There is something terribly off about the international rankings when it comes to India, with this country performing poorly in almost all the following spheres—be it democracy, press freedom, or human/religious rights. And now even in terms of Covid deaths, apparently India has the highest death count, with 4.7 million people supposed to have perished in this country—that is 47 lakh, or nearly half a crore. While the WHO statistics is supposedly about science—some will argue, bad science and thus erroneous—the other surveys do not even pretend to be remotely scientific and therein lies the problem. These rankings are mostly about perceptions, with biases driving the perceptions.
Recently, this writer heard the term “wrap-up smear”. In public space, it seems to have been first used by US Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi in 2017. “It’s called a wrap-up smear. You make up something. Then you have the press write about it. And then you say, everybody is writing about this charge. It’s a tool of an authoritarian,” Pelosi had said. Something similar has been working against India as well. A charge is made against someone or some group, or against a government or a party, not necessarily based on facts—or something based on a deliberate misinterpretation of facts—which is picked up by a particular section of the press that fancies itself as “liberal” and is then disseminated globally by dint of the network they have. It is then picked up by activists and global media outlets and disseminated even further. Just because everyone is writing about it, the charge becomes a fact, internationally. It is no one’s concern that in the meantime the charge may have turned out to be false—take for example the tale about a church in Delhi being burnt down by Hindutva groups, or the boy from a minority community being killed on a train because he was carrying beef. Both claims turned out to be false, with the church burning down found to have been caused by an electrical problem, while the boy’s death was found to have been resulted from a fight over railway seats. But by then the narrative of India being an unsafe place for minorities had gone global and it was all the way downhill from there. These two incidents are important because they took place towards the beginning of Narendra Modi’s tenure and set the tone and tenor for how India and India’s government would be viewed for the next eight years.
It is no one’s case that India has a beautifully functioning democracy or is a heaven for all ethnic and religious groups. But there is also no denying that India is as bad or as good as it has been ever since it came into existence, 75 years ago and has institutional checks in place to take care of excesses. Nothing has happened in the last eight years for the Swedish V-Dem Institute to label India as an “electoral autocracy”. Similar is the case with the World Press Freedom Index (WPFI)—compiled by the Reporters Without Borders (RSF)—where India this year has fallen to the 150th place among 180 countries, ranking even below Somalia (140), South Sudan (128) and Ethiopia (115). According to a report by the Niti Aayog, “Deciphering the World Press Freedom Index”, a total of 150 individuals and 18 NGOs were involved in deciding the 2020 ranking. “Multiple countries and commentators have raised concerns with both the WPFI criteria, methodology and also about RSF’s perceived biases, lack of objectivity in ranking and lack of transparency. One of the primary concerns raised has been the opaqueness of the WPFI survey,” says the Niti Aayog report. In other words, it needs one or two people from a country of 1.3 billion and thousands of media outlets and lakhs of journalists to decide whether India has a free press or not. This is as bad as the “perception poll” that Reuters had published a few years ago, branding India as the worst place in the world to be a woman, even worse than Syria and Afghanistan.
And then these reports are used by global commentators to draw comical conclusions such as India abstaining from voting against Russia at the UNSC on Ukraine war is proof that nations such as Russia, China and India are coming together because they are authoritarian. And how is India authoritarian? That’s because Swedish V-Dem Institute labelled India as an “electoral autocracy”. This author was gobsmacked to read an article in the international media more or less saying this.
It is a Goebbelsian cycle, where a lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth. At this rate, none of these rankings will be taken seriously except by the most gullible.