South Asia’s battered democracies

August 14, 2024

KATHMANDU – A number of recent reports from globally recognised institutions like the Freedom House and IDEA have unequivocally concluded that freedom and democracy are in constant decline worldwide due to a surge in far-right politics, the rise of authoritarian regimes and, worst of all, stolen elections sanctioning elected dictators. The Freedom House Report 2024 concluded that democracy is under attack in every region of the world. The IDEA report reaffirmed it.

These problems are perhaps more pronounced in South Asian democracies than elsewhere. South Asia is a basket case of nascent, fledgling and trembling democracies which have suffered repeated and nearly fatal setbacks before they could be firmly institutionalised. Political upheaval in Bangladesh is the latest case in point. Last week, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was forced to resign and flee the country just after seven months of claiming unrivalled electoral victory for a fourth consecutive term in office.

The downturn

Democratic deficit is pervasive in all of South Asia. Afghanistan has been under ultraconservative Taliban rule since 2021. Bangladesh, in its five-decade existence, has gone under several military coups and dictatorships and is now culminating in the collapse of Hasina’s elected autocracy. After mass protests in April 2022, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was also forced to leave the country; he eventually resigned while in exile, ending the nefarious ‘rule of the Rajapaksa clan’. The flipflop in Pakistani democracy is seemingly a never-ending saga. Either a direct military rule or a dense shadow of the army over any so-called civilian government in history has been the signature governing feature of the Islamic