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Inside India’s battle to control the democracy narrative [1]
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Date: 2025-05
Prakash saw a contradiction. 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?
He had a point: who gets to decide what democracy means? This was precisely the conflict the Indian government chose to seize on. If democracy was not a fixed standard but a contested idea, India could argue that the West had no exclusive right to define it.
Ordinarily, such a letter might have quietly disappeared under the scores of such letters and suggestions the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) receives on a daily basis. But this time, something unusual happened.
The PMO took Prakash’s proposal seriously. That same month, it forwarded a note to the MEA, instructing officials to examine the proposal. Within months, this letter became a catalyst for what eventually evolved into India’s official strategy.
To understand how this happened, it’s not enough to follow one letter, one note, or one decision. The best way to see it is to understand the mindset behind it – the way the government views narratives, legitimacy and control.
A more aggressive approach
Nowhere is this mindset articulated more clearly than in a confidential report on Government Communication from the Group of Ministers (GoM). The document, which I accessed, starkly outlines how the government plans to shape and control the information ecosystem itself.
Officially, the select team of nine ministers had a straightforward mandate: to improve government messaging – press outreach, media engagement, digital campaigns, the basic mechanics of communication. But inside closed-door meetings, the discussions went much further.
The GoM met six times in 2020 on June 14, June 20, June 22, June 26, June 28, and July 9. (These are exact quotes from the official report.) | Nayanika Chatterjee for The Plank
The ministers debated the need to track journalists and categorise them, separating those who were supportive from those who needed handling. They discussed how to systematically promote positive influencers while ensuring dissenting voices were pushed to the margins. There was agreement that messages from ministries, embassies, and political leaders had to be streamlined so that there weren’t that many contradictions.
But the strategy extended far beyond media engagement. It recommended closely tracking and responding to critical voices while strengthening communication networks that could push back against unfavourable narratives. It outlined plans to amplify key government achievements, ensuring these became the dominant themes in public discourse.
One minister spoke about the need to “neutralise” those spreading false narratives. Another pushed for a more aggressive approach to shaping global perception.
The GoM report, compiled after these discussions, documented a methodical, structured strategy to control narratives across multiple levels, from media and academia to international platforms.
The government was no longer just shaping narratives. It was setting the terms of what could be said – and who had the authority to say it.
Building a defence
In March 2021, the Prime Minister’s Office directed the MEA to prepare a formal presentation on the ‘Robustness of Indian Democracy’ in an attempt to reframe how India’s democracy was seen globally.
This presentation portrayed democracy not as a system built solely on individual rights, institutional independence and checks on power, but as a civilisational inheritance rooted deeply in mythology. It even cited the Ramayana, an ancient epic of Hindu literature, as evidence of ancient self-governance.
The presentation highlighted how election officials trekked to remote Himalayan villages to collect just 16 votes and set up polling booths in the Gir National Park in Gujarat for a single voter. It emphasised how democratic politics had peacefully transferred power from urban elites to previously marginalised groups, describing this as a social revolution achieved through ballot boxes. Above all, it underscored democracy’s success in holding together a nation of 4,635 distinct communities, including a population where 19.4% are religious minorities, speaking dozens of languages and expressing countless traditions politically.
Slide from MEA's “Robustness of Indian Democracy” presentation
Surya Prakash’s ideas were prominently featured, receiving an entire slide in the 33-slide presentation. (His influence on the government’s thinking was ultimately recognised publicly in January 2025, when he was honoured with the Padma Bhushan – India’s third-highest civilian award – for his “well-researched interventions on national political issues.)
The underlying idea was simple: Western standards didn’t apply here. India had its own definition of democracy.
In August 2021, the government took this argument further. The MEA prepared “speaking notes” for Om Birla, the speaker of Lok Sabha, the lower house in the Indian parliament, to brief to foreign diplomats. His task was to meet heads of foreign missions and explain India’s version of democracy – a narrative now fully articulated and backed by the state.
What made this move significant wasn’t just what was being said, but who was saying it. The Lok Sabha speaker is meant to be an independent constitutional authority, separate from the executive. Yet here he was, delivering a government-prepared defense of India’s democracy.
At the same time, the government moved to limit domestic debate on democracy rankings. Twice, it attempted to prevent parliamentary discussions on the issue.
In July 2021, officials successfully requested the Rajya Sabha secretariat disallow a question about “India’s position on the democracy index”, claiming it was too sensitive for parliamentary debate. When the topic resurfaced in February 2022 – with an MP asking why India had fallen to 53rd on the EIU's Democracy Index – the government again managed to block the question. This time, it cited a procedural rule stating that questions “shall not raise matters under the control of bodies or persons not primarily responsible to the government of India”.
The implication was clear: since foreign institutions compiled these rankings, India’s democratic standing wasn't appropriate for parliamentary scrutiny.
This idea that India should not just defend its democracy rankings but define them didn’t remain rhetorical for long. It soon turned into policy.
In early 2023, the government began working on its own democracy index.
The project was assigned to the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), a think tank that works closely with the government on international policy initiatives. As a senior government official told me, the task was to develop a homegrown ratings system that could act as an alternative to the Western-led democracy indices that India had spent years contesting.
Nayanika Chatterjee for The Plank
This was a statement of intent. For years, India had played by rules set elsewhere – by institutions shaped by Western liberal democratic ideals and reinforced through global indices. Until now, the government’s response had been to contest, critique, and push back against these methodologies.
