Times of Better Bharat

What the long series shows

Most commentary on Indian democracy works with a window of ten or twenty years, because that is the window most indices provide. V-Dem's series runs from 1789, which puts the present in a different frame.

On that series, India's electoral democracy score rises slowly through the late colonial period, jumps at Independence, climbs through the first decades of the Republic, dips during the Emergency, recovers sharply after 1977, peaks in the 2010s, and declines afterwards.

That shape is worth sitting with regardless of one's politics. It is the shape of an institution that has been tested before, degraded before, and recovered before — within living memory, and by ordinary electoral means.

The caveat that has to travel with it

V-Dem scores are produced by coding the judgements of country experts, aggregated with a measurement model that reports uncertainty. They are not instrument readings. Reasonable people dispute both the coding and the aggregation, and any single year's value carries a confidence interval that this site's charts do not currently draw.

Expert-coded indices also have a known failure mode: coders are not immune to the prevailing narrative about a country, which can make a score move partly with international commentary rather than with events on the ground. Where a score change is small, that is a live alternative explanation.

None of which makes the series useless. It makes it evidence rather than verdict — which is the correct status for every number on this site.

Why publish it at all

Because the alternative is worse. The EIU's Democracy Index, the series most often quoted about India, cannot be lawfully redistributed and is paywalled at the country level from its 2025 edition. A public debate conducted around a number the public cannot check is a poor debate.

V-Dem is open, documented, and long. Publishing it, with its limitations stated, gives a reader something they can argue with. That is the most a data publication can honestly offer, and more than most offer.

How to read this

This is an argument, not a measurement. The charts above are sourced and checkable; the reasoning between them is editorial judgement and should be treated as such. Where a claim has no series behind it, it is stated as judgement rather than fact.