Democracy at the World’s Ballot Boxes

Moderator: Steven Erlanger, diplomatic correspondent, The New York Times

Participants: Yamini Aiyar, visiting senior fellow at the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University and former president and chief executive of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi; Yves Leterme, former prime minister of Belgium and member of the Club de Madrid forum; Oliver Röpke, president of the European Economic and Social Committee of the European Union; and Lwando Xaso, a lawyer, author and founder of Including Society

Excerpts from the panel State of Democracy — Assessing the Mega Election Year have been edited and condensed.

STEVEN ERLANGER Supposedly more than 40 percent of the world heads toward the polls this year, seven of the 10 most populous countries. But what is the state of democracy? We have challenges to democracy both within consolidated democracies in the West and other places like India, but also challenges from all kinds of strains and stresses.

First we have Yamini Aiyar, who ran the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and has just come to Brown University. Tell us about Indian democracy and South Asian democracy and its challenges.

YAMINI AIYAR I come from a region that in many ways tells us a story of the vulnerabilities of democracy but also gives us a little bit of hope, I think, of the resilience of democracy when citizens take control. Our democratic institutions are fledgling; they are vulnerable to creeping authoritarianism, which is very much the context in which Indians voted in April, May and early June this year against a backdrop of strongman leadership.

The political party that was running the government, the B.J.P. [Bharatiya Janata Party], and our prime minister, [Narendra] Modi,