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This report seeks to shift the locus of discourse on democracy away from the global North to ‘most of the world’. It does so by examining democratic experience in South Asia—a region marked by poverty, illiteracy, complex diversities, and multiple and overlapping structures of social hierarchy—and by daring to ask not just what democracy has done to South Asia but also what South Asia has done to democracy. Based on the first-ever social scientific survey of political opinions and attitudes across the five countries in the region—Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka—the report offers a fresh analysis of the promise of democracy for the ordinary people, its institutional slippages, obstacles in its functioning, and its mixed outcomes. The report combines public opinion data with expert assessment, case studies, and dialogue with democracy activists to come up with some big ideas, such as:
South Asians have transformed the idea of democracy by infusing it with new meanings
The experience of democracy in this region defies conventional notions of preconditions and outcomes of democracy
Deviation from the received model of democracy is often a source of strength
Politics is still vibrant and invites a high degree of interest and involvement
Political experience matters more than inherited identities like religion and ethnicity in shaping peoples’ orientations to democracy
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