A few things that stand out (not that it's that shocking!)
- Narratives matter -- a lot . Second order effects of such subjective rankings are real . Imagine getting a credit downgrade because someone perceives the democracy to be under threat
- "the government had reverse-engineered the ranking, strategically identifying procedural tweaks that directly boosted India’s scores in Delhi and Mumbai—the two cities evaluated by the World Bank" .
I love the whole cynical nature of this. This is statecraft at it's finest ( I render no moral judgements here :) ). This is reminiscent of Machiavelli or Kautilya (Chanakya) [0]
A lot more to digest but will post them as a reply on this thread.
I don’t know, I get the feeling Sir Humphrey would approve of this fine piece of statecraft (unless of course it was an adversary of Her Majesty’s government, in which case he would be appropriately concerned)
Modi has the highest approval rating, according to western pollsters, of any leader in the world. India’s elections are free and fair. That’s all democracy requires.
Are they, when people opposing one candidate are jailed?
> That’s all democracy requires.
That is certainly false. Democracy isn't mob rule, or as the saying go, it's not two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. Democracy is about self-determination for each person; if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.
> Democracy is about self-determination for each person; if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.
That’s western liberal individualism and it’s orthogonal to democracy. Indeed it’s antidemocratic, because even in western countries the people vote to impose certain restrictions on individuals and minorities.
This is the old argument of dicators, going back to the Cold War and before. Like much propaganda, it tries to turn around the enemy's own arguments to disrupt and disconcert - the enemy cares about cultures and freedom, so brutal dictators should be 'free' to do what their 'culture' demands - I don't think their victims see it that way.
Democracy, with rights, has prospered and been embraced across cultures and around the world, on every continent. Before Modi, it was embraced in India.
I have no idea what “dictators” you’re talking about. Both my argument and Hamid’s comes from the experiences with fledgling democracies in the Muslim world, where the model of liberal democracy has been tried and failed repeatedly.
What does “democracy, with rights” even mean? Who decides what the “rights” are? In Asia, “democracy, with rights” exists primarily in Japan and South Korea, where it was imposed by the United States. Previously, it existed in Hong Kong, which was a British colony. Singapore also has “democracy, with rights” but again as a result of British colonization. And post-colonization, the “with rights” part is pretty circumscribed.
“Democracy, with rights” was a foreign import to India (and Bangladesh), imposed by an Oxbridge-educated Indian elite. Nehru didn’t get secularism and social democracy from India, he got them to England while he was studying at Cambridge.[1] What you’re seeing in India now is the result of India becoming more democratic as British colonial influence fades: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial...
[1] The last Congress prime minister has degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge. While the current leader of Congress is half Italian and went to college near Orlando, then got his masters at Cambridge.
If majoritarianism is exactly equal to democracy, then a third of the citizenry can be in prison serving as slave labor and so long as they get to cast ballots for candidates promising freedom only to be voted down by the keep-slave-labor camp that's "democracy".
I'd like to think that aspiring higher than that is neither western nor non-western.
> Are they, when people opposing one candidate are jailed?
And pray tell who that candidate is and what was their platform?
> Democracy isn't mob rule, or as the saying go, it's not two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. Democracy is about self-determination for each person; if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.
And what is the definition of minority to follow? Caste? Religion? Ethnicity?
Each one of these intersectionalities are represented in Indian electoral politics at the local, state, and national level.
The BJP itself lost it's supermajority in the Lok Sabha (Parliament) after Muslim voters in UP flipped to the Samajwadi Party in the 2024 election, and the opposition parties have won major state elections such as in Jharkhand.
In fact, after the 2024 election results, Indian electioneering is starting to stop using the "Hindu-Muslim" trope because it's been overused, and the primary swing voting bank at this point is women, as was seen with the results of the 2024 General, Maharashtra, and Delhi elections.
> if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.
I agree with you that Majoritarianism is NOT democracy.
But minorities are not uniformly opposed to the BJP either. Lower caste Muslims (Pasmanda) tend to lean towards the NDA (BJP's coalition) [0] and Muslim women have begun to lean in favor of the BJP due to women first welfare schemes [1]
Furthermore, assuming the BJP is India and India is the BJP is an extremely reductive take on Indian democracy that was clearly proven wrong in the 2024 General Elections. If it was then the BJP would have won a hypermajority ("Abki Bhar 400 Paar"), but got a severe drubbing forcing them to build a coalition with secular JD(U) in Bihar and TDP in AP.
>Modi has the highest approval rating, according to western pollsters, of any leader in the world. India’s elections are free and fair. That’s all democracy requires.
Source? According to these sources Bukele beats Modi ~90% to 75%.
The problem with any other definition of democracy is that there’s an irreconcilable bootstrapping problem. Democracy is a way to make collective decisions about governance among people who don’t agree on things. The beauty of democracy is that we can all agree on a procedural rule (majoritarian voting) separate and apart from substantive decisions.
If you want to exempt certain decisions or categories of decisions from the majoritarian rule, that poses a conundrum: how do you decide what’s exempted, and how do you make decisions about issues within that exempted space?
Well, the obvious answer is that rights, along with legislative procedures, etc, get codified in a constitution which takes a supermajority to amend. In a perfect world that constitution is approved at a constitutional convention by a supermajority of the citizenry acting through their representatives; in practice it arrives via various historical means, including outside imposition. Despite the "irreconcilable bootstrapping problem", constitutional democracies somehow exist.
But yeah yeah that's not "true democracy" because anything other than majoritarianism is a grotesque western perversion of the perfect immaculate glorious ideal of "simple majority rules on everything". Whatever.
Ironically, tyranny of the majority is a very very good definition of democracy if you drill the majority down into subcategorical majorities recursively until you reach the individual who might be severely disconnected from the averages.
That's amusing, but silly. A criminal screeching "tyranny of the majority!" as they get hauled away is not a revealing example and does not reflect the phrase's usual meaning.
The way I put it was meant to be slightly amusing, but let me put it a different way for the sake of discussion.
For this purpose, I like to mentally model a country (or territory which decided to hold an election of some kind) as a collection of points in a multidimensional space of values or policies which are up for election. Each point represents where a voting person would stand according to their personal principles.
Now, I’d like to postulate that the act of voting corresponds to finding the center of the cluster of points. In this model, it’s easy to imagine the scenario where a very large portion of people (and possibly even the majority) are deeply dissatisfied with the result because they are too far on many dimensions from the center that was elected. This is actually further exacerbated by many factors in real life like the asymmetry of information between people.
The obvious solution would be to create more cluster centers instead of one fat cluster that leaves everyone not very happy. This corresponds to states or provinces within a country in the real world.
