“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most democratic of them all?”
Historians have rarely held a mirror to assess who among all the prime ministers of India has been the most democratic and egalitarian in spirit. A dispassionate and thorough appraisal of all the PMs we have had so far might provide us a chance to fight slanging matches — that is, how P V Narasimha Rao would fare compared to, say, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh with I K Gujral, Chandra Shekhar with H D Deve Gowda, Rajiv Gandhi with V P Singh, and last but not least, Narendra Modi with his bête noire Jawahar Lal Nehru – to name just a few. Indira Gandhi’s flirtation with a brief period of dictatorship taught most Indians about the dangers that threaten democracy. They understood the pitfalls of gratuitous hero worship and how demagoguery, disregard for liberty, placing power in the hands of a few, can play havoc. One Emergency was enough to blot the many exploits of a really courageous PM, the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 being the foremost one.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah late last year said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has brought back people's faith in democracy by taking good governance to the grassroots level. According to him, people have realised that Modi came to power in 2014 not to run the government but to provide a clean, transparent and welfare administration, thus changing the face of the country. Modi took decisions, Shah averred, neither with an eye on the vote bank, nor on populist planks, but upon consideration of what is good for the people. But what takes the cake is perhaps the claim that Modi is a precursor to the revival of what was a flagging state of Indian democracy.
Then, almost as a counterpoint, came the howler a few days later, when Meghalaya Governor Satya Pal Malik triggered a massive row by saying that Modi had been “arrogant” when he met him over the deaths of farmers during their year-long agitation. “When I told him that 500 of our own (farmers) had died…he said, ‘Did they die for me?’ I told him ‘yes, since you are the king’. I ended up having an argument with him. He told me to meet Amit Shah, and I did.”
The residual part of Malik’s statement — of having met Shah and having been told by him that our PM had “lost his mind” was uncharitable if it was made to placate Malik, and whatever might be the spirit of the statement, it ran counter to Shah’s depiction of Modi as an exemplar of democracy. The perception of Modi’s received image as a megalomaniac leader, who remains unmoved by the human costs of his far-reaching decisions, got firmed up further by Malik’s fulminations.
But a democratic leader, in view of all his obligations to be pro-people, must not remain impervious to the enormous costs of his or her decisions. Over 140 people died waiting in long queues at the ATMs due to demonetisation. An iron-fisted lockdown resulted in the dangerous and unplanned displacement of millions of internal migrant workers, killing many on the way. The BBC filed over 200 RTIs to find out who in the government had been consulted before the national lockdown was called, only to learn that nobody in the government, whether disaster management or the finance ministry, knew this was going to come. The plight of millions of migrant workers in cities, without work or basic resources, beggared description. The death of the agitating farmers could have been avoided, too.
If Malik was hinting at demagoguery, democracy’s tryst with demagogues according to the political scientist Samuel Huntington, passed through three “waves” each followed by a “reverse wave.”
The first wave, from 1828 to 1926, included the series of European revolutions in 1848, followed by a reverse wave that began in 1922 with Mussolini’s takeover of Italy’s fragile democracy and continued through World War II.
The second “short wave” extended from 1943 to 1962, as the Allied Powers installed democracies in the conquered Axis countries, followed by a second reverse wave from 1958 to 1975, when authoritarian regimes took root across the world.
The third wave began in Portugal in 1974 and crested with the fall of the Soviet Union, the various “colour revolutions” in Eastern Europe and the rise of democracies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America today. The third reverse wave should include not only the rise of the authoritarian strongmen but the double threat to democracy posed by post-truth propaganda and an authoritarian backlash to the politics of Truth.
At the Democracy Summit hosted by US President Joe Biden, Modi was one of 12 leaders invited to speak at the plenary. Our PM proudly recounted how the “spirit of democracy” and adherence to “rule of law” are “ingrained” in Indians, and how the source of that endowment lies in India’s “civilisational ethos”. The trouble is, the situation on the ground runs counter to his proclamations because it is the very spirit that has seriously been dented by his regime.
Facts have been recounted ad nauseam. India dropped from ‘Free’ to ‘Partly Free’ status in Freedom in the World 2021. The central government and its state-level allies continue to crack down on critics, lynch and crush innocent persons, hate people with different sartorial and eating habits, intimidate filmmakers, dramatists and writers with contrarian views. India seems to have forfeited its potential to serve as a global democratic leader, elevating narrow Hindu nationalist interests at the expense of its founding values of inclusion and equal rights for all.
None can fail to see how the driving force of the government has been based on an ideology of pure and unadulterated communal polarisation. A number of commentators recently analysed how hatred and intolerance, obfuscation and obscurantism have become parallel tools of governance, be they through calls for genocide, branding civil society as a war weapon, or unleashing a very pliant media and vigilante groups on detractors. But finally, it is the civilisational call of the Opposition, already looking too effete and clueless – mute spectators so far when institutions have been subverted, political opponents hounded, dissent suppressed and freedom of speech silenced – to put their act together to arrest India’s tectonic slide towards authoritarianism.