But by moving towards creating its own index, India was adopting a different strategy. Instead of attempting to influence existing rankings, it was now constructing its own system.
A Western voice
These were the official efforts – the structured push to redefine democracy on India’s terms.
But alongside official efforts, another force was at play: who got more space in the debate, and who was pushed to the margins. The GoM report had already outlined the strategy: amplify friendly voices, discredit critics. Soon, that became visible in public discourse.
The government, along with right-wing media outlets, rushed to discredit V-Dem.
Much of this centered on funding sources, pointing out that V-Dem received support from the Open Society Foundation, run by George Soros, a long-time political villain in the rhetoric of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
At times, these attacks entered official spaces. Venkaiah Naidu, the speaker of Rajya Sabha, the upper chamber in India’s Parliament, dismissed a question about the country’s democracy ranking, saying: “What is the use of a Sweden report? These are all political. They should look inward. All countries which are commenting on India should first look inward and then comment on India.”
A coordinated campaign to discredit V-Dem followed – both online and offline. At the same time, another voice suddenly emerged, quickly becoming a fixture in the debate: American-born sociologist Salvatore Babones.
Babones was introduced as a contrarian voice on India’s democratic health at the 2022 India Today Conclave, an annual conference that brings together political leaders, business magnates and cultural icons for discussions on a chosen theme. Speaking at the event, he said: “India’s intellectual class is anti-India...They are certainly anti-BJP and anti-Mr Modi, as a class.”
It was the first time many Indians had seen a Western academic forcefully defending India’s democracy on prime-time television. Babones’s core argument revolved around who was assessing India in the first place.
“The experts at V-Dem, I have to stress, are mostly people in India,” he told me in an interview in late 2024. “How do they know whether or not the electoral commission is independent? None of them were on the electoral commission. None of them were interviewing members of the electoral commission. They’re all just giving their impression.”
To Babones, these rankings weren’t measuring democracy itself, but the sentiments of an elite – and, he claimed, that sentiment had simply shifted. There has been no actual change in India from 2004 to 2014 to 2024, he told me. “The only change is that the experts are now depressed, when the experts were previously happy.”
His argument resonated in certain circles. And suddenly, his views were amplified across government-aligned media. Babones had found the right moment, the right platform, and the right audience. From there, his message spread.
All of this reflected the style of governance the GoM report had outlined: governance through narrative control. The homegrown democracy index, diplomatic messaging, discrediting critics, amplifying supporters, and carefully managing public discourse were all parts of this strategy. In this worldview, public discourse was not a space where ideas could freely co-exist, but a battleground where the state had to assert dominance.
And at least to me, that doesn’t sound democratic. (The ORF’s Democracy Index would disagree, I am sure.)
Nayanika Chatterjee for The Plank
The backlash
Staffan Lindberg, the director of the V-Dem Institute, had seen governments react badly to democracy rankings before. Turkey under Recep Erdoğan had lashed out. Hungary under Viktor Orbán had tried to discredit the system. But India, he told me, was different.
“It’s been the most obvious and blatant reaction from a government and government officials,” he said when we spoke in late 2024.
In Turkey and Hungary, the backlash against rankings was largely driven by party supporters. In India, it was the government itself leading the pushback. “In the case of India, it’s been a stronger reaction – openly from government and government officials,” Lindberg explained. “And a more blatant defamation campaign in trying to discredit V-Dem, The Economist, and Freedom House.”
But what troubled him most was the impact on those within India who contributed to these rankings.
V-Dem, like other democracy indices, relies on local experts to evaluate conditions in each country. Their identities are kept strictly anonymous – a precaution taken everywhere from Sweden to North Korea – to protect researchers from potential pressure or retaliation.
“This is something we took very seriously from the beginning,” he said. “We are legally bound by Swedish and European law to protect their identity because of the potential threat.”
That threat, he said, had become real in India. “We had two people on our advisory board from India – both famous professors,” Lindberg explained. “One was eventually more or less thrown out from his university, and both asked to be removed from the international advisory board because of the harassment they faced at home from BJP and their supporters.”
Mission accomplished
In February 2025, Donald Trump’s administration drastically cut the funding for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), abruptly terminating numerous foreign assistance programs, including several in India.
As more information surfaced on the programs funded by USAID, Sanjeev Sanyal, now a member of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, framed this as evidence of a larger conspiracy, describing the move as the sudden collapse of a global “Deep State” influence network he had opposed for years.
@sanjeevsanyal/X
This was a far cry from the meticulous, data-driven critique Sanyal had once co-authored. That original paper was clinical in its approach: a breakdown of methodological flaws in democracy rankings, contradictions in scoring, and the arbitrary nature of perception-based metrics. It was the work of a technocrat dissecting a measurement system.
But now, that rigour had given way to something else – the simplicity of having an enemy. The shift was complete. There was no longer a need to fix ‘flawed’ rankings if the entire system could simply be dismissed as a conspiracy.
This evolution reveals a deeper truth: the point isn’t whether democracy indices are perfect – they aren’t. What matters is how criticism was met with efforts at delegitimisation. The ‘West vs us’ rhetoric became a convenient weapon to discredit all criticism, emerging from a fundamental frustration: unlike with domestic media, the government couldn’t control global discourse.
And here, between the government’s public dismissals and private scrambling, lies a revealing contradiction: a democracy that claims strength but cannot tolerate scrutiny. Because in the end, the numbers weren’t the real problem. The fear of losing control was. And that – more than any index – reveals where Indian democracy truly stands.
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