So coming from that line of thinking, it leads me to believe that sometimes to maintain a democracy, you need to cut the outliers away to move/make the center such that people are happy with the result. Essentially you enforce the will of the majority by cutting away the minority until it is no longer a tyranny to do so.
Of course this is gross simplification of real life. It is ignoring factors such as external threats, instability, unpredictability, information availability and so on. However, I think it’s useful to think this way for many purposes.
Addressing your extreme example of a criminal, that’s a point so far off in the space that you definitely want to cut it out of the system.
The amount of data collection and analysis is insane. Election Consulting Companies like I-PAC and Showtime Consulting would gather extremely granular religious (sect level), ethnic (sub-clan level), age, linguistic (sub-dialect level), economic, and social metrics and poll on a near weekly basis, and work with the parties that hired them to iterate on electoral messaging and promises based on the selected demographic intersection.
These consulting firms also pay Microsoft and Google India level salaries so they are attracting the best of the best at top Indian universities.
> Democracy doesn’t mean western democracy or liberal democracy
It's something I disagreed with you about before, but have come to agree with you about Raynier.
Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Turkiye, and Israel have all begun falling out of the US orbit after we began pressing on the liberalism aspect.
We should fight for liberal democracy at home, but it is not something we should necessarily evangelize abroad, as elite and economic consolidation plays a greater role in building lasting ties with a country instead of ideological ties.
I had a convo with Mastro and Doshi about this during a seminar a couple months before the election, and it sounded like they also started agreeing with this view as well.
> elite and economic consolidation plays a greater role in building lasting ties with a country instead of ideological ties
Elite and economic consolidation is a corrupting force, though. A country's actions are just as important as it's stated values - if it partners with others who don't share those values, then it's just performance. If your country signals that it doesn't actually care about its purported values, then why would any country which does care want to create long-term relationships or otherwise ally themselves with you? How would anyone be able to trust you if you compromise your foundational principles for economic gain? How could you trust them?
Cambodia used to be American leaning in the 2010s during their transition to democracy, with support for democratic norm building and actual democracy. China on the other hand decided to only conduct outreach to Cambodian economic and political elite [0]
The US government funded social infrastructure like health clinics, schools, and sanitation systems, but the Chinese government funded hard infra projects like canals, highways, energy systems, and weaponry without human rights oversight [0].
When Cambodia decided to end their democratic experiment, the US condemned it, but the Chinese government was indifferent. And now Cambodia has solidly shifted to the Chinese sphere of influence.
This story has repeated all across ASEAN from Thailand to Malaysia to Indonesia.
The reality is it's only the economic, military, and poltical decisionmakers that matter, and if you needle them too much, they will try to find alternatives or build their own strategic autonomy.
France did the same thing in the De Gaulle era for the exact same reasons (military regime that didn't like getting needled about democratic backsliding).
> then why would any country which does care want to create long-term relationships or otherwise ally themselves with you
Cold hard cash, weapons, and legitimacy. Which is what ASEAN countries have begun to do by shifting closer towards China. They don't want or need lectures - they want to maintain their own power.
Notice how Europe has grown silent about Turkish democratic decline now that European nations require Turkish support to stabilize Ukraine. And if PiS wins the Polish elections, you won't hear similar complaints about "democratic backsliding" compared to the PiS barely 3 years ago. When push comes to shove, values don't matter much.
In an era where great power politics has returned, values matter less than hard power.
I (reluctantly) acknowledge the practicality of this, but what happens when those economic and political elite are too extreme and are overthrown? Supporting those actors creates a permanent divide and causes further isolation. Consider the various examples of regime change and/or support for dictators/authoritarians enabled by the United States in South America and the Middle East - has that made any of those countries (the US included) better off because there was alignment with political and economic elites? It seems like you make more enemies in the long run with this approach.
> what happens when those economic and political elite are too extreme and are overthrown
Regimes fall when subsets of the elite decide to defect to the opposition.
For example, Hosni Mubarak fell not because of protesters in Tahrir Square, but because Sisi didn't feel like shooting protesters at that time for Mubarak's sake (Sisi had ambitions). If Sisi and the Egyptian military didn't decide to return to the barracks, the Arab Spring in Egypt would have never happened.
The only solution to this is by actually cultivating multiple different factions within those elites. Yet this is something the US is not good at anymore because this kind of knowledge and understanding requires significant cultural background, and State Dept hiring regulations prevent people of the same ethnicity from working on relations for those countries.
> Consider the various examples of regime change and/or support for dictators/authoritarians enabled by the United States in South America and the Middle East
The most notable one in the post 1971 era is Iran 1979 where US cultivated the secular Shah's government and military leadership, but not the organized Shia clergy. If the US had cultivated Khomenini, we wouldn't have been in such a severe situation. The French on the other hand engaged Khomeini and Shia clergy, and it helped ensure that France could maintain relations until the sanctions regime began in the 2010s.
By the 1990s, US foreign policy in Latin America changed to democracy promotion due to the same points you brought up, and that caused Honduras to switch in favor of China after corruption investigations threatened their leadership, and Nicaragua switched in favor of China due to pushback for democratic backsliding in 2017-18.
My view on this is shaped by the situation in Asia, and in particular Bangladesh where I’m from. The former Bangladesh PM, Sheikh Hasina, was a despot but also had a real democratic mandate, with 70% approval according to a polling by a U.S. organization: https://www.cfr.org/blog/new-bangladesh-survey-hasina-remain.... The U.S. has giving her a hard time, however, for human rights issues. Which certainly existed—but which most people weren’t concerned about.
I’ll leave aside my conspiracy theories about how much Anthony Blinken had to do with Hasina being overthrown last year. But we have a new government promising more liberalism but the security situation has deteriorated: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/3/4/gotham-but-no-ba.... Holding fair elections will be impossible, because the interim government has a tremendous incentive to ban Hasina’s party, which has long been the most popular party.
>How could theocratic states with no separation of religion and government score higher than India? How could a country with universal suffrage and constitutional rights rank below nations that didn’t even hold elections?
Since the article talks quite a bit about Sanjeev Sanyal, I think it might be interesting to point to some of his podcasts.
Similarly, India has taken criticism from the West over its more ambitious projects like Sardar Vallabhai Patel's statue, and the space program. So taking the West's word with a grain of salt is quite valid.
Further, the article points out that the government is trying to game the ranking while outwardly saying that they don't matter. This seems hypocritical at first glance but it also points out that having lower rankings affects investor confidence and borrowing rates. You can be against a broken system while still trying to appease it because it's not going to change immediately. The Indian Government needs to work within the system until something better can be created.
I am not fully supportive of everything the NDA government has done but I don't think there is another leader in India who can feasibly win an election right now and I refuse to support INC until they get rid of the Gandhi dynasty.
