Today, on the 48th anniversary of the Emergency, take a moment to reflect on democracy’s vulnerability. And to acknowledge that these are not good times, in general, for democracy.
In countries across the world, there is talk of democratic backsliding. Questions are being asked about the widening gaps between a bare-bones electoral democracy and its full promise and possibility — the weakening of minority rights and imperilled freedom of expression and dissent, because of broken party systems and angry underclasses, fake news and resurgent intolerance, demagogues and populists. The list of dangers is long and they don’t always overtake democracies in spectacular ways, as they did in India, many Junes ago, with the imposition of the Emergency.
As one of the most insightful theorists of democracy, Professor John Keane, wrote on our pages earlier this year in January, “Some observers say that an anti-democratic counterrevolution on a global scale is now underway”, but insurrections aren’t democracy’s greatest threat. “The troubling truth is that it can be destroyed in multiple ways, in different tempos. There’s no single Iron Law of Democide… ballots can be used to ruin democracy just as effectively as bullets”. In other words, there is a democratic road to despotism.
In this climate, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s soaring rhetoric on democracy in his speech at the US Congress this week — he spoke of democracy as a “sacred and shared” value between the world’s largest and oldest democracies, which will together demonstrate that “democracies matter and democracies deliver” — also served to draw attention to the democratic deficits both in his host country and back home.
In America, only a little over two years ago, a mob of protesters bent on overturning an election result, cheered on by a defeated president, stormed the Capitol.
In India, this week, an elected chief minister reacted to former US President Barack Obama’s remarks on the “protection of the Muslim minority in a Hindu majority India”, in response to a question on the Biden-Modi meeting in an interview, by tweeting about the “Hussain Obama” who need to be “taken care of” in this country. There has been no penalty, no censure so far, by the BJP or the BJP-led government of Himanta Biswa Sarma’s brazen flouting of the norms of democratic respect and civility.
Also this week, the top leaders of as many as 15 Opposition parties gathered in Patna, and pledged to meet again, to put up a joint challenge to what they see as the BJP’s threat to democracy.
But for all that democracy is in trouble in India, as it is elsewhere, it will be a long trek for these parties from Patna to Delhi.
On one end, the slow erosion of democratic norms, when it does not take the shape of a spectacular event like the Emergency or an insurrection like at Capitol Hill, is an abstraction difficult to concretise. On the other end, there are so many complicities in democracy’s decline that, in popular perception, it is almost a faceless crime.
The Opposition’s tall order, then, is this: To first frame democracy-under-siege in ways that don’t just sound like an opportunistic lament — it needs to show that it is not simply reacting to the episodic targeting of individual leaders. It must connect the democracy dots to the voter. And then, it will need to persuade her that the Modi government is at fault, specifically and more.
After all, the degradation of institutions and shrinking of public spaces for free expression has taken place on the watch of other governments led by other parties too, both in the states and at the Centre. Are we seeing a difference of quantity or quality of unfreedom on the Modi government’s watch, or a quantitative difference that has grown into a qualitative one — the Opposition will need to find the language and the credibility to pose these thorny questions and propose answers.
If it wants to persist with the democracy argument, it must also draw its connections with other issues that affect voters’ lives, like unemployment or inequality, education or health or women’s empowerment. And with concerns and themes the BJP has successfully talked up and tapped into, like national security, Hindutva and cultural nationalism.
While it does all this, it must know that the BJP is hardly likely to stay in one place. The Modi-Shah party is a constantly moving target.
The many photo-ops of the grand welcome accorded to PM Modi in the US, and those still to come from the upcoming G20 summit in Delhi in September and the scheduled inauguration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya in January — the BJP has much to pick from, to package and project. In particular, the Modi-BJP has been adept in conveying to the voter the image of a country more confident with itself and at ease with the world — in a more connected age, Modi’s India compulsively takes perfect selfies and posts them for Indians, in town and village, to admire and see.
Of course, much before it turns its face to the people, the still-to-be cobbled Opposition front at Patna will also have to sort out the internal give-and-take between its component parties when it meets next in Himachal Pradesh.
It’s going to be a hard-fought battle in 2024, and though democracy is a given, the Emergency’s anniversary is another reminder that it is not to be taken for granted.
Till next week,
Vandita
Must Read Opinions of the week:
– C Raja Mohan, “The road not taken before”, June 24
– Flavia Agnes, “Uniform rights, not laws”, June 23
– J Sai Deepak, “The majoritarianism slur”, June 22
– Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Making of a high point”, June 21
– Kham Khan Suan Hausing, “Don’t fiddle in Manipur”, June