Aakar Patel | Of Authoritarianism and Freedom: What the world is saying about today’s India

There was a popular video recently by a young man named Dhruv Rathee, which irked the government’s supporters. Its broad argument may be understood by the title, which was “Is India becoming a dictatorship?” The examples used in the video included the recent rigging of the Chandigarh mayoral election by the BJP, the recent rigging of the panel to select the chief election commissioner, the misuse of government agencies against Opposition leaders, and so on. The dictionary defines dictatorship as “a form of government in which one person or a small group possesses absolute power without effective constitutional limitations’, and “a form of government in which absolute power is concentrated in an individual or a small clique”. I never use the term ‘fascist’ as a term of abuse; to me it is a diagnostic category comprising not only one’s ideological posture but also the personality traits and motivational patterns contextualising the ideology.” Nandy added: “Modi, it gives me no pleasure to tell readers, met virtually all the criteria that psychiatrists, psycho-analysts and psychologists had set up after years of empirical work on the authoritarian personality. This month, the annual V-Dem Institute’s report from the University of Gothenburg said: “India’s autocratisation process has been well documented, including gradual but substantial deterioration of freedom of expression, compromising independence of the media, crackdowns on social media, harassment of journalists critical of the government, as well as attacks on civil society and intimidation of the Opposition.” Similar findings come from Freedom House, which ranks India as “partially free”; Civicus, the global alliance of civil society organisations, which rates India as “repressed” and the Economist Intelligence Unit, which classified India as a “flawed democracy”.