-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 Hindu Modi government cracked down on critics: report. U.S.-based human rights watchdog Freedom House has accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government of “driving India toward authoritarianism” with a “hamfisted lockdown”, scapegoating of Muslims, and a crackdown on critics, and downgraded India’s status from ‘Free’ to ‘Partly Free’, in its annual report. “Under Modi, India appears to have abandoned its potential to serve as a global democratic leader, elevating narrow Hindu nationalist interests...

-TheCitizen.in/ IPS UNESCO and International Centre for Journalists Survey WASHINGTON: An alarmingly high number of women journalists are now targets of online attacks associated with orchestrated digital disinformation campaigns. The impacts include self-Censorship, retreat from visibility, an increased risk of physical injury, and a serious mental health toll. The main perpetrators? Anonymous trolls and political actors. These findings are among the first released in a survey conducted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific...

-Newslaundry.com It ranks 12th on the CPJ’s Global Impunity Index 2020, one position worse than last year’s. India is one of the dozen countries that fare the worst when it comes to prosecuting killers of journalists, according to the Global Impunity Index 2020 prepared by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The index “spotlights countries where journalists are singled out for murder and their killers go free”, the CPJ explained in its report titled...

-The Hindu The arbitrary ban on 59 web services undermines legal processes and democratic norms Earlier this week, on June 29, a dramatic press release was issued by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) directing a ban on 59 smartphone applications, many of them web services. This includes TikTok, a popular social media platform; the UC Browser, a preferred web browser for low budget smartphones; and CamScanner, which is used...