Year after year, India gets judged against global metrics of progress, excellence, and values by various benchmarking agencies. The bona fide multilateral institutions do so with objective criteria and mandated purpose. Then there are self-styled arbiters of virtue signalling, government or private in Western countries, that judge with a bias in what may be called the imperialism of judgement. The latest instance is the US Commission on International Religious Freedom 2026 Annual Report, recommending India be designated a “Country of Particular Concern” for the seventh consecutive year, calling for targeted sanctions against the RSS among others, and proposing to link US security assistance and trade to improvements in India’s religious freedom record. India’s Ministry of External Affairs categorically rejected the findings as a “motivated and biased characterisation” relying on questionable sources and ideological narratives rather than objective facts, and pointedly asked whether the commission had reflected on the vandalism of Hindu temples in the United States and the intimidation of Indian diaspora communities there.
The commission has an institutional design problem at its core, typical of such judgement pulpits. It carries not a single Hindu voice among its commissioners—one can justifiably argue no judgement without representation—and its composition reflects constituencies in active theological and political contestation with a Hindumajority democracy. Such bodies produce verdicts that confirm the prior bias their members bring, not neutral measurement. India, with one of the world’s longest traditions of religious pluralism, tolerance, and syncretic civilisational practice, is designated year after year alongside states that imprison and execute religious minorities. This is structural bias operating as institutional design, and it is the problem countries like India need to counter by building a new global benchmarking order that shows the righteous way.
Global benchmarking is, in principle, one of multilateralism’s genuine contributions to accountability. Its first tier comprises major multilateral bodies—the UNDP’s Human Development Index, the World Bank’s Development Indicators, the IMF’s growth projections, UNCTAD’s trade rankings, WIPO’s Global Innovation Index—carrying intergovernmental accountability and publicly auditable methodology. A second tier of initiatives, including the Pew Research Center’s surveys and the World Economic Forum’s indices, draws on disclosed, verifiable data. A third covers democracy ratings, press freedom rankings, happiness indices, and governance scores, relying on unnamed experts whose assumptions are never examined. The first two and this third are not equivalent, and conflating them causes severe distortions feeding narrative wars built on motivated value judgements.
The Pew Research Center conducts face-to-face interviews across tens of thousands of respondents, publishes its full methodology, and names no secret panels of arbiters. Its 2025 Global Attitudes Survey found 74% of Indians satisfied with the functioning of their democracy, placing India second globally behind Sweden and well ahead of the United States at 37%, France at 33%, and Japan at 24%, reflecting lived experience rather than ideological prior. At the other end sits a cluster of indices whose methodology is opaque, whose assessors are unnamed, and whose institutional impact far exceeds their evidential foundation.
Consider what the Economist Intelligence Unit’s “flawed democracy” verdict on India actually requires us to believe. India has sustained unbroken constitutional democracy since 1947, conducted the largest election in human history in 2024 with 640 million voters, and has not suspended civil government once in its modern history. France was downgraded in 2024 for governmental dysfunction; South Korea, where the president declared martial law in December 2024, was also downgraded; the United States has sat in the flawed democracy category since 2016. A civilisation that has renewed itself democratically for millennia, for whom plurality and participation are civilisational values rather than imported prescriptions, is being asked to seek legitimacy from a methodology that five unnamed experts can move at will. That is not benchmarking. That is a worthiness test administered by self-appointed judges with a colonial mindset.
The methodology behind these verdicts does not survive scrutiny. The EIU draws on expert surveys disclosing neither the number nor the nationality nor the credentials of the assessors, using data from the 2012 wave of the World Values Survey, over a decade stale. Reporters Without Borders ranks India 151st on press freedom, below Pakistan. Unbelievable. The World Happiness Report showed Indians less happy than residents of Ukraine and Palestine during active conflict. Sanjeev Sanyal, a pioneer in exposing the bias of this judgement imperial and in advocating for independent frameworks, captured the structural logic when he compared it to money laundering: layer upon layer of institutional endorsement until five original opinions are wired into sovereign ratings carrying 18 to 20% weighting. A downgrade by unnamed academics translates directly into higher borrowing costs on every bond a developing economy floats.