Also, please look at the podcast from this timestamp[2], where he further shows why people in general but Indians specifically should be skeptical of Western narratives. This is also supported by the book Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl
Sometimes I do find it bizzare when western media praises a theocratic absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia for “modernizing” (by allowing women to drive and allowing them to not have chaperones) while simultaneously these same media organizations accuse a constitutional liberal democracy like India (which has strict separation of powers and an active independent Supreme Court) of somehow being authoritarian or fascist or some other slur.
The BJP is certainly authoritarian and fascistic, this is not contested. The country itself though probably isn’t. They failed to get an outright majority in the recent elections, and perhaps the main reason they still win is the opposition is completely incapable of reform (like the OP said they keep putting up members of the Gandhi family despite them losing elections repeatedly).
It's hard to define that - on average? In the long run? What would a Indian who is Muslim say - 'well, it's ok because on average or in the long run, it's ok'?
Every leader in the world gets criticized to some degree. It's nonsense to compare criticism of Vajpayee over nuclear tests with Modi or Gandhi rolling back freedom and democracy, and killing and brutalizing people.
Media sensationalism is everywhere. But I’ve become especially distrustful of these rankings and labels from random think tanks or nonprofits. A good example is the one the other day from “civicus that claimed civic freedoms were disappearing in the US even though no law has changed that would affect civil rights. When you look at their report it basically complains about political decisions rather than civic freedoms. I imagine the bias is 10x worse for India.
Civil rights are declining for immigrants, the press, speech - just because a law hasn't been passed doesn't mean rights haven't changed. The idea that it all depends on law is naive or disingenuous.
The article doesn't answer its own question. The inherent contradictions in the ratings. Romania who just 'cancelled an election' and banned the winning candidate from contesting is 40 positions above India.
> Western standards didn’t apply here. India had its own definition of democracy.
I think this is core thrust of narrative of Indian state and its card carrying supporters. On ideological part this of course makes sense. But practical aspect of cheap cost of informational bit vs physical bit that makes state so obsessed with this. As it makes so easily achievable.
It would be very much clear to anyone who do not spend whole life on social media dream world in India that physical infrastructure will not be reaching of western standards at least in this century. On the other hand informational infrastructure very much reachable if not already reached. Consider Indian companies do so much information /data processing for West already.
Hence all emphasis and obsession on narrative building.
I disagree with the physical infrastructure bit. Indian Govt has invested massively in all kinds of infrastructure and they don’t seem to be slowing down. All of this has already paid off massive dividends and will continue to accelerate development.
Physical infrastructure will keep improving but at some point one has to have a sense of proportion on what is realistically possible. My three visits to India in past 2-3 years has given me first hand experience on how stunningly crappy infrastructure and system managing that infrastructure is compared to first world.
To be fair though it may be better than lot of other poorer nations.
Middle class (Upper, middle, and lower) are crushed into shambles. The Rich and those who can gather means are leaving the country at an alarming rate. The fake leader is worried about his narrative and ratings.
The West do try to control India through these institutions and rankings, and Indian government is trying to use that to hide some of their shortcomings.
Narrative controlling is necessary, but I hope the actual work is done too.
Before someone bites the bait - this comment is sarcastic and 100% of democratic societies spend resources to control the narrative around their government/country/whatever. 100%.
It doesn't help that the nature of "democracy" is itself endlessly contested. E.g. both supporters and critics of the way Romanian courts have treated Georgescu seem to claim they are "defending democracy".
There are important advantages to a social contract which is simple and unambiguous.
> It doesn't help that the nature of "democracy" is itself endlessly contested.
It's not really; I've never heard someone say that, in fact. The nature of propaganda is to make everything uncertain, and then everyone is frozen and nobody has done wrong.
>It's not really; I've never heard someone say that, in fact.
Lots of disputes within democracies consist of both sides implicitly claiming their position is "more democratic". E.g. how much power should the US president have over US bureaucracies? Some say that because bureaucrats are "unelected", the president should have more control. Others say that too much executive control is authoritarian. In both cases, the nature of "democracy" is what's [implicitly] at stake.
>propaganda
* I speak truth to power.
* He is exercising his right to freedom of speech.
* They spread propaganda.
I don't think the phrase "propaganda" is meaningless, necessary. But this reinforces my point from earlier, about how our social contract could use more simplicity and less ambiguity.
I don't see that happening. I see lots of propaganda trying to make the same paralyzing arguments, especially the argument that 'it's all the same and you can't tell the difference'. Yes we can, pretty easily.
Hopefully I'm not nitpicking, "propaganda" in general form can be to
any purpose; rallying/unity, sapping morale, creating a scapegoat...
A lovely word for what your describing is "discombobulation" - sowing
seeds of fear, uncertainty, doubt (FUD), gaslighting and disorienting.
And there is much propaganda - especially now - used to sow hate, violence, and division.
We need clear language for each form (how many are there?). And I think we need a more serious word than 'discombobulation' - for one, it describes the effect, not the cause; and for another, people won't take the issue seriously.
I am pretty shocked at that Romanian court ruling though. It seems like the entire questioning of the election outcomes was motivated by EU leadership not liking the result of democracy.
The decision to not stop at redoing the election but to then ban the candidate seems motivated by the fact that opinion polls show him to still be winning even today despite the alleged “election interference”, months after he won the first election.
It’s weird seeing the EU conduct elections sort of like Russia does, ironically. In the past I viewed the EU as supporting things like free speech and democracy in the same way America does.
>what do you do about election manipulation? 'Nothing' isn't an acceptable answer.
I agree, and this reinforces my point about the ambiguity of the social contract. When the US constitution was written in 1787, the telegraph wasn't even invented. Now we all live in a single "global village". People from all over the world are commenting on politics in other nations in real time. Where do you draw the line for "election manipulation"? No one seems to know, exactly.
The problem is that we've made this intellectual laziness acceptable. Nobody knows exactly? We have pretty good ideas; we know the difference between legitimate media and propaganda; we just need to encode that in English in specific rules.
And before that, we need to get the people who benefit from propaganda, and therefore defend it, out of power. Look at the widespread, and effective campaign to shut down anyone studying disinformation. The problems with letting things like that fester and not doing anything - which is what we've done, mostly - is that people in power become invested in it.
>we just need to encode that in English in specific rules.
Well, I encourage you to lead the way, fight this intellectual laziness, and propose specific rules. I suspect that you will find the task more difficult than you thought. Whatever rules you propose will be adversarially interpreted by your political opponents, and by actual propagandists. Ideally, the rules should also be simple enough for any voter to understand.
> 100% of democratic societies spend resources to control the narrative around their government/country/whatever
That's like saying 100% of people lie. Yes, but that's meaningless - people range from highly trustworthy to miserable frauds. What the democratic societies actually do, and the consequences, is what matters.
