A number of recent reports from globally recognised institutions like the Freedom House and IDEA have unequivocally concluded that freedom and democracy are in constant decline worldwide due to a surge in far-right politics, the rise of authoritarian regimes and, worst of all, stolen elections sanctioning elected dictators. The Freedom House Report 2024 concluded that democracy is under attack in every region of the world. The IDEA report reaffirmed it.

These problems are perhaps more pronounced in South Asian democracies than elsewhere. South Asia is a basket case of nascent, fledgling and trembling democracies which have suffered repeated and nearly fatal setbacks before they could be firmly institutionalised. Political upheaval in Bangladesh is the latest case in point. Last week, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was forced to resign and flee the country just after seven months of claiming unrivalled electoral victory for a fourth consecutive term in office.

The downturn

Democratic deficit is pervasive in all of South Asia. Afghanistan has been under ultraconservative Taliban rule since 2021. Bangladesh, in its five-decade existence, has gone under several military coups and dictatorships and is now culminating in the collapse of Hasina's elected autocracy. After mass protests in April 2022, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was also forced to leave the country; he eventually resigned while in exile, ending the nefarious 'rule of the Rajapaksa clan'. The flipflop in Pakistani democracy is seemingly a never-ending saga. Either a direct military rule or a dense shadow of the army over any so-called civilian government in history has been the signature governing feature of the Islamic Republic.

The democracy scorecard of regional superpower India, often referred to as the world's largest democracy, is also not progressive. In an overall score of freedom, India declined by 10 points (scoring only 66 out of 100) during the last decade (2013-23), while Bangladesh was even worse with the loss of 13 points and got only 40 out of 100. The alleged religious intolerance in India and rigged and violent elections in Bangladesh are cited as the reasons for such decline. Although Nepal added four points to be at 62 in this particular measure, mainly due to the smooth transition of power after the last parliamentary elections in 2022, the dominance of communist ideology in Nepal's politics, in some way or another, has been a key bottleneck in consolidating and institutionalising the newly adopted federal democracy. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party won 63 lesser seats in recent elections (or 240 only) compared to the 2019 elections. It fell short of securing majority seats in the 543-member lower house, the Lok Sabha.

The ailments

The trigger for protests to overthrow regimes may vary according to the country’s context. For example, the Sri Lankan protests resulted from increasing economic hardships, as the state coffers emptied and the government introduced extreme rationing of essential commodities. On the contrary, Bangladesh was lauded as a miracle in economic growth, with quadrupled per capita income from $698 in 2009 to $2,688 in 2022. Despite this, protests erupted against the government’s decision to reserve a 30 percent quota of government jobs for the families of veterans of the freedom struggle for independence from Pakistan in 1971.

But again, they were only the triggers. The real reasons, generally common to all countries of the region, are long-accumulated discontent against nepotism, corruption, brutal suppression of dissenting voices, misrule, use of state mechanisms to rig elections and growing hopelessness among the youths, among several other factors.

At the core of every malaise is the lack of democratic intent in major political players in these countries. Instead of empowering and ensuring the impartiality of key democratic institutions like the judiciary, election commission, bureaucracy and security apparatus, there is a growing tendency to make them subservient to serve the interests of the ruling elites. Atrocities to silence opposition voices and revenge politics when in power are common in the politics of the entire subcontinent. In the majority of these countries, only a handful of 'elite' families have monopolised their countries' politics for long. Regime stability is often misinterpreted as democratic stability. Therefore, the quest for institutionalising democracy in South Asian nations has proven to be a mirage by design, not by default.

The geopolitics

In each of South Asian nations except India, the leadership across the political spectrum is convinced that it can rise to or retain power only if it can secure support from a regional superpower. Traditionally, these political forces, barring the Pakistanis, competed to get the favour of the Indian establishment. But now, with the rise of China as the next-door economic powerhouse and its manifested interest in expanding the sphere of influence in South Asia, both India and China are competing to cultivate and nurture their 'pet' leaders in each of these countries. In the process, they overlook falling mercury in the popularity barometer of the leaders they favoured. These superpowers put forth their rather elusive 'security concern' argument to rationalise their engagement.

The current Bangladesh imbroglio is the latest example. Sheikh Hasina got unconditional support from New Delhi despite her anti-democratic excesses. Modi government did not even warn not to compromise fundamental democratic values while dealing with the opposition. Indian diplomacy seemed too preoccupied with the alleged collusion of Hasina's detractors with the forces not friendly to India. India follows a similar pattern of diplomacy in other neighbouring countries as well. This has unleashed a trend of vertical split between the political forces trying to win either Indian or Chinese favour, also in Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Pakistan is already in the Chinese lap. In this race to increase strategic influence, democracy ceases to be a defining variable.

Instead of banking on a single personality like Hasina, India, as a regional superpower and the largest democracy, ideally should have contributed to institutionalising democracy in the neighbourhood by charting out a subcontinental democratic axis. This could serve a double purpose: To protect its traditional sphere of influence and stabilise democracy in the entire neighbourhood. But, at present, Lutyens' Delhi seems more preoccupied with the preset narrative of security concern than internalising the benign effects of promoting genuine democracy in neighbouring countries as its topmost agenda of 'neighbourhood first' policy.