India’s democratic malaise is by now well documented, notes James Crabtree, executive director of IISS-Asia and author of ‘The Billionaire Raj’. The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, which tracks data on the health of democracies, recently reclassified the country as an “electoral autocracy”. Other indices tell a similar story of weakening institutions and declining civil liberties, he writes for The Financial Times in a review of two new books, To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism by Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane, and Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy by Christophe Jaffrelot. RTWT
