Anthology of Indian Democracy

In recent times there has been a lot of debate on how the current dispensation is breaking down the Instruments of Democracy and how there is a brazen disregard to the spirit of National unity and the basic constructs of the Constitution. This is raging in the middle of unprecedented polarization of our society and seemingly irreconcilable differences between the polarized factions. Although conflicts and differences are inherent in any democracy, the framework itself had mechanisms to balance them and to resolve them one way or the other without affecting the nature of Democracy. In the past, many such conflicts that were bubbling up the surface were mainly based on Economy, Class and empowerment of masses. Although religion was a subject of contention, there was a clear distinction between “Progressive” and “Regressive” topics and religion was relegated to sides of the regressive hue.

 

However, post liberalization, contrary to expectation that India would now take leaps and bounds into progressive and developmental direction along with thriving middle class driving the Democratic establishment, it has taken a decisive step in a direction that was hitherto considered the communal and religious majoritarian direction. 

 

“The rapid economic growth post-liberalization, on the other hand, has endowed the seekers of favourable policy with far greater resources to offer party and government bosses in return for state discretion. The ability of despots at state and national levels to ‘raise funds’ has risen exponentially, allowing them more power over other party leaders and centralize authority.”

 

While the world over, the left seemed to be taking a retreat, with what Anne Applebaum and Francis Fukuyama point out as Alt-right, In India it is compounded by Religious lines and seemingly led by the upper and upper middle class which benefited most from the economic  liberalization. This, as Jean Dreze points out as “Revolt of the upper castes” is a catchy phrase that sums up the current state.

 

So there is a big question that looms in front, that begs to examine, whether this is a sudden and abrupt turn of events or is it a cumulation of successive failures?

The book that John Keane and Debasish Roy Chowdhury have co-authored, “To Kill a Democracy: India's Passage to Despotism” seeks to examine this.

 

John Keane is a popular economist and proponent of what he calls as Monetary Democracy as against the Representative democracy that India and many other countries follow.  Though he does not completely reject the indirect participation of the Subjects in the decision making of the country, enabled by the Representative democracy model, he seeks to control that by providing checks and balances to the limits of unbridled power granted to the elected executive after the election. The typical manifestation of the problem that John Keane points out is the phenomenon where the Participation of the Citizens in the decision making and country building gets cut off once the elections are over.  He seeks to balance the loss of transparency and practice of consultation by introducing monetary mechanisms within the framework of Democratic government. This is significant while the traditional check and balances with Legislative, Judicial and media functions have been relegated to the gallery as cheerleaders of the powerful Executive. Many contradict this view of his while acknowledging the diminished state of Traditional mechanisms. They claim that his model is trying to build power structures of its own. 

 

While that goes on, this book is a comprehensive view on the Indian situation and examines at length, original question of whether the seeds to the current situation have seeds in the past.

 

The book starts off with acknowledgement of the real Challenges the country faced at the dawn of Independence.

 

“Indian democrats proved that political unity within a highly diverse country could be built by respecting its social differences.”

 

“Nehru and his Congress party envisaged an Asian democracy that wasn’t simply a replica of the West. It had to solve two problems at once. The new democracy had to snap the chains imposed from the outside by its colonial masters; and unpick the threads of colonial domination at home by creating a new nation of equally dignified citizens of diverse backgrounds. Democracy was neither a gift of the Western world nor uniquely suited to Indian conditions. India was in fact a laboratory featuring a first-ever experiment in creating national unity, economic growth, religious toleration, and social equality out of a vast and polychromatic reality, a social order whose inherited power relations, rooted in the hereditary Hindu caste status, language hierarchies, and accumulated wealth, were to be transformed by the constitutionally guaranteed counter-power of public debate, multiparty competition, and periodic elections”

 

“Democracy—say champions of the India Story—was no longer regarded as a means of protecting a homogeneous society of equals. It came to be seen as the fairest way of enabling people of different backgrounds and divergent identities to live together as equals, without civil war.”