What is the problem the article is pointing out? A "democracy" index based on the "feelings" of some chosen experts is always going to be biased and problematic. Anyone getting the short end of that stick, if they were organised enough and had the resources, would fight against it irrespective of whether the rankings were justified or not. A large part of soft power is narrative control. There is nothing objective about narrative control. Which means powerful countries which weild a lot of soft power have managed to effectively control their narrative. And their narrative likely has little convergence with reality. No system should realistically expect the subjects to just cede control without any benefits accruing to the "controlled". So countries seeking to increase their own soft power will and should try to control their own narrative. It is easily one of the bigger captain obvious moments I have come across.
My hot take is that, viewed under the right conditions, India today is what a long-term MAGA victory in the US would look like (as in multiple consecutive Presidential administrations). Now obviously the religion must be changed; obviously also the demographic/racial aspect is different too. But in general, to see how MAGA might operate if it succeeded completely, look at India.
That's exactly what I keep saying - both governments use the same tools to control relatively gullible masses. For example, BJP won by a vast majority largely due to their IT cell[1], an army of people paid 1-10$ per day to berate or praise anyone, re-tweet/like/share to manipulate algorithms and make things go viral. This was a huge one-sided operation for the initial few years until the opposition finally caught up.
The party is headed by an alleged murderer (people died and cases against him conveniently disappeared as soon as the party came to power)[2][3]. He's the mastermind while Modi is just the face. Modi hasn't held a single unscripted press conference/interview in the last 10 years and can't handle questions that aren't pre-arranged.
Its not just related to India, Right wings across the globe have more or less figured this out.
As I get older, I realize increasingly that there is a huge gap between how most people think the government works and how it actually works... Also, the government and other entities which benefit from the incongruity spend a massive amount of effort constructing narratives to obscure the discrepancy in the public eye.
If you boil it down and peek beneath the many layers of complexity and misdirection, reality is disturbingly dark and you wonder how society functions at all and how so many people can be fooled into believing surface narratives... But in a way, it's because people are fooled that society can function as-is, in spite of its dysfunction. If people knew how the system really worked, it would have to change.
IMO, the good news is that generally, when the system is forced to change to become more transparent, things improve. But the system is always at the edge; constantly gaslighting the public as much as it can get away with at any given time. The state rarely apologizes for past mistakes; unless it serves some new agenda which it benefits from (e.g. the mistake happened under different leadership).
There should be some rule like "The state is precisely as corrupt as it can get away with." Or "The state is corrupt proportionally to how passive and delusional its citizens are."
Well compare things now with how they were during feudalism. Things are a bit better for the average person.
The problem we have now is that the population is extremely propagandized/delusional due to powerful media, made possible by technology. But the same technologies can also create more transparency... Or the technology may cause more skepticism which is also good; e.g. As AI generates fake videos, people will adapt to be more skeptical.
> compare things now with how they were during feudalism. Things are a bit better for the average person.
That is really looking at the long run! :D I hope for improvement on a shorter timeline, myself. All those average people are dead.
> powerful media
If you include social media, I'm with you.
> As AI generates fake videos, people will adapt to be more skeptical.
You said, and I agree, that people have become "extremely propagandized/delusional" due to prior tech development; why would AI tech have different outcomes?
I've been thinking about human communication and how much it changed over time.
It crazy to think that before the printing press, the most efficient form of communication was word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth only conveys a very vague, unreliable description of reality. Communication was unreliable. People knew they could not fully trust what was communicated to them; not only because the original material may not be reliable, but people knew the message could have been distorted as it propagated through the population 'Chinese Whispers' effect.
Then with the printing press, communication became a lot more reliable; people did not have to worry about 'Chinese Whispers' anymore, they knew that what was printed likely came directly from the source...
Then photography came along. People trusted photos completely for a time. It was high-resolution evidence; wars could be started over it. Then as photo-editing tech became more powerful, people started to doubt photography but then video came along and created a new medium for reliable communication which was hard to fake. CGI never got quite to the level that it could not be distinguished from reality.
Now AI is making video unreliable... We will have no way to verify the authenticity of detailed visual communication. So we will lose trust in it.
Maybe something like blockchain will help us to get back to a certain level of communication reliability in terms of source authentication... but the resolution has been lost permanently. We will never again be sure if something really happened with quite the same level of certainty. We go back to a kind of 'printing press' level of reliability.
The resolution of the communication (the amount of detail) doesn't add to its reliability anymore. We shouldn't underestimate how much of a role video has played in creating the highly centralized over-trusting society which we have today.
Would people give governments so much power if they couldn't even agree with certainty about who said what and even who won the election?
A few things that stand out (not that it's that shocking!)
- Narratives matter -- a lot . Second order effects of such subjective rankings are real . Imagine getting a credit downgrade because someone perceives the democracy to be under threat
- "the government had reverse-engineered the ranking, strategically identifying procedural tweaks that directly boosted India’s scores in Delhi and Mumbai—the two cities evaluated by the World Bank" .
I love the whole cynical nature of this. This is statecraft at it's finest ( I render no moral judgements here :) ). This is reminiscent of Machiavelli or Kautilya (Chanakya) [0]
A lot more to digest but will post them as a reply on this thread.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanakya
Statecraft at its finest? Next, I'll hear that KPI manipulation sets the standard for good engineering...
I agree re KPIs and engineering. But, statecraft is people. You’re not dealing with bits :)
The real question is why did anyone even think KPIs were effective in the first place.
Exactly, I'm sure Boeing and Intel both had KPIs coming out the walls but both have had major engineering issues recently.
I don’t know, I get the feeling Sir Humphrey would approve of this fine piece of statecraft (unless of course it was an adversary of Her Majesty’s government, in which case he would be appropriately concerned)
Modi has the highest approval rating, according to western pollsters, of any leader in the world. India’s elections are free and fair. That’s all democracy requires.
Democracy doesn’t mean western democracy or liberal democracy. Shadi Hamid has done excellent work on this issue: https://www.brookings.edu/books/the-problem-of-democracy-ame... see also https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/18/the-problem-of...
> India’s elections are free and fair.
Are they, when people opposing one candidate are jailed?
> That’s all democracy requires.
That is certainly false. Democracy isn't mob rule, or as the saying go, it's not two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. Democracy is about self-determination for each person; if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.
> Democracy is about self-determination for each person; if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.
That’s western liberal individualism and it’s orthogonal to democracy. Indeed it’s antidemocratic, because even in western countries the people vote to impose certain restrictions on individuals and minorities.
