India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi waves to his supporters in New Delhi, Jan. 16.

Photo: sajjad hussain/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

India’s dramatic plunge in global democracy rankings has stoked heated debate within the country. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s supporters argue that the indexes are biased. Yet flawed though they may be, the rankings point to real infringements on civil liberties under Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Unless the BJP can find a way to reconcile Hindu nationalism with respect for individual rights, India will struggle to attain the global standing it craves.

Since Mr. Modi was first elected prime minister in 2014, India’s democracy rankings have plummeted. In 2021 Freedom House demoted India from a “free” country to only “partly free.” Around the same time, the Swedish NGO Varieties of Democracy, or V-Dem, declared that India had ceased to be a democracy altogether in 2019. It was now an “electoral autocracy.” On the Economist Intelligence Unit’s democracy index, India has fallen 19 places to 46th since Mr. Modi took power.

Critics raise some reasonable issues with these rankings. Most indexes merely provide a snapshot of a particular year without taking history into account. That’s how Nepal, an absolute monarchy as recently as 2006, can end up ranked higher by V-Dem than India, which has had universal adult suffrage since 1950. “In ratings about today, what happened 10 years ago and what will happen 10 years from now is of no consequence,” says Staffan Lindberg, director of the V-Dem Institute, in a phone interview. “We are not saying anything about robustness or future stability.”

Other findings defy common sense. Paris-based Reporters Without Borders ranks India as 150th in its press-freedom index, behind countries such as Zimbabwe and Libya, which lack anything that resembles India’s massive legacy media industry or plucky online news sites. The EIU ranks Malaysia, which by law discriminates against its non-Muslim minorities—primarily ethnic Chinese and Indians—above India. V-Dem has gone so far as to claim that Afghanistan enjoyed more academic freedom in 2021 than India did. (Mr. Lindberg blames a coding oversight and says it is being corrected.)

But while these indexes hurt their own credibility with such absurd pronouncements, their findings still point to real issues with Indian democracy. To rank highly, countries don’t simply need to hold elections. They need to guard their people’s liberties too.

Hindu nationalism struggles with this. The ideology’s core tenets view Muslims and Christians as organized threats to Hindu hegemony rather than as equal citizens who happen to follow different faiths. Since Mr. Modi’s rise, BJP state governments have implemented policies that privilege Hindu sensibilities above civil rights. These include “love jihad” laws designed to prevent Muslim men from marrying Hindu women and so-called religious-freedom laws that constrain Christian proselytization. In several states, draconian beef bans have coincided with an uptick in vigilante mob attacks on Muslims accused of killing cows. In 2019 a controversial law fast-tracked naturalization only for non-Muslims from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. Hindu nationalists defended this policy as an act of compassion and a form of historical redress. But by flouting the liberal principle of treating all faiths equally, the law ended up hurting India’s democracy ranking.

In well-functioning democracies, the judiciary and media check government power and safeguard individual rights. In India, they often fail to do so. In 2019 the Modi government unilaterally revoked statehood for the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, dividing it into two federally administered territories. The Supreme Court hasn’t found the time to decide whether this was constitutional. Indian courts sometimes deny habeas corpus, a cornerstone of the Anglo-Saxon law India supposedly follows. And while the Reporters Without Borders ranking is absurd, it’s hard to deny that much of the Indian media—especially TV news channels—act more like government lapdogs than watchdogs.

BJP-friendly critics of democracy indexes are good at lawyerly nitpicking that shows them in a poor light. But they refuse to wrestle with the central underlying question: Does India under the BJP seek to be a liberal democracy? Hindu nationalism as it stands is fundamentally at odds with the principles that undergird liberalism. To quote the scholar Francis Fukuyama, these include “positing rights in individuals rather than groups,” “the premise of universal human equality” and “the value of free speech and scientific rationalism as methods of apprehending truth.”

The health of Indian democracy matters. It has long been an important exception to the notion that democracy can only take root in rich countries. With 1.3 billion people, India can make the difference between a world that’s mostly democratic or not. Thanks in large part to India’s reclassification, V-Dem estimates that today 70% of the world’s people live in an autocracy of some sort., while only 13% live in a liberal democracy.

For India, the stakes are tangible. All other members of the Quad—the U.S., Japan and Australia—are democracies, and may balk if India’s democratic backsliding continues. It could hurt the economy too. The World Bank uses democracy indexes to help formulate governance indicators, which in turn influence sovereign ratings by credit-rating agencies. As economists Sanjeev Sanyal and Akanksha Arora pointed out in a recent paper, if global companies incorporate democracy indexes into environmental, social and governance ratings, these indexes could end up influencing investment decisions.

The real question India faces isn’t whether democracy rankings are fair. It’s whether the country wants to be a liberal democracy or travel down an autocratic path.