 

While acknowledging the challenge, the book gradually and systematically, examines various important indexes of democratic delivery to see how India figured in all of them. The important aspects like Health care, Education, Food security, Water, Land, Legal equality etc. are analyzed in detail. What it brings out is a sad story of how the successive governments undermined the democratic instruments rendering the democracy in India to a reductionist exercise of winning and losing the elections. The resources were consistently being denied to the deprived.

 

“There can often be immediate medical triggers such as stomach disorder or malaria for many deaths among the poor, but in whatever form they come, hunger lies at their core. These deaths are conveniently attributed to diseases to avoid media attention and political scandal. But the chronically hungry don’t die of pneumonia or tuberculosis. They die because their feeble bodies can’t fend off disease anymore.”

 

“Caught between an unregulated private health business and the mostly broken public sector, the average Indian citizen is faced by a Hobson’s choice of cheap massacres and expensive slaughter. In a country where the top 10 percent of the population holds 77 per cent of the total national wealth, most don’t in any case get to make that choice simply because their daily lives are plagued by other deprivations. Such as food.”

 

Historical injustices of land grabbing and unequal allocation of resources are presented as the gradual process of democratic erosion starting with the First amendment of our Constitution by the very proponents of Civil Liberty like Nehru and Ambedkar. The data presented show that the gradual erosion became a sudden torrent with the current dispensation that has reached unbelievable proportions.

 

“The blueprints for ‘development’ are drawn up by ‘experts’ who know best. Democratic accountability counts for little, or nothing. The top-down decision-making template was wired into policymaking from the early days by Nehru. Kicking off the construction of India’s first major river-valley project, the Hirakud Dam in Orissa, a few months after Independence, he said in his speech to those facing displacement: ‘If you have to suffer, you should suffer in the interest of the country.’”

 

“European scholars rue that democracies are often snail-paced in their handling of large and small political matters, but in India it’s exactly the opposite.8 On just one day in 2018 (13 March), the Lok Sabha passed funding demands from ninety-nine ministries and government departments, along with two bills containing 218 amendments—all in thirty minutes and without any debate. The entire annual budgetary plan for a country of 1.3 billion people passed in half an hour. The House Speaker used a special parliamentary procedure called the ‘guillotine’, which enables the Speaker, backed by the brute majority of the ruling party, to railroad financial grants and proposals worth Rs 26 lakh crore ($375 billion). Most budgetary provisions that people think are examined and debated in the House are actually passed every year using the ‘guillotine’ method.”

 

“Some years, all funding bills are passed in this way without debate, along with important non-financial regulations (Figure 28). The two government bills that were passed that day included the crucial ‘Finance Bill’ with the 218 taxation law amendments. Tucked away on page 90 of the 92-page Bill was an amendment allowing political parties to escape scrutiny on foreign funding.”

 

As you read the book, one thing that strikes me is the fact that most of us, Indians, were not really committed to Democracy or had an understanding of what democracy actually is. While growing up, I have heard many in my elder generation always fantasizing about a strong leader who can drive the decisions for the entire country as the answer to the shortcomings in Indian Democracy. This has been drilled to hapless youngsters who are the current crop. So, it is not surprising that we have reached this point.

 

“When social life is degraded and governing institutions are floundering, democratic accountability goes missing. Politics becomes a protection racket. Election campaigns resemble street fights.”

