India ranked 105 out of 179 countries on the Liberal Democracy Index in 2025, down from 100 the previous year, according to the Democracy Report 2026 released this week by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The country has remained classified as an “electoral autocracy” since 2017.
The report, now in its tenth edition and titled ‘Unraveling the Democratic Era?’, notes that four of the world’s five most populous countries, India, China, Indonesia, and Pakistan, are now classified as autocracies.
The report traces India’s autocratisation to 2009. On the role of the ruling party, it states: “The ruling anti-pluralist, Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s derailing of democracy include deteriorations in freedom of expression and independence of the media, harassments of journalists critical of the government, and attacks on civil society and the opposition.”
India scores 106 on the Electoral Democracy Index, 99 on the Liberal Component Index, 138 on the Egalitarian Component Index, 83 on the Participatory Component Index, and 100 on the Deliberative Component Index.
In South and Central Asia, only 2 per cent of the population lives in a democracy, in Nepal and Sri Lanka. Eighty-five per cent live under electoral autocracies. Bangladesh fell into the closed autocracy category in 2025. Sri Lanka is the only country in the region the report identifies as democratising. India sits among four countries moving in the opposite direction, alongside Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Pakistan.
The report places India on a list of countries where print and broadcast media perspectives are narrowing, where critical media scrutiny of government is weakening, where legislative oversight is declining, and where public consultation before important decisions is shrinking.
Globally, the report records 92 autocracies against 87 democracies, with 74 per cent of the world’s population living under autocratic governments. Freedom of expression is declining in 44 countries. Media censorship is the most common tool used by autocratising governments, deployed in 32 of 44 such countries. Civil society repression has surged, now affecting 30 autocratising countries.
The United States features prominently in this edition. The report strips it of its liberal democracy classification for the first time in over 50 years, dropping it from 20th to 51st place on the LDI in a single year under President Donald Trump’s second term. The report calls it the most rapid democratic decline in American history, adding that for the average global citizen, democracy has now returned to 1978 levels, wiping out nearly all gains made since what scholars call the third wave of democratisation began in 1974.
Ten new autocratisers were identified in 2025, among them five European countries: Croatia, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom.
The V-Dem Institute produces what it describes as the largest global dataset on democracy, covering 202 countries and territories from 1789 to 2025, drawing on more than 4,200 country experts and over 32 million data points.
