Atikh Rashid: The third wave of autocratisation and why it was waiting to happen

By Dilip -

As per the latest V-DEM report, in 2020, the third wave of autocratisation has accelerated considerably and now engulfs 25 countries and 34 per cent of the world population.    Last month, V-Dem Project (Varieties of Democracy), a Sweden-based independent research institute, released its annual democracy report making a key observation that India, the world’s largest democracy, has turned into an ‘electoral autocracy’. As per the report, 87 countries are now electoral autocracies and home to 68 per cent of the global population.

Apart from this, the report also pointed to an accelerated autocratisation in several countries including G-20 nation-states United States, Brazil and Turkey that has hastened the decline of democracy globally. Liberal democracies, the report says, have diminished and now constitute only 14 per cent of people. The report says that with the backsliding of democracy in Asia-Pacific region, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, the level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2020 is down to levels last found around 1990….

https://indianexpress.com/article/research/the-third-wave-of-autocratisation-and-why-it-was-waiting-to-happen-7281739/

As the dead pile up in Gujarat, the state’s media is on a warpath with the government over Covid-19 // Soutik Biswas: How India failed to prevent a deadly second wave

Bharat Bhushan: Burden of bigotry may break Indian democracy's back

Sankarshan Thakur - Compliant and complicit: Indians are living the funereal carnival of their own dispossession

Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist?

Walter Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion (1921)

Noam Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction (Universalizing Resistance)

Book review: Peter Pomerantsev's 'This Is Not Propaganda' is quietly frightening. By Steve Bloomfield

The emperor's masks: 'apolitical' RSS calls the shots in Modi sarkar

A whiff of evil

एक बात हमेशा ज़हन में सवाल खड़े करती है A question that stays with me... / Ravish Kumar's Speech at Berkeley (2019)

Mukul Kesavan: Against forgetting

Pratap Bhanu Mehta: In post-mortem of secularism, we are hand wringing over religion, missing the real crisis // Ashutosh Bhardwaj - Don’t blame only English elite. Indian secularism failed in Hindi heartland first

Suhas Palshikar: Bhoomi pujan of the new republic // Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Political colonisation of Hinduism




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