This is the old argument of dicators, going back to the Cold War and before. Like much propaganda, it tries to turn around the enemy's own arguments to disrupt and disconcert - the enemy cares about cultures and freedom, so brutal dictators should be 'free' to do what their 'culture' demands - I don't think their victims see it that way.
Democracy, with rights, has prospered and been embraced across cultures and around the world, on every continent. Before Modi, it was embraced in India.
I have no idea what “dictators” you’re talking about. Both my argument and Hamid’s comes from the experiences with fledgling democracies in the Muslim world, where the model of liberal democracy has been tried and failed repeatedly.
What does “democracy, with rights” even mean? Who decides what the “rights” are? In Asia, “democracy, with rights” exists primarily in Japan and South Korea, where it was imposed by the United States. Previously, it existed in Hong Kong, which was a British colony. Singapore also has “democracy, with rights” but again as a result of British colonization. And post-colonization, the “with rights” part is pretty circumscribed.
“Democracy, with rights” was a foreign import to India (and Bangladesh), imposed by an Oxbridge-educated Indian elite. Nehru didn’t get secularism and social democracy from India, he got them to England while he was studying at Cambridge.[1] What you’re seeing in India now is the result of India becoming more democratic as British colonial influence fades: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial...
[1] The last Congress prime minister has degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge. While the current leader of Congress is half Italian and went to college near Orlando, then got his masters at Cambridge.
If majoritarianism is exactly equal to democracy, then a third of the citizenry can be in prison serving as slave labor and so long as they get to cast ballots for candidates promising freedom only to be voted down by the keep-slave-labor camp that's "democracy".
I'd like to think that aspiring higher than that is neither western nor non-western.
> Are they, when people opposing one candidate are jailed?
And pray tell who that candidate is and what was their platform?
> Democracy isn't mob rule, or as the saying go, it's not two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. Democracy is about self-determination for each person; if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.
And what is the definition of minority to follow? Caste? Religion? Ethnicity?
Each one of these intersectionalities are represented in Indian electoral politics at the local, state, and national level.
The BJP itself lost it's supermajority in the Lok Sabha (Parliament) after Muslim voters in UP flipped to the Samajwadi Party in the 2024 election, and the opposition parties have won major state elections such as in Jharkhand.
In fact, after the 2024 election results, Indian electioneering is starting to stop using the "Hindu-Muslim" trope because it's been overused, and the primary swing voting bank at this point is women, as was seen with the results of the 2024 General, Maharashtra, and Delhi elections.
> if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.
I agree with you that Majoritarianism is NOT democracy.
But minorities are not uniformly opposed to the BJP either. Lower caste Muslims (Pasmanda) tend to lean towards the NDA (BJP's coalition) [0] and Muslim women have begun to lean in favor of the BJP due to women first welfare schemes [1]
Furthermore, assuming the BJP is India and India is the BJP is an extremely reductive take on Indian democracy that was clearly proven wrong in the 2024 General Elections. If it was then the BJP would have won a hypermajority ("Abki Bhar 400 Paar"), but got a severe drubbing forcing them to build a coalition with secular JD(U) in Bihar and TDP in AP.
[0] - https://carnegieendowment.org/2024/02/09/mapping-muslim-voti...
[1] - https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/elections/india/lok-s...
>Modi has the highest approval rating, according to western pollsters, of any leader in the world. India’s elections are free and fair. That’s all democracy requires.
Source? According to these sources Bukele beats Modi ~90% to 75%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_B...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1456852/world-leader-app...
The definition of democracy as "free and fair elections" alone is subject to tyranny of the majority.
The problem with any other definition of democracy is that there’s an irreconcilable bootstrapping problem. Democracy is a way to make collective decisions about governance among people who don’t agree on things. The beauty of democracy is that we can all agree on a procedural rule (majoritarian voting) separate and apart from substantive decisions.
If you want to exempt certain decisions or categories of decisions from the majoritarian rule, that poses a conundrum: how do you decide what’s exempted, and how do you make decisions about issues within that exempted space?
Well, the obvious answer is that rights, along with legislative procedures, etc, get codified in a constitution which takes a supermajority to amend. In a perfect world that constitution is approved at a constitutional convention by a supermajority of the citizenry acting through their representatives; in practice it arrives via various historical means, including outside imposition. Despite the "irreconcilable bootstrapping problem", constitutional democracies somehow exist.
But yeah yeah that's not "true democracy" because anything other than majoritarianism is a grotesque western perversion of the perfect immaculate glorious ideal of "simple majority rules on everything". Whatever.
Ironically, tyranny of the majority is a very very good definition of democracy if you drill the majority down into subcategorical majorities recursively until you reach the individual who might be severely disconnected from the averages.
That's amusing, but silly. A criminal screeching "tyranny of the majority!" as they get hauled away is not a revealing example and does not reflect the phrase's usual meaning.
The way I put it was meant to be slightly amusing, but let me put it a different way for the sake of discussion.
For this purpose, I like to mentally model a country (or territory which decided to hold an election of some kind) as a collection of points in a multidimensional space of values or policies which are up for election. Each point represents where a voting person would stand according to their personal principles.
Now, I’d like to postulate that the act of voting corresponds to finding the center of the cluster of points. In this model, it’s easy to imagine the scenario where a very large portion of people (and possibly even the majority) are deeply dissatisfied with the result because they are too far on many dimensions from the center that was elected. This is actually further exacerbated by many factors in real life like the asymmetry of information between people.
The obvious solution would be to create more cluster centers instead of one fat cluster that leaves everyone not very happy. This corresponds to states or provinces within a country in the real world.
So coming from that line of thinking, it leads me to believe that sometimes to maintain a democracy, you need to cut the outliers away to move/make the center such that people are happy with the result. Essentially you enforce the will of the majority by cutting away the minority until it is no longer a tyranny to do so.
Of course this is gross simplification of real life. It is ignoring factors such as external threats, instability, unpredictability, information availability and so on. However, I think it’s useful to think this way for many purposes.
Addressing your extreme example of a criminal, that’s a point so far off in the space that you definitely want to cut it out of the system.
And this is how Indian elections work.
The amount of data collection and analysis is insane. Election Consulting Companies like I-PAC and Showtime Consulting would gather extremely granular religious (sect level), ethnic (sub-clan level), age, linguistic (sub-dialect level), economic, and social metrics and poll on a near weekly basis, and work with the parties that hired them to iterate on electoral messaging and promises based on the selected demographic intersection.
These consulting firms also pay Microsoft and Google India level salaries so they are attracting the best of the best at top Indian universities.
The Guardian article is interesting because it helped untangle the idea of liberalism and democracy in my mind. How did they become so deeply linked?
Democracy means that people can vote. Liberalism means they get to choose who to vote for.
