“every other liberal democracy”

In every liberal democracy. India is not one of those. They have elections, but those are necessary, not sufficient conditions for a meaningful state of democracy to exist.

Sure, it's been mired in the "flawed democracy" category for a long time. I'm explicitly not commenting on the actual legal justification of this action because I don't know anything about how their law is written. I think the point of this article is very much to grade India on an absolute international scale of behavior. They fancy themselves as the "world's largest democracy" and things like this put a huge asterisk on their use of that kind of title. Permitting dissent would be a big signal that they're still committed to being a part of the liberal order, but they went the other direction. Same with their tepid reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The US is in that category too, for what it’s worth—at least on the list compiled by the Economist.

https://thefulcrum.us/big-picture/Leveraging-big-ideas/flawe...