Indians Advocate for Dictatorship and Autocracy. What Does the New Pew Survey Tell us About the Populace?
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A recent survey conducted by one of the most esteemed think tanks, Pew Research Center, revealed that Indians largely support authoritarianism and militarism. Named ‘Representative democracy remains a popular ideal, but people around the world are critical of how it’s working,’ the methodological findings of the wide-ranging report asserted that around 67% of the pollees uphold a military/authoritarian regime and actively favor it.
Countries like Kenya and Indonesia stood at 52% and 51%, respectively. Moreover, they highly undermined the importance of opposition. Among the 24 countries that were surveyed, India stood at the third lowest in terms of supporting the opposition’s autonomy.
Whereas the UK saw 37% of people endorsing authoritarian governance, followed by the United States at 32%. According to the survey, people who support an autocratic leadership essentially have right-wing ideological inclinations and are relatively less educated. It also found that an average of 31% across all the countries in the report support autocracy.
The tendency to advocate for such governments was more common among lower and middle-income countries. Concerning Technocracy, a type of governance where experts from fields like science, economics, etc., are designated and appointed to lead, India saw a surge as people supporting it rose from 82% to 65%. Moreover, we also came highest in terms of endorsing women leaders for better public policies.
Sweden turned out to be the most progressive in terms of autonomy and equitable democracy; as few as 8% of the population supported a strong authoritarian leader or a military dictatorship.
Notably, the percentage of people who viewed representative democracy as a highly effective democracy declined from 44 to 36% in the span of 6 years, and the number of people pushing for an autocratic form of government rose from 55% to a whopping 85%; this comparative study exhibits the behavior that is being instilled in the minds of Indians and is quite disheartening; to say the least.
In retrospect, Indians have always had a dictatorial bone to them; if we look back in time, the era of emergency and what followed is a testament to how we deal with autocracy; from 1971 to 1977, the vote share of UPA did not plummet as much as you think it would, yes it did see a drop but it was no different than what Congress faced in 2014 when Modi came into power.
Despite how widely Indira Gandhi was denounced for emergency which saw blatant curtailment and abuse of liberty, according to Scroll, she was awarded with an even better vote percentage, mainly from the southern regions. However, the northern regions saw a steep reduction in UPA vote share, namely in UP & Bihar. Their vote share declined by 9%, However, within three years of emergency, they completely retained their pre-emergency percentage figure.
The organization collected the data from numerous national representative surveys, ranging from interviews taken by phone and face-to-face conversations over a period of several months.
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