[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.