Opinion | Democracy is not just about numbers

Going by an all-adult consensus could mean no decision ever gets taken, while dictatorship deprives people of any say in their collective destiny and subjects them to the tyranny of whimsy, or worse. India slid 10 ranks on the global chart based on the EIU Democracy Index for 2019, which covers political systems across 165 countries and two territories. Of the broad criteria used for the analysis, we appear to have more or less held our past record on political participation and culture, as also electoral processes and pluralism, but suffered a decline on civil liberties. There are worse performers on the chart, such as China and Hong Kong, both of which have fallen sharply, and the report suggests that democracy seems to have weakened on average across the world. India, of course, is the world’s largest democracy, and holds regular elections involving larger numbers than the populations of the chart toppers put together. But it is clear from a cursory glance at the EIU’s findings that it does not see democracy as a function of the number of voters, or anything numeric, for that matter. General observation does confirm that India has not escaped global trends that democrats have been watching with dismay over the past few years. The EIU report points to Jammu and Kashmir and Assam as places where state actions have chipped away at the country’s democratic credentials, in its view. What it seems not to have taken into account are the popular voices of support for the constitutional values and democratic principles of equality, liberty and justice. As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has argued, Indians are an inherently argumentative lot, and our traditions of debate and discursive problem-solving go back millennia.