-The Hindu It violates the basic tenets of India’s democracy by keeping the knowledge of the ‘right to know’ from citizens and voters The Supreme Court, after a brief hearing on March 24, reserved orders on the question of whether or not to stay the electoral bond scheme, ahead of the upcoming State elections. For the last three years, electoral bonds have been the dominant method of political party funding in India....

-The Hindu If passed in its current form, the NCT of Delhi (Amendment) Bill, 2021 will strip the elected government of almost all its powers. It must be referred to a select committee and not passed in haste. The political theorist Jean Louis De Lolme had once famously observed that “British Parliament can do everything but make a man a woman, a woman a man”. The English statesman Lord Burleigh had remarked...

-The Indian Express Amid recent questions about the ECI’s autonomy, a look at how the body has steered India’s electoral history. On March 15, the Citizens’ Commission on Elections (CCE), chaired by retired Supreme Court judge Madan B Lokur, which examines critical aspects of conducting elections, released the second part of its report. Titled “An Inquiry into India’s Election System,” the report evaluated the integrity and inclusiveness of the electoral rolls, increasing...

-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,...