WHY INDIA'S DEMOCRACY IS DYING

India exemplifies the global democratic recession. India’s recent downgrade to a hybrid regime is a major influence on the world’s autocratization. And the modality of India’s democratic decline reveals how democracies die today: not through a dramatic coup or midnight arrests of opposition leaders, but instead, it moves through the fully legal harassment of the opposition, intimidation of media, and centralization of executive power. By equating government criticism with disloyalty to the nation, the government of Narendra Modi is diminishing the very idea that opposition is legitimate. India today is no longer the world’s largest democracy. © 2023 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press.