The government has strongly rebutted the Freedom House report and called it “misleading, incorrect and misplaced” while asserting that the country has well established democratic practices.
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Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday courted another controversy by saying that Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi used to win elections as well, as he made sarcastic attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi for India’s dwindling status in global democracy metrics.
“Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi used to have elections. They used to win them. It wasn’t like they weren’t voting but there was no institutional framework to protect that vote,” he said In an online interaction with Brown University professor Ashutosh Varshney, faculty and students.
“An election is not simply people going and pressing a button on a voting machine. An election is about narrative. An election is about institutions that make sure that the framework in the country is operating properly, an election is about the judiciary being fare and a debate taking place in parliament. So you need those things for a vote to count,” he said.
Mr Gandhi’s comments came days after he claimed India is “no longer” a democratic country, quoting media reports of a Sweden-based institute downgrading India to an “electoral autocracy” citing a “decline in democratic freedoms” since PM Modi took office in 2014.
The move by Sweden’s V-Dem Institute came shortly after another global report by US government-funded NGO Freedom House that downgraded India’s status from “free” to “partly free” and claimed that “political rights and civil liberties have eroded in India since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014”.
The government has strongly rebutted the Freedom House report and called it “misleading, incorrect and misplaced” while asserting that the country has well established democratic practices.