A Boring Dystopia

I can understand to not see India as a real democracy right now but not in the context of framing the USA as the poster child of how democracy fails. In that instance India is far larger still.

It's also one of the oldest (in the modern sense), an early adopter with little to no best practices to learn from. Not to mention that it kind of wandered into being a democracy through legal interpretations rather than being one by design.

Anyway, you're not looking at things structurally enough and missing the fundamental problem: excessive consolidation of power. By which I don't mean the "big government" conservatives like to complain about, because governments don't have to be monoliths, but simply what it sounds like: one entity having an excessive power at its disposal that it's able to use at its own volition. To prevent that in government you need to not only design it in a way that not one part of it has an excessive amount of power (through separation of powers, independent institutions etc.), but also have mechanisms in place to keep it that way, because it's ultimately people who are doing the execution. And any such mechanism that does not involve accountability to the public is doomed to failure, because that mechanism is, once again, executed by people, and the fewer people are involved, the easier it is to take over. In other words, it's not simply that democracy can work, it's the only thing that is structurally capable of working. Any other form of government is inherently more susceptible to corruption.

However, implementation details matter and a flawed implementation can cause it to fail. And basically every modern democratic state has one big flaw: it has political democracy, but not economic democracy. As a result, there is very little constraining private actors from accumulating as much capital (=power) as they can, based on the naive assumption that market forces are enough to prevent them from accumulating too much. And so once enough capital has accumulated in once place, that power can be used to undermine political democracy as well. So the problem here isn't that democracy doesn't work, it's that we don't have enough of it.