Because illiberals, when realizing their beliefs aren't all that popular, don't tend to pack it in and give it up to democracy.
> Democracy doesn’t mean western democracy or liberal democracy
It's something I disagreed with you about before, but have come to agree with you about Raynier.
Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Turkiye, and Israel have all begun falling out of the US orbit after we began pressing on the liberalism aspect.
We should fight for liberal democracy at home, but it is not something we should necessarily evangelize abroad, as elite and economic consolidation plays a greater role in building lasting ties with a country instead of ideological ties.
I had a convo with Mastro and Doshi about this during a seminar a couple months before the election, and it sounded like they also started agreeing with this view as well.
> elite and economic consolidation plays a greater role in building lasting ties with a country instead of ideological ties
Elite and economic consolidation is a corrupting force, though. A country's actions are just as important as it's stated values - if it partners with others who don't share those values, then it's just performance. If your country signals that it doesn't actually care about its purported values, then why would any country which does care want to create long-term relationships or otherwise ally themselves with you? How would anyone be able to trust you if you compromise your foundational principles for economic gain? How could you trust them?
Cambodia used to be American leaning in the 2010s during their transition to democracy, with support for democratic norm building and actual democracy. China on the other hand decided to only conduct outreach to Cambodian economic and political elite [0]
The US government funded social infrastructure like health clinics, schools, and sanitation systems, but the Chinese government funded hard infra projects like canals, highways, energy systems, and weaponry without human rights oversight [0].
When Cambodia decided to end their democratic experiment, the US condemned it, but the Chinese government was indifferent. And now Cambodia has solidly shifted to the Chinese sphere of influence.
This story has repeated all across ASEAN from Thailand to Malaysia to Indonesia.
The reality is it's only the economic, military, and poltical decisionmakers that matter, and if you needle them too much, they will try to find alternatives or build their own strategic autonomy.
France did the same thing in the De Gaulle era for the exact same reasons (military regime that didn't like getting needled about democratic backsliding).
> then why would any country which does care want to create long-term relationships or otherwise ally themselves with you
Cold hard cash, weapons, and legitimacy. Which is what ASEAN countries have begun to do by shifting closer towards China. They don't want or need lectures - they want to maintain their own power.
Notice how Europe has grown silent about Turkish democratic decline now that European nations require Turkish support to stabilize Ukraine. And if PiS wins the Polish elections, you won't hear similar complaints about "democratic backsliding" compared to the PiS barely 3 years ago. When push comes to shove, values don't matter much.
In an era where great power politics has returned, values matter less than hard power.
[0] - https://www.iseas.edu.sg/articles-commentaries/iseas-perspec...
I (reluctantly) acknowledge the practicality of this, but what happens when those economic and political elite are too extreme and are overthrown? Supporting those actors creates a permanent divide and causes further isolation. Consider the various examples of regime change and/or support for dictators/authoritarians enabled by the United States in South America and the Middle East - has that made any of those countries (the US included) better off because there was alignment with political and economic elites? It seems like you make more enemies in the long run with this approach.
> what happens when those economic and political elite are too extreme and are overthrown
Regimes fall when subsets of the elite decide to defect to the opposition.
For example, Hosni Mubarak fell not because of protesters in Tahrir Square, but because Sisi didn't feel like shooting protesters at that time for Mubarak's sake (Sisi had ambitions). If Sisi and the Egyptian military didn't decide to return to the barracks, the Arab Spring in Egypt would have never happened.
The only solution to this is by actually cultivating multiple different factions within those elites. Yet this is something the US is not good at anymore because this kind of knowledge and understanding requires significant cultural background, and State Dept hiring regulations prevent people of the same ethnicity from working on relations for those countries.
> Consider the various examples of regime change and/or support for dictators/authoritarians enabled by the United States in South America and the Middle East
The most notable one in the post 1971 era is Iran 1979 where US cultivated the secular Shah's government and military leadership, but not the organized Shia clergy. If the US had cultivated Khomenini, we wouldn't have been in such a severe situation. The French on the other hand engaged Khomeini and Shia clergy, and it helped ensure that France could maintain relations until the sanctions regime began in the 2010s.
By the 1990s, US foreign policy in Latin America changed to democracy promotion due to the same points you brought up, and that caused Honduras to switch in favor of China after corruption investigations threatened their leadership, and Nicaragua switched in favor of China due to pushback for democratic backsliding in 2017-18.
My view on this is shaped by the situation in Asia, and in particular Bangladesh where I’m from. The former Bangladesh PM, Sheikh Hasina, was a despot but also had a real democratic mandate, with 70% approval according to a polling by a U.S. organization: https://www.cfr.org/blog/new-bangladesh-survey-hasina-remain.... The U.S. has giving her a hard time, however, for human rights issues. Which certainly existed—but which most people weren’t concerned about.
I’ll leave aside my conspiracy theories about how much Anthony Blinken had to do with Hasina being overthrown last year. But we have a new government promising more liberalism but the security situation has deteriorated: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/3/4/gotham-but-no-ba.... Holding fair elections will be impossible, because the interim government has a tremendous incentive to ban Hasina’s party, which has long been the most popular party.
I once took a deep dive into the methodology of one of the custodians of "democracy rankings". It is one of the 2 most popular custodians.
Their methodology for each country was different.
For India their methodology was to survey 36 important people in the country. They did not disclose who these people were.
The survey asked them to share whether democracy was "backsliding" or whether it was becoming stronger, than the past.
A pivotal quote in the article:
>How could theocratic states with no separation of religion and government score higher than India? How could a country with universal suffrage and constitutional rights rank below nations that didn’t even hold elections?
Since the article talks quite a bit about Sanjeev Sanyal, I think it might be interesting to point to some of his podcasts.
Like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiW-mH4qIOQ. Here he points out how the media has misrepresented India and exaggerated and sensationalized issues.
Similarly, India has taken criticism from the West over its more ambitious projects like Sardar Vallabhai Patel's statue, and the space program. So taking the West's word with a grain of salt is quite valid.
Further, the article points out that the government is trying to game the ranking while outwardly saying that they don't matter. This seems hypocritical at first glance but it also points out that having lower rankings affects investor confidence and borrowing rates. You can be against a broken system while still trying to appease it because it's not going to change immediately. The Indian Government needs to work within the system until something better can be created.
I am not fully supportive of everything the NDA government has done but I don't think there is another leader in India who can feasibly win an election right now and I refuse to support INC until they get rid of the Gandhi dynasty.
Also, please look at the podcast from this timestamp[2], where he further shows why people in general but Indians specifically should be skeptical of Western narratives. This is also supported by the book Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl
[2]:https://youtu.be/gNVMvlfMbCU?list=PLgZQtm7d9Z1K9TCynoA3S0QWv...
