Using political epithets lightly in a fatigued democracy

Ideological battles have assumed utmost importance but cannot be fought with a frivolous mindset

Whether a party will organise a 'Black' Friday protest as Congress did on August 5, the day of the second anniversary of the construction of Ram Temple, is a free choice of its leaders. However, without the protest, Amit Shah and Yogi Adityanath, the two leaders vying for the place of the future numero uno of the Saffron Brigade, perhaps would not have much scope to highlight the day's connections with the Ram temple.

This was politics as usual. But, going a step ahead, Rahul Gandhi declared the 'death of democracy' and 'onset of dictatorship' in the country. It must have earned him kudos from certain quarters, but his charges were frivolous.

If democracy were dead, Rahul Gandhi would have been in jail, or censorship would have stopped the media from telecasting what he said. India saw such a 'death of democracy' during Indira Gandhi's Emergency days.

However, the situation is not at all a happy one today. As we are celebrating the 75th year of our independence, it is not only that the institutions are under pressure; the lofty values and the sense of propriety are being eclipsed, too, with all the sides involved in the political fight sharing responsibility.

Present-day India is much more resilient, unlike the India of the 1950s, '60s and '70s, when it was weak, poor, and ravaged by frequent communal and caste riots. It has come a long way, but our democracy is showing some definite signs of fatigue in the present century.

The word fatigue is defined in the dictionary, among other things, as weakened by repeated variations of stress. Our democratic polity has been truly under stress for the last two decades.

Till the 1990s, Indian polity was graduating from a hopelessly feudal setting characterised by the rule, from top to bottom, by the uppers castes and classes to a much more vibrant democracy thanks to hundreds and hundreds of political mutinies, both constitutional (like socialist, communist or Dravidian movements) and unconstitutional (like the Naxal movement).

Meanwhile, in the 1990s, people like T N Seshan emerged from within the system and fixed the vulnerable electoral methods, plugging the holes through the election (EPIC) identity card amidst stiff opposition. Further down the line, the radical idea of NOTA was introduced. In a parallel move, 'judicial activism' brought positive revolutionary changes, including introducing schemes like the 'mid-day meal' across India.

Further, the economic liberalisation of the 1990s curtailed the state's gigantic bureaucratic power and bestowed on the people a new sense of freedom. By the turn of the century, India was on its way to becoming a much more civilised, humane and mighty state.

But then the fatigue started setting in. The humongous corruption during Manmohan Singh's regime frustrated the people and forced them to look beyond the old political options. It strengthened the Hindutva forces so much that it earned an absolute majority for the BJP in Parliament, a feat last achieved by any party in 1984.

With that, anti-appeasement and religion-based Hindutva politics started dominating the scene. In reaction, the so-called secular liberal lobby magnified the stress factor so much that it invited a vehement counter-reaction. Political sobriety gave way to acrimony, and a broad unanimity about the sacred institutions—the Army, the Election Commission and the RBI included—broke down. The days of using the governor as a brazen political tool, efforts to dislodge elected governments, and the days of Ayaram-Gayaram were back.

Though the BJP shoulders the lion's share of the blame, the opposition has failed to emerge any better. And now we have senior politicians like Nitish Kumar holding the unenviable record of trampling people's verdict twice in two consecutive assemblies.

Meanwhile, corruption has spread geographically (it has enveloped even a state like West Bengal, where in the past top leaders of the ruling parties stood above board), and measures like demonetisation have only helped the dishonest to whiten their black money.

Altogether, the socio-political situation is rather bleak while the economy, the genuine powerhouse, has grown well. In such a situation, the light use of epithets like 'death of democracy' and 'onset of dictatorship' is highly inappropriate. It not only falsely depicts India as apocalyptic to the world, but much like the proverbial shepherd who shouted 'tiger, tiger' to mock people, it is fraught with the danger of failing the opposition if something grim really happens someday.

Rahul Gandhi is angry as 'every institution is today controlled by the RSS'. He forgets that the institutions were earlier controlled by the leftist secular liberals who devalued the concepts of 'rewriting the history' advocated by Rabindranath Tagore or the 'uniform civil code' forwarded by the makers of our constitution.
The ideological battles for a value-based polity and society have assumed utmost importance, but such battles cannot be fought with a frivolous mindset deciding the course.

(Diptendra Raychaudhuri is a journalist and author based in Kolkata)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.