A Norwegian reporter, PM Modi and the West’s democracy delusion

There was something farcical about a Norwegian journalist suddenly awakening to her supposed duty as a guardian of democracy, human rights and press freedom. There she stood at the joint press briefing of two prime ministers — one the host, the other a visiting guest — armed with Western moral vanity masquerading as journalism. The kind of vanity that assumes civilisation is synonymous with Europe, morality is monopolised by the West, and democracy is a benevolent export to the non-white world.

It is hard to believe the reporter did not know the difference between a press conference and a press briefing. The former invites questions; the latter merely briefs the press. But ignorance could still have been tolerated if accompanied by humility. What unfolded instead was the now-familiar spectacle of the “freest press in the world” treating a democratically elected foreign leader like an accused standing trial before self-appointed moral prosecutors.

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This wasn’t all. Two days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Oslo, a Norwegian publication produced a cartoon portraying him as a snake charmer seducing the Scandinavian nation for energy cooperation. Dark skin, exotic imagery, primitive symbolism — the usual colonial toolkit was dusted off and repackaged as enlightened satire. Imagine, for a moment, an Indian newspaper showcasing a European leader as a drunken Viking marauder with yellow teeth plundering the Global South. The European media would have gone berserk, lecturing Delhi on fascism, racism and majoritarian nationalism. But when Europe does it, the same exercise magically turns into satire.

Such prejudice extends beyond cartoons. It sits embedded inside the sacred texts of modern Western liberalism — democracy rankings, press freedom indices, et al. Take, for instance, the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute, one of the West’s most celebrated arbiters of democratic virtue. According to these Scandinavian custodians of global morality, Bharat is now an “electoral autocracy”. Apparently, 1.4 billion people voting repeatedly in loud, chaotic, fiercely contested elections no longer qualifies as democracy. It qualifies merely as “electoral”.

Democracy, it seems, begins only after receiving absolution from the chosen priesthood of Western media and academia. It matters little that Bharat is what author Salvatore Babones calls “the world’s most extraordinary democracy”.

“No other democracy outside the developed West can match India’s record of seven decades of constitutional democratic rule. In Asia, the only country that comes close is Israel — with a GDP per capita more than 20 times India’s,” Babones writes in Dharma Democracy. It also apparently matters little that Bharat remains “the only major South Asian country where the military has never meddled in politics”.

Such credentials cut little ice with the high priests of democracy in Europe’s intellectual monasteries. No wonder, according to the V-Dem 2026 report, Bharat remains trapped in the category of “electoral autocracy”. The audacity of the Western duplicity gets magnified when one finds the Maldives — a country that denies citizenship to non-Muslims and where apostasy under Sharia law can invite death — being classified as an “electoral democracy”.

According to V-Dem’s historical data, Bharat supposedly reached its democratic zenith in 1998, ranked 45th in the world. But by the time Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, the country had slipped to rank 71. At the end of his first term in 2019, it had plunged further to 107. And in 2023, the country ranked 108 — just two points above Pakistan. As democracy deepened in the country, its global ranking deteriorated.

The absurdity extends to the annual World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). India ranks 157th out of 180 countries in the 2026 index. Pakistan ranks 153rd. Bangladesh 152nd. Yes, Pakistan and Bangladesh, where journalists are abducted, attacked, silenced or killed by political actors, intelligence agencies and jihadist outfits.

Reading this, one almost admires the sheer audacity of the Western liberal imagination. Babones exposes this statistical absurdity succinctly as he states how the claim of Bharat being “dangerous” for journalists is derived largely from Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) data. “According to CPJ data, 43 journalists were killed in India over the period 2001-2023. That gives an annual rate of 1.3 per billion people per year, which compares very favourably to the 9.5 per billion rate in the rest of the world excluding China (which is not covered by CPJ data),” writes Babones as he adds: “India is safer than the United States, where the rate of journalist killings is 1.6 per billion per year.”

But numbers become irrelevant when narratives acquire the status of doctrine. And the doctrine is simple: the West is an enlightened axis around which the rest of the world must revolve. The old empire may have vanished politically, but psychologically it still struts about in think tanks, editorial boards, NGOs and media funded to diagnose democracy everywhere except at home.

Perhaps this is where Indians continue making a fatal mistake. They keep fitting themselves within Western frameworks, seeking moral certification from the very institutions that view post-colonial societies through lenses still fogged by imperial arrogance.

The time has come for Bharat to build its own frameworks for evaluating democracy and press freedom. The age of white referees grading brown/black civilisations cannot continue indefinitely. Nor should the sanctimonious lectures from Western journalists who confuse condescension with courage, prejudice with principle, racism with satire, and ideological activism with journalism.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)