Sometimes I do find it bizzare when western media praises a theocratic absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia for “modernizing” (by allowing women to drive and allowing them to not have chaperones) while simultaneously these same media organizations accuse a constitutional liberal democracy like India (which has strict separation of powers and an active independent Supreme Court) of somehow being authoritarian or fascist or some other slur.
The BJP is certainly authoritarian and fascistic, this is not contested. The country itself though probably isn’t. They failed to get an outright majority in the recent elections, and perhaps the main reason they still win is the opposition is completely incapable of reform (like the OP said they keep putting up members of the Gandhi family despite them losing elections repeatedly).
> The country itself though probably isn’t.
It's hard to define that - on average? In the long run? What would a Indian who is Muslim say - 'well, it's ok because on average or in the long run, it's ok'?
Has there been an Indian government that will be viewed favorably through western lenses?
- Pt. Nehru wanted Socialism and State Control.
- Indira Gandhi brought the Emergency and all that came with that
- PM Vajpayee conducted the nuclear test
- PM Modi is viewed as an authoritarian and fascist
I think these cover the most influential leaders over the last 75 years. Only PM Manmohan Singh stands up to such scrutiny.
What's a western lens? Borris Johnson looked good through a "western lens."
It is India's close ties to USSR/Russia.
That's the western lens.
India didn't have close ties, it successfully took advantage of its neutrality to benefit from both sides of the cold war.
Every leader in the world gets criticized to some degree. It's nonsense to compare criticism of Vajpayee over nuclear tests with Modi or Gandhi rolling back freedom and democracy, and killing and brutalizing people.
Media sensationalism is everywhere. But I’ve become especially distrustful of these rankings and labels from random think tanks or nonprofits. A good example is the one the other day from “civicus that claimed civic freedoms were disappearing in the US even though no law has changed that would affect civil rights. When you look at their report it basically complains about political decisions rather than civic freedoms. I imagine the bias is 10x worse for India.
i wouldnt describe it as rapid, but there certainly are examples of covil rights declines, mostly via court decisions.
eg. overturning roe v wade, and allowing gerrymandering based on race
the most recent wpuld be executive orders stripping visas and greencards based on protected speech
Civil rights are declining for immigrants, the press, speech - just because a law hasn't been passed doesn't mean rights haven't changed. The idea that it all depends on law is naive or disingenuous.
The article doesn't answer its own question. The inherent contradictions in the ratings. Romania who just 'cancelled an election' and banned the winning candidate from contesting is 40 positions above India.
The Romania actions were too recent to affect the rankings whatever you think of them.
> Western standards didn’t apply here. India had its own definition of democracy.
I think this is core thrust of narrative of Indian state and its card carrying supporters. On ideological part this of course makes sense. But practical aspect of cheap cost of informational bit vs physical bit that makes state so obsessed with this. As it makes so easily achievable.
It would be very much clear to anyone who do not spend whole life on social media dream world in India that physical infrastructure will not be reaching of western standards at least in this century. On the other hand informational infrastructure very much reachable if not already reached. Consider Indian companies do so much information /data processing for West already.
Hence all emphasis and obsession on narrative building.
I disagree with the physical infrastructure bit. Indian Govt has invested massively in all kinds of infrastructure and they don’t seem to be slowing down. All of this has already paid off massive dividends and will continue to accelerate development.
Physical infrastructure will keep improving but at some point one has to have a sense of proportion on what is realistically possible. My three visits to India in past 2-3 years has given me first hand experience on how stunningly crappy infrastructure and system managing that infrastructure is compared to first world.
To be fair though it may be better than lot of other poorer nations.
Middle class (Upper, middle, and lower) are crushed into shambles. The Rich and those who can gather means are leaving the country at an alarming rate. The fake leader is worried about his narrative and ratings.
that is true almost everywhere in the world today.
Wait, what? When did this happen. This is not the India I live in. India is fluid, complex beast.
Your comment reads like propaganda.
The Economist has a democracy index. The US dropped to "flawed democracy" after the coup attempt and has not recovered.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
With the police visiting grannies based on their Facebook posts, I’d say the UK should be right there next to the US.
No one is right here.
The West do try to control India through these institutions and rankings, and Indian government is trying to use that to hide some of their shortcomings.
Narrative controlling is necessary, but I hope the actual work is done too.
Would say India is big enough country with enough people and knows how to take care of its own business, democracy or others.
How does size indicate that? Many big countries have done horrible things.
Of course. In above comment take care is doing heavy lifting.
thank goodness i live in a country in which the government doesn't attempt to control the narrative around democracy
Before someone bites the bait - this comment is sarcastic and 100% of democratic societies spend resources to control the narrative around their government/country/whatever. 100%.
It doesn't help that the nature of "democracy" is itself endlessly contested. E.g. both supporters and critics of the way Romanian courts have treated Georgescu seem to claim they are "defending democracy".
There are important advantages to a social contract which is simple and unambiguous.
> It doesn't help that the nature of "democracy" is itself endlessly contested.
It's not really; I've never heard someone say that, in fact. The nature of propaganda is to make everything uncertain, and then everyone is frozen and nobody has done wrong.
>It's not really; I've never heard someone say that, in fact.
Lots of disputes within democracies consist of both sides implicitly claiming their position is "more democratic". E.g. how much power should the US president have over US bureaucracies? Some say that because bureaucrats are "unelected", the president should have more control. Others say that too much executive control is authoritarian. In both cases, the nature of "democracy" is what's [implicitly] at stake.
>propaganda
* I speak truth to power.
* He is exercising his right to freedom of speech.
* They spread propaganda.
I don't think the phrase "propaganda" is meaningless, necessary. But this reinforces my point from earlier, about how our social contract could use more simplicity and less ambiguity.
I don't see that happening. I see lots of propaganda trying to make the same paralyzing arguments, especially the argument that 'it's all the same and you can't tell the difference'. Yes we can, pretty easily.
>Yes we can, pretty easily.
Indeed, it's quite easy! If I agree, it's brave truth-telling. If I disagree, it's propaganda.
Hopefully I'm not nitpicking, "propaganda" in general form can be to any purpose; rallying/unity, sapping morale, creating a scapegoat... A lovely word for what your describing is "discombobulation" - sowing seeds of fear, uncertainty, doubt (FUD), gaslighting and disorienting.
No, I appreciate it. It's a great point.
And there is much propaganda - especially now - used to sow hate, violence, and division.
We need clear language for each form (how many are there?). And I think we need a more serious word than 'discombobulation' - for one, it describes the effect, not the cause; and for another, people won't take the issue seriously.
I am pretty shocked at that Romanian court ruling though. It seems like the entire questioning of the election outcomes was motivated by EU leadership not liking the result of democracy.
