Where 2 billion voters reside: Measuring democracy in the subcontinent

Rating democracies is a tricky business. I am only using the simple metric of who in the Indian subcontinent has had the most peaceful, stable, normal political transitions and continuity

Try as we may, we will not find another contiguous region in the world where about two billion people vote and value democracy. Not in the Americas, not Africa. Europe doesn’t have the numbers, and most of East Asia has the 1.4 billion Chinese overhang.

 

Something makes the Indian subcontinent different. All of its nations -- from the Maldives through Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan -- have regular elections. Of course, the quality of democracy varies, let’s say, from Pakistan at the lowest rung to India. It isn’t my case that Indian democracy is perfect.

 

Rating democracies is a tricky business. I am only using the simple metric of who’s had the most peaceful, stable, normal political transitions and continuity. India has had the most of it, barring the 19-month aberration of the Emergency that delayed an election by a year.

 

Pakistan, we rate as the lowest on this scale, as it discovered elections more than 25 years after its creation, and even then has never had an elected Prime Minister complete a full term. It has always ceded much ground to the army and invented its own hybrid arrangement. It has also had many full military interregnums for long periods, such as General Musharraf from 1999 to 2008. Yet, people continue voting.

 

Look elsewhere now. In a tiny, ultra-stable Himalayan monarchy like Bhutan, the king has been farsighted enough to hold regular elections and pass much power on to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet so installed. Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives (listed in order of their population size) have all been having elections and stable, peaceful transitions. Nowhere has that dreaded “A” word, for the army, cropped up. Not even in Bangladesh for three decades despite its history of two military dictatorships. Commitment to elected democracy, therefore, is well-established among one-fourth of humankind, living in one geographically cohesive subcontinent. If anything, in all countries except Pakistan, the army has proved to be a force for good, backstopping stability for fresh elections and transition — even when an established government was swept away dramatically by a furious street protest.

 

In the past four years, we have seen this play out among three of these neighbours. Sri Lanka’s Mahinda Rajapaksa fell first, then Sheikh Hasina Wazed in Bangladesh, and then Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli in Nepal. All three, after what looked like a disruption to rival the Arab Spring, did not collapse into anarchy. They sprang back on their feet, held clean, peaceful elections and elected popular leaders with wide majority.

 

Two of those, Sri Lanka and Nepal, in the process also discovered new political parties. There was anger with the “system”. It is just that it became a fury against the established political party instead: They are all the same, equally bad, complicit. The answer wasn’t a new non-constitutional force or a new constitution, but a new political party.

 

Nepal is the latest. Over two dramatic days between September 8 and 9 in 2025, the Oli government fell amid speculation on “what the army would do”. It did nothing. It just maintained order so a transitional government under a respected Chief Justice (Nepal’s first woman Chief Justice) Sushila Karki was set up with the solitary agenda of holding a peaceful and fair election soon.

 

She delivered it within six months and allowed all parties to contest freely. The results were a spectacular rejection of all those between whom 14 prime ministerships had changed hands since the end of the monarchy, the establishment of democracy, and the adoption of a republican constitution in 2008.

 

This marked the end of the Maoist power. Now, with a shade less than 10 per cent in the 165-directly elected house, they’ve been swept away to the garbage heap of democratic history. The new leader? Balendra Shah, just 35, and not in the job because he’s the offspring of a famous parent. A structural engineering MTech from Belagavi’s Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU), he was a rapper who became a humongous cult figure, with his lyrics reflecting popular frustrations against corruption, lousy governance, desperate outward migration and the quality of life. The party he joined, the Rastriya Swatantra Party, was launched by journalist Rabi Lamichhane in 2022 and has now won one short of a two-thirds majority. At this moment, it even looks ideology-free, although it calls itself centrist. The nutgraf of the story is a complete trust in the constitution, the democratic process, and the fact that all key institutions — from the Supreme Court, Presidency, and Election Commission to the Army — stayed intact, retaining their stature and respect.

 

Bangladesh played out just a little bit earlier, and had its variations. The supposed caretaker government under Muhammad Yunus  didn’t quite act like one and pretended as if it was fully mandated to make policy shifts, including reversals. It was the army chief who nudged Mr Yunus back into reality.

 

The election was far from ideal as one major party, the Awami League was banned. However, the election finally was peaceful — way more peaceful than any we remember in our West Bengal — and Tarique Rahman (60) won a two-thirds majority. Almost immediately, we have seen some return to sanity. The anti-India rhetoric and activity is down, conversations re-established, and the new government is looking at Bangladesh’s future rather than grievances, national or personal, of the past. Bangladesh’s democracy has emerged stronger even if the Awami League ban remains a blot.

 

Sri Lanka before that went through a longer, but remarkably calm process. Initially, while the rest of the Rajapaksa family left, Gotabaya, as President, appointed the old UNP (United National Party) stalwart Ranil Wickremesinghe as Prime Minister.

 

Two months later, the popular protest, called Aragalaya (the struggle), also threw Gotabaya out, and Wickremesinghe was made President. This, when his party only had one MP. The secret ballot in the national parliament chose to continue with him. Why? Because they had faith in their Constitution, democracy, and a shared commitment to stability in the national interest. The election was held entirely peacefully in November 2024, where Anura Kumara  Dissanayake (57), a committed communist formerly from the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which was once considered a terrorist organisation and violently suppressed, swept aside all the established parties to win a two-thirds majority. To this extent, this was a pattern of rejecting all legacy parties that Nepal followed. The only difference being that one gave a landslide to the hard Left (Sri Lanka) and the other (Nepal) rejected it sweepingly.

 

The Maldives has also had peaceful, electoral transitions since 2008, although the odd incoming leader may have jailed his predecessor. We told you there is no such thing as a perfect democracy.

 

Early on, we also listed Pakistan among these democracies and that’s only because the country is now going through its longest continuous phase of elected governments, such as they may be. Within its hybrid history, the current arrangement has produced the weakest government and it has conspired with the army to mutilate the Constitution.

 

So here’s the question: How come, while all other countries in the subcontinent have seen their democracy mature and strengthen, Pakistan has slipped?

 

The answer many say is in the way each has imagined its nationalism. Pakistan is exceptional in that it is still fighting to justify the two-nation theory. It is this fixation that has never allowed any institution except the army to build moral stature. This happens when you define yourselves ideologically as a national security state. The Pakistan predicament is existential. Existential not in the sense that it’s commonly used these days, but in the sense closer to the original Jean-Paul Sartre: Why do I exist? And how do I exist? Therein lies the difference between the quality of its democracy and the rest of the subcontinent’s two billion.

 

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