Salvatore Babones is an associate professor at the University of Sydney in Australia. Salvatore Babones is a quantitative comparative sociologist. He is an associate professor at the University of Sydney and the director of the China and Free Societies program at the Centre for Independent Studies. He earned his MS (mathematical sciences) and Ph.D. (sociology) from Johns Hopkins University.   He has also written a book on the ranking of  Australian Universities, so he understands comparisons and ranking methodologies. He recently wrote an article on why India's ranking on three different indices tracking democracy is falling. These indices are by the Economist Intelligence Unit (#EIU), where Indian democracy ranking has been in decline ever since Mr. #Modi first took office in 2014. The ranking fell from number 27 in the world (just below Belgium) to number 46 (two spots below South Africa). The# EIU now labels India as a “flawed democracy” characterized by “serious deterioration in the quality of democracy. Sweden’s university-based Varieties of Democracy Institute (#V-DEM) ranks India even lower, at 101st in the world for electoral democracy (two places above even Myanmar) and 97th in the world for liberal democracy (one place above Papua New Guinea). Indeed, it claims that India is no longer a liberal democracy at all, but is now an “electoral autocracy” on par with Russia. Lastly, the  American government-funded think tank Freedom House considers India to be only “partially free”, with an overall freedom rank of tied-85th in the world. It even lists the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir as “unfree”.    Babones says the challenge is not with the institutions but with the inputs that it is collecting through its surveys that are leading to this bias and crash in the ranking. In this conversation, Babones talks about the biased sample of people who are asked to answer in this survey. He says that Indians abroad or even resident Indian "intellectuals" who participate in these surveys by these three institutions are biased against #narendramodi Modi and #BJP and this results in a poor rating on these indices. He also says that the International or more specifically the American media is creating a narrative of anti-#bjp and Anti- #Narendra #modi that has now reached epic proportions and is affect Geo- strategic relations of India with the western world.  It is affecting India's perception among not just policymakers but ordinary Americans and Europeans who think that India is now a more dangerous place to go. The political opposition to BJP by the left forces has reached a stage where they are willing to damage India's perception globally as long as they are able to damage #BJP. Do watch, share, and give your opinion about this line of thinking.