-The Statesman Assembly elections in the States of Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and the Union Territory of Puducherry to be held between 27 March and 29 April come at a time the prestigious US-based Freedom House report has lowered India’s rank from a “free” to a “partially free” country and Sweden’s V-Dem Institute which once described India as the world’s largest democracy as an “electoral Autocracy.” The government can either...

-Scroll.in The report by Varieties of Democracy Institute said India is as autocratic as Pakistan in censorship and worse than Bangladesh and Nepal. India has turned into an “electoral Autocracy”, an analytical research project by Sweden-based Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute said. The research institute had said last year that the Bharatiya Janata Party now closely resembles a “typical governing party in an Autocracy”. A report of the organisation, which conceptualises and measures democracy,...

-The Telegraph 'It is on the verge of losing status as a democracy due to shrinking space for media and civil society' More people are living under autocracies than under democracies across the world and India’s “steep decline” on democratic traditions despite electoral politics is a contributing factor to the global surge in autocratisation. India has also been put among the top 10 autocratising countries. This is one of the conclusions of a study...

-The Times of India No obituary notice can do justice to Justice J S Verma. A judge for over 25 years, Chief Justice of India (CJI), Chairman National Human Right (NHRC), Verma Commission on Security Lapses, Verma Commission on rape laws. The list is endless. Many judges hanker for post-retirement jobs, Justice Verma did not. A CJI has to chair of NHRC. He did not ask for the job, but did...

-The Hindu The debate over the cartoons used in NCERT textbooks as aids to learning have thrown up a range of issues. The discussion has crystallised around a set of oppositions: motivated political correctness of our elected representatives vs. the necessity of preemptory parliamentary intervention on educational material appropriate for schools; institutional autonomy vs. political responsibility of a state presiding over a diverse and fraught society; the hubris of ‘experts’ vs....