Bangladesh is in a stronger position than India in terms of democracy, a recently published report from Sweden has revealed.
The fifth annual democracy report – ‘Autocratisation goes viral’ – by Sweden’s V-Dem Institute claims to produce the largest dataset on democracy with almost 30 million data points for 202 countries from 1789 to 2020.
Bangladesh’s Liberal Democracy Index (LDI) score was at an all-time high at 0.18 (on a scale of 0-1) in 2010, it had declined to 0.09 by the end of 2020 — a loss of 9 percentage points in 10 years.
This report comes within a week of US watchdog Freedom House deemed Bangladesh as a “Partly Free” nation.
The report by the organization summarizes the state of democracies of the world against the backdrop of developments that have taken place over the past decade.
The report finds that liberal democracies have diminished over the past decade from 41 countries to 32 countries.
With the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, V-Dem Institute started the Pandemic Backsliding project (PanDem) to track state responses to Covid-19 and their potential effects on democracy in 144 countries until December 2020.
The project measured few types of violations like – discrimination against minorities, violations of fundamental rights, excessive use of force and restrictions on media freedoms.
According to the report, in South Asia, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka register major violation of international norms during Covid-19 emergency measures. Bangladesh and Pakistan moderately violate international norms.