 

“On the other hand, the suggestion that Indian democracy was doing just fine till Modi showed up, is equally fallacious. Many of the institutional pathologies outlined in this book have intensified under Modi, but neither the many curbs on fundamental rights and the dissolution of the checks and balances of power, nor the spate of unlawful arrests of the regime’s discontents are an entirely new phenomenon restricted to the machinations of one party or leader. One of Bollywood’s most celebrated lyricists, Majrooh Sultanpuri, found himself in jail for criticizing Nehru in 1949. It was under Nehru again when one of the most flagrant exercises of mass detentions in India took place—during the 1962 war with China, when about 3,000 Indian-Chinese were rounded up from Assam and West Bengal and taken to an internment camp in the deserts of Rajasthan. All because the Nehru government deemed them a security risk simply because of their ethnicity. Their property was seized and auctioned, and many of them were deported to China, even though they were Indian citizens who had lived in India for generations. India’s colonial-era sedition laws and the draconian security and anti-terror laws designed in subsequent years have consistently allowed rulers to attack their real and imagined enemies with impunity. To what extent the rulers use these provisions is subject to their inclination and legislative might. Only now, it seems to be part of the natural order of things, a functional requirement of governing. Unlike the US Bill of Rights, India’s fundamental rights are not inviolable. 3 Rights such as free speech and expression, assembly and movement can be—and regularly are—tempered by ‘reasonable restrictions’ on the grounds of protecting the inviolable but conveniently inexact notions of preserving ‘law and order’ and the ‘sovereignty, unity and integrity’ of India.”

 

Our Leaders, apart from those pioneers who were involved in nation building, were busy breaking down the democratic institutions to suit their short-term needs. The Emergency in India which ran for a 21-month period from 1975 to 1977 is not an aberration but a milestone in the process of dismantling the democracy in India. When delivery of basic needs was denied, the dangerous fantasy kept getting stronger, finding more buyers for that. The successive leaders neither gave attention to strengthening the democratic institution nor emphasizing the values of democratic institutions to the next generation, as they were busy playing their number games. This led to progressive weakening of the democratic institutions over the time. The current dispensation only is serving the Demand for a “strong centralized leadership which is the popular ask.

 

“The legislature is supposed to enact laws, the executive implement them, and the judiciary test their constitutionality, to examine and decide whether they violate constitutional rights. With the legislature’s role rapidly becoming ornamental, it’s the executive, in effect, that both enacts and arranges the enforcement of laws. This puts India firmly on the road to a new kind of despotism. Citizens are stripped of their powers as voters and citizens. As subjects, they elect lawmakers but are divorced from lawmaking. The injustices of the legal system only increase this distance between people and the law.”

 

In the end what the book presents is not all grim and dark. What they present is the result of concerted and coordinated right wing push happening all over the world as presented by multiple authors such as Anne Applebaum, Francis Fukuyama et. al. From Viktor Orban to Putin the extreme fascist right push is everywhere. On the other hand, the forces that are presented as the side that could resist this surge of despotism stands eroded of trust. 

 

“Among the most potent long-term gifts of the democracy founded in India last century is the way it has stirred up hopes for a dignified society of equal citizens. The founding democratic vision was built on hope. It remains the condition of possibility of hope. Think of how democracy stirs up a sense of possibility.”

 

“Even when people are ground down by social indignities, a democracy encourages them to look beyond their present miserable horizons, to expect and to demand positive improvements. Democracy even stretches the scope of hope. Hope isn’t just the anticipation of a future that’s judged to be possible. Hope can also be the active remembering of a past that can be rescued and resuscitated, brought back to life in much-changed circumstances, with an eye to the future.”

 

“They remind their Indian audiences, and the rest of the world, of the global importance of B.R. Ambedkar’s and Periyar E.V. Ramasamy’s understanding of democracy as a way of life that not only licenses citizens to rebel against social injustice and lawless power but also enables them to see that if despotism replaces democracy then this isn’t because despotic power is somehow inevitable, but because citizens allow it to happen.29 That means, when the going gets really rough, democracy fosters hope against hope. It stirs up insurrections. It gives energy to the sense that it’s possible to change things, to build a better future guided by precious precepts”

 

However, what this book talks about is, the revival of hope as a potent weapon against such threats finding strength from Past. After all hope is the only commodity left with the people who have lost their way into the miasma of despotism.