Bobby Ghosh:
Well, if you think about democracy simply in terms of elections, then, far and away, India is the biggest democracy in the world. It conducts a gigantic election that is very hard to wrap your head around, the sheer scale of it.
But democracy is much more than just about elections. It's about freedom to express yourself, freedom to criticize the government, freedom to investigate, and put the government under a microscope. All those freedoms are shrinking in India, and have been shrinking at an alarming pace.
It's still a democracy, but it's an illiberal democracy, rather than a liberal democracy. And the arc, the direction in which it is going, does not allow for optimism about any kind of turnaround in the near future. This is not the democracy of Nehru. This is a very, very different kind of beast.
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