Topic: 2025 – Authoritarianism and Democracy
Country: India
Delegate Name: Bobby Young
Currently in the central and southern Asian region where India is located, authoritarianism is taking over the region at an increasingly alarming rate. Authoritarianism is a form if government that has been taking iverin the southern and central regions of Asia at an alarming rate. . While the political climate of central Asia has begun to move towards authoritarianism, India has remained a democratic country that holds fair, free, and multi-party elections. We hope that through the efforts of this committee we will be able to collaborate and create a solution that combats authoritarianism from spreading even further by ensuring the protection of democracies in countries that have established democratic governments, create protection measures for countries with newly established democracies that are vulnerable to autocracy, and establish measures that protect democratic institutions in autocratic regimes.
While India strongly believes in our free and safe elections, this has not always been the case. Most notably on June 25, 1975 then prime minister Indira Ghandi exercised an excessive use of executive power. In reaction to a high court ruling that found Ghandi was guilty of electoral malpractice in India’s 1971 election, Ghandi delared a national emergency calling upon India’s military and police force to suppress political opposition. This declared national emergency had lead to the arrests of 110,000 Indians including high profile political opposers of Gandhi’s administration. The media was surpressed, millions of Indians would be sterilised forcefully with hundreds of thousands of them becoming displaced, Gandhi’s son would extend autocratic authority in an almost secondary government, and hundreds of thousands of poor Indians became displaced after the destruction of their homes. However, the Indian people did not stand for this tyranny and voted out Ghandi in the 1977 election. The results of this election proved the Indian people’s desire to not have an autocratic regime and any claims of India furthering this autocratic agenda today are misleading and incorrect.
India is a very predominantly Hindu country, and many of our high ranking officials like our great prime minister Narendra Modi align with the Hindu religion; however, India believes that religious identity should not be weaponized like it was in Kashmir, India this past spring when a group of foreign Muslim nationalist extremist violently attacked and killed Indian Hindu tourists to forward their country’s religious nationalist agenda. This event is proof that authoritarian regimes can cause violence and conflict outside of their country’s borders, which suggests that authoritarian governments are not simply domestic issues that affect only the freedoms of the country’s inhabitants, but an international issue that affects the freedom and safety of inhabitants of other nations. India hopes that in this committee we will be able to pass a resolution that continues to further protections for countries like India that neighbor autocratic countries in order to ensure the safety of our people from these violent nationalist attacks while preserving their freedoms. Additionally, India wishes to reach consensus regarding our hopes to create democratic protections in vulnerable countries, and continue to promote the ideas promoted in the UN resolution 79/168 to affirm peoples freedom of expression.
Bibliography:
Biswas, Soutik. “Emergency: When Indira Gandhi Put Democracy on Pause in India.” BBC News, BBC, 24 June 2025, www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0gnvq72lko.
Arun, Kumar, et al. “From Emergency to Empire: How 1975 Reshaped India’s Economic Future.” IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, 23 July 2025, www.impriindia.com/insights/from-emergency-to-empire/.
India: Human Rights Assessments | Congress.Gov | Library of Congress, www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12198. Accessed 22 Nov. 2025.
Psychology of Authoritarianism | the Oxford Handbook of Authoritarian Politics | Oxford Academic, academic.oup.com/edited-volume/55828/chapter-abstract/444218502?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false. Accessed 22 Nov. 2025.
https://docs.un.org/en/A/RES/79/168
