YOGENDRA YADAV in https://theprint.in/opinion/jaishankars-problem-is-stark-no-amount-of-external-pr-can-cover-up-indias-truth/623325
This is not to dispute Jaishankar’s charge of hypocrisy. Of course, Europe or North America is nobody to distribute certificates of democracy. Not just because their certificates are inevitably linked to their foreign policy and economic interests but also because their own democracy is deeply flawed. ..
It was rich of Jaishankar to claim that India was not looking for approval from the West. Facts suggest otherwise. No prime minister before Narendra Modi has held melas outside India to promote his image. No head of government was as keen to please an American president as Modi was to Donald Trump. No government has made such a song and dance about a routine Ease of Doing Business Index as this one did, a ranking that landed in a manipulation controversy. Never have Indian government officials preferred International Monetary Fund (IMF) data over India’s own statistics as during this government. No one in the world has tried to claim credit for a high score on severity of lockdown index as this government’s enthusiasts did. ...
https://theprint.in/opinion/no-emergency-modi-shah-are-using-democracy-to-subvert-democracy/447685/
The Emergency had a beginning and was, at least on paper, required to have an end. The new system that we now live under has a beginning, but no one is sure if it has an end. The challenge to democracy does not await us in a distant future. We are living in it. By looking for an Emergency in our times, we forget to notice that the first Republic inaugurated with the Constitution of India is already over. .. the book How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future.. reminds us that democracies mostly die an unspectacular, slow and barely visible death, mostly at the hands of democratically elected leaders, often through legal instruments. “The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy – gradually, subtly, and even legally – to kill it.”