[hn_check]

How is this weird? A country of law and order and checks and balances rightly allows orders like this to be contested.

India, used as the example, has a very flawed democracy and a high degree of corruption.

EDIT: LOL, downvoted to oblivion by the HN India contingent. As provided elsewhere, India's democratic and corruption rankings are mediocre.

[markdown]

India's democracy is far superior to that of the US (which is TBH, like any two-party system, a bit of a joke - see Bush v Al Gore, dem race Sanders v Clinton), and as for corruption, the US leads the entire world on that score.

The difference is where the corruption happens (lobbying for billion dollar contracts, rather than a private citizen slipping a civil servant a few notes to speed along some approval or another). The former type of corruption doesn't get taken into account in any world corruption index, so Americans think they're not corrupt.

[hn_check]

The US is nowhere near leadership in either democracy or corruption. I didn't hold it as the stellar example, beyond countering someone who is surprised (or finds it "weird") that a government has checks and balances, and a legal system. I know few Americans who "think they're not corrupt", nor does that change the fact that India is very corrupt and has a very flawed democracy.

[sudosysgen]

The US in not a leader in corruption, but it is an interesting study in creative ways to be corrupt.

[parthdesai]

Because being allowed to legally bribe politicians (lobbying), influence them which basically means that politicians have interest of corporations at heart and not that of general population is democracy. Being able to rig primaries so that a candidate that people wanted to vote for as a president can't run for the elections is democracy. Gotcha.

[jjcon]

What about Japan and Australia which are currently working to ban it.

[hn_check]

What about them?

I replied to someone saying "ha ha isn't that weird they can contest it in the US look countries like India just went ahead and banned it and there's no recourse". Great. Other countries can talk about it, go through a legislative process (in Japan lawmakers aren't even going to start talking about their possible options until September), then there are legal challenges and normal processes to go through, etc.

[blocked_again]

> India, used as the example, has a very flawed democracy

How come?

[known]

Elections != Democracy

https://archive.vn/hmUx2

[hn_check]

https://www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index

https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi

India is no benchmark. There are far worse countries, but if someone cites India's actions as an example, it falls flat.

[blocked_again]

I was asking why India has a flawed democracy.

I went through the list. India is ranked around 50.

If you ignore all the cute european countries like Finland, Denmark, Liechtenstein etc from the top, which doesn't even qualify as a big city in India, I would say India is doing pretty good for a country where 1/6 population of the world live.

[dragonwriter]

> I would say India is doing pretty good for a country where 1/6 population of the world live.

Sure, India is by far the most democratic country of its own size or larger.

But that literally just means “not as bad as China”. It's kind of like if the Republic of Korea (which could support stronger claims, to be sure) was said to be “pretty good for a country located on the Korean peninsula”—it is true, but doesn't say a lot.

[blocked_again]

Sure. A democracy index where you have countries ranging from less than a million population to greater than 1 billion population also doesn't say a lot :)

[dragonwriter]

I think it says quite a lot.

It's possible that one of the things it says is that democracy (at least the values measured by the index) is not scale independent, and more specifically democratic values are inherently incompatible with large states. I don't think the second part is actually true, at least with current technology and at the scales involved, but that seems to be the “defense” of India here.