“And the clearest signs of such democratic erosion are that elected leaders question the legitimacy of all opposition and use every available legal tool to undermine it. Drawing on a broad range of historical cases, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that unwritten rules and norms of behavior toward political opposition are the key to preventing such democratic deterioration. They argue that the two most important norms are opposition tolerance, meaning that political opponents are not treated as enemies but simply as political rivals, and forbearance, that is, limited use of the legal methods to steamroll opposition, such as executive orders, vetoes, and filibusters.6 Contemporary democratic backsliders tend not to transform overnight to autocracies. Instead, democracies slowly die when opposition is no longer tolerated and when elected politicians use the full might of the law to quash rather than compromise with political opposition.”
www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/why-indias-democracy-is-dying/