their actual freedom of expression, alternative sources of information and association, as well as male and female suffrage and the degree to which government policy is vested in elected political officials.

The electoral principle of democracy seeks to embody the core value of making rulers responsive to citizens, achieved through electoral competition for the electorate's approval under circumstances when suffrage is extensive; political and civil society organizations can operate freely; elections are clean and not marred by fraud or systematic irregularities; and elections affect the composition of the chief executive of the country.