The decision to not stop at redoing the election but to then ban the candidate seems motivated by the fact that opinion polls show him to still be winning even today despite the alleged “election interference”, months after he won the first election.
It’s weird seeing the EU conduct elections sort of like Russia does, ironically. In the past I viewed the EU as supporting things like free speech and democracy in the same way America does.
Isn't it Romania, and not the EU? Also, what do you do about election manipulation? 'Nothing' isn't an acceptable answer.
>what do you do about election manipulation? 'Nothing' isn't an acceptable answer.
I agree, and this reinforces my point about the ambiguity of the social contract. When the US constitution was written in 1787, the telegraph wasn't even invented. Now we all live in a single "global village". People from all over the world are commenting on politics in other nations in real time. Where do you draw the line for "election manipulation"? No one seems to know, exactly.
> No one seems to know, exactly.
The problem is that we've made this intellectual laziness acceptable. Nobody knows exactly? We have pretty good ideas; we know the difference between legitimate media and propaganda; we just need to encode that in English in specific rules.
And before that, we need to get the people who benefit from propaganda, and therefore defend it, out of power. Look at the widespread, and effective campaign to shut down anyone studying disinformation. The problems with letting things like that fester and not doing anything - which is what we've done, mostly - is that people in power become invested in it.
>we just need to encode that in English in specific rules.
Well, I encourage you to lead the way, fight this intellectual laziness, and propose specific rules. I suspect that you will find the task more difficult than you thought. Whatever rules you propose will be adversarially interpreted by your political opponents, and by actual propagandists. Ideally, the rules should also be simple enough for any voter to understand.
Eager to read your reply!
> 100% of democratic societies spend resources to control the narrative around their government/country/whatever
That's like saying 100% of people lie. Yes, but that's meaningless - people range from highly trustworthy to miserable frauds. What the democratic societies actually do, and the consequences, is what matters.
or free speech?
What is the problem the article is pointing out? A "democracy" index based on the "feelings" of some chosen experts is always going to be biased and problematic. Anyone getting the short end of that stick, if they were organised enough and had the resources, would fight against it irrespective of whether the rankings were justified or not. A large part of soft power is narrative control. There is nothing objective about narrative control. Which means powerful countries which weild a lot of soft power have managed to effectively control their narrative. And their narrative likely has little convergence with reality. No system should realistically expect the subjects to just cede control without any benefits accruing to the "controlled". So countries seeking to increase their own soft power will and should try to control their own narrative. It is easily one of the bigger captain obvious moments I have come across.
My hot take is that, viewed under the right conditions, India today is what a long-term MAGA victory in the US would look like (as in multiple consecutive Presidential administrations). Now obviously the religion must be changed; obviously also the demographic/racial aspect is different too. But in general, to see how MAGA might operate if it succeeded completely, look at India.
That's exactly what I keep saying - both governments use the same tools to control relatively gullible masses. For example, BJP won by a vast majority largely due to their IT cell[1], an army of people paid 1-10$ per day to berate or praise anyone, re-tweet/like/share to manipulate algorithms and make things go viral. This was a huge one-sided operation for the initial few years until the opposition finally caught up.
The party is headed by an alleged murderer (people died and cases against him conveniently disappeared as soon as the party came to power)[2][3]. He's the mastermind while Modi is just the face. Modi hasn't held a single unscripted press conference/interview in the last 10 years and can't handle questions that aren't pre-arranged.
Its not just related to India, Right wings across the globe have more or less figured this out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BJP_IT_Cell
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-68653573
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/16/amit-s...
Win an election of 800M people by using tweets and shares. How delusional can one person be.
As I get older, I realize increasingly that there is a huge gap between how most people think the government works and how it actually works... Also, the government and other entities which benefit from the incongruity spend a massive amount of effort constructing narratives to obscure the discrepancy in the public eye.
If you boil it down and peek beneath the many layers of complexity and misdirection, reality is disturbingly dark and you wonder how society functions at all and how so many people can be fooled into believing surface narratives... But in a way, it's because people are fooled that society can function as-is, in spite of its dysfunction. If people knew how the system really worked, it would have to change.
IMO, the good news is that generally, when the system is forced to change to become more transparent, things improve. But the system is always at the edge; constantly gaslighting the public as much as it can get away with at any given time. The state rarely apologizes for past mistakes; unless it serves some new agenda which it benefits from (e.g. the mistake happened under different leadership).
There should be some rule like "The state is precisely as corrupt as it can get away with." Or "The state is corrupt proportionally to how passive and delusional its citizens are."
> the good news is that generally, when the system is forced to change to become more transparent
Is that what is happening now?
Well compare things now with how they were during feudalism. Things are a bit better for the average person.
The problem we have now is that the population is extremely propagandized/delusional due to powerful media, made possible by technology. But the same technologies can also create more transparency... Or the technology may cause more skepticism which is also good; e.g. As AI generates fake videos, people will adapt to be more skeptical.
> compare things now with how they were during feudalism. Things are a bit better for the average person.
That is really looking at the long run! :D I hope for improvement on a shorter timeline, myself. All those average people are dead.
> powerful media
If you include social media, I'm with you.
> As AI generates fake videos, people will adapt to be more skeptical.
You said, and I agree, that people have become "extremely propagandized/delusional" due to prior tech development; why would AI tech have different outcomes?
I've been thinking about human communication and how much it changed over time. It crazy to think that before the printing press, the most efficient form of communication was word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth only conveys a very vague, unreliable description of reality. Communication was unreliable. People knew they could not fully trust what was communicated to them; not only because the original material may not be reliable, but people knew the message could have been distorted as it propagated through the population 'Chinese Whispers' effect.
Then with the printing press, communication became a lot more reliable; people did not have to worry about 'Chinese Whispers' anymore, they knew that what was printed likely came directly from the source...
Then photography came along. People trusted photos completely for a time. It was high-resolution evidence; wars could be started over it. Then as photo-editing tech became more powerful, people started to doubt photography but then video came along and created a new medium for reliable communication which was hard to fake. CGI never got quite to the level that it could not be distinguished from reality.
Now AI is making video unreliable... We will have no way to verify the authenticity of detailed visual communication. So we will lose trust in it.
Maybe something like blockchain will help us to get back to a certain level of communication reliability in terms of source authentication... but the resolution has been lost permanently. We will never again be sure if something really happened with quite the same level of certainty. We go back to a kind of 'printing press' level of reliability.
The resolution of the communication (the amount of detail) doesn't add to its reliability anymore. We shouldn't underestimate how much of a role video has played in creating the highly centralized over-trusting society which we have today.
Would people give governments so much power if they couldn't even agree with certainty about who said what and even who won the election?