India’s treatment across verifiable indices shows the full split: 38th on WIPO’s Global Innovation Index, 10th on the Climate Change Performance Index, its first sovereign credit upgrade from S&P in eighteen years in 2025, and the Responsible Nations Index placing India 16th among 154 countries, ahead of the United States at 66th and China at 68th. The Pew survey’s 74% democratic satisfaction, drawn from actual Indian citizens, sits alongside these verdicts in a flat factual contradiction. One of these is measurement. The other is narrative engineering with institutional dressing.
This is not the first time the Global South has confronted this asymmetry. The New International Economic Order and the simultaneous push for a New International Information Order, the NIIO, were both defeated in the 1970s when the United States and the United Kingdom withdrew from UNESCO rather than accept structural reform. Today’s index architecture—democracy ratings, press freedom indices, and governance scores—is the institutional expression of that victory, owned, funded, and operated by institutions concentrated in the North Atlantic. The Global South has no equivalent institutional presence, and India is scored by systems it did not design, does not fund, and cannot audit.
The Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister documented methodology failures that provided the intellectual foundation for withdrawing the World Governance Indicators from sovereign ratings. The Responsible Nations Index, launched in January 2026 by the World Intellectual Foundation with JNU and IIM Mumbai, is a first proof of concept: disclosed methodology and verifiable data produce fundamentally different country pictures.
What India brings to this architecture is a civilisational perspective on what benchmarking should measure and on whom the same standards should be applied. A world that presumes to assess religious freedom should apply identical methodology symmetrically: to the growing racism, rising Hinduphobia, and vandalism of Hindu temples in North America, to rising antisemitism in Europe, to the structural Islamophobia and racist assumptions embedded in the immigration and policing systems of countries that run these indices. Governance indices that treat Western forms as the universal finish line miss civilisational depth and differential socio-economic starting points entirely. This is not a demand for lower standards. It is a demand for superior, universal ones, applied with equal rigour in all directions.
India should build a global Centre of Excellence for International Benchmarking, co-anchored with partners across the Global South, serving as atma gyaan—honest self-knowledge and the discipline of self-improvement—as much as holding a mirror to a West grown complacent in its authority to judge.
Indian philosophy offers what Western measurement architecture has never attempted. Purusharth frames progress across dharm, arth, kaam, and moksha; Kautilya’s maapdand places ethical conduct at the centre of statecraft; the Bhagavad Gita’s yoga karmasu kaushalam evaluates effort and intent alongside outcomes; Sarvodaya and yajna measure collective welfare and contribution of everyone. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam asks whether a nation is a genuine global citizen, serving the common goods of peace, security, sustainable development and humanitarian response—a global solidarity index!
Such a system would also disarm one of the most insidious instruments of cognitive warfare: the skewed index that arrives wearing the clothing of objectivity and leaves behind a weakened state, higher borrowing costs, and a citizenry made uncertain of its own institutions, values and achievements in accelerated economic growth and social justice. The demand that the 1970s generation made to the world was many voices, one world. The demand this generation must make is many voices, many metrics, and the right of nations like India—with its civilizational gravitas, its democratic scale and economic weight—to define the standards by which they are measured. The NIEO was defeated. The NIIO was killed. The New International Benchmarking and Narrative-Setting Order is the next frontier. India, with its institutional capacity and track record of structural reform, is the natural anchor.
The MacBride Commission asked who controls the story. Today’s India must ask who controls the scorecard. And it must answer that question by building one that judges back with cold eyes with full reciprocity, measure for measure.
- Lakshmi Puri is a former Assistant Secretary-General at the United Nations.
