India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

- 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

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.

>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...

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.