To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism. Debasish Roy Chowdhury & John Keane. Kindle edition. Pan Macmillan India. December 2021.Print Length 327 pages
Ashoak Upadhyay
I
n times such as these when a gloating darkness spreads across our cognitive landscapes, and not just because of the persistent pandemic, it is tempting to look at this benighted republic’s past when someone as distinguished as John Kenneth Galbraith, Harvard economist and US ambassador to India described the country as a “functioning anarchy”. It became an endearing cachet, drew indulgent smiles from the urban middle class and a nascent liberal/academic elite: yes, India’s natural boisterousness as Shashi Tharoor termed it disrupted the protocols of Parliament in unique ways not seen elsewhere in more mature democracies. Decades later Madan Sabnavis, in 2013 could still see in that anarchy the capacity of public institutions to function democratically: “India remains a democracy despite our disenchantment with various parties and their opportunism.” Boisterousness and juvenile behavior in parliament; opportunism and disenchantment could not, would not mar the liberal imagination from holding onto an abiding faith in the tenacity of democracy to continue to define this republic’s destiny.
That abiding faith continued to be articulated in the popular media by an urban liberalism based on faith in consensus about what democracy entailed and meant. One, a belief in Progress, expressed at times as an impatience to move on towards that Utopia awaiting us through the agency of the Development program. Secondly, trust in the resilience of the public institutions created by our founding fathers to keep executive power in check. “Let’s Move On!” by keeping the faith in the Vikas model that had already been proven successful in one state; Don’t Look Back in anger or bitterness or fear; our watchdog institutions could be relied upon to subdue executive excesses and trespasses.
It did not take long for the most-read public liberals’ expectations to sour, curdling at the edges almost as soon as the new dispensation had occupied the corridors of executive power on the back of an electoral consensus about a corruption- free, development agenda-driven government, never mind the blood on its hands. Suddenly, the faith in the public institutions of the Legislature, of the judiciary to perform their watchdog duties was splintering. How could this be happening? Why were those institutions in which we had invested so much hope to do the right thing and control the nasty, brutish ambitions of elected representatives, faltering? Was Democracy failing? Was it being killed? Had it already been killed? Had this god failed?
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In this darkling scenario, Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane’s :To Kill A Democracy” appears like the worst confirmation of the liberal fears that the god of our secular faith is indeed dead, that it has succumbed to the mighty blows from despotic rulers; the temples of Solomon have crumbled At the outset the authors remind us that “India is confronted not only by an undeclared political emergency. For many decades, the country has been suffering an undeclared social emergency “ (28) So there you have it: a political emergency confirms our fears that despotic rule has come out of the shadows. But the authors point us to what they call the social substructure where a “social emergency” is creating its own havoc, quietly, and unnoticed or worse, ignored.
For the most part of the book, Chowdhury & Keane (henceforth C&K) unpack those two emergencies in great detail as evidence of what they term “democide.” That unravelling in the post-Independence decades of the social substructure is heart rending not the least because it trains the spotlight on how policy, regardless of the ideological bent of governments, failed the vast majority of Indians not just in overall social welfare terms, but in the more blatant disregard of inherited inequalities that were in fact further entrenched by policy.
“The pestilence hadn’t gutted India’s health system, it merely showed it up for what it was. A supposed democracy had for nearly three quarters of a century subjected its people to murderous inequity by not provisioning for basic universal healthcare. It had celebrated the equality of its people and their votes, even while treating their bodies as unequal. Now the show was over. It was payback time.” (44)
And tellingly:
“Too bad that a democracy that is animated by issues such as a uniform civil code for all religions had never invested any political energy in uniform healthcare.” (45)
Reading the sections on social substructures is illustrative and educative; but of what? You get a sense that the authors are really deconstructing for us the development paradigm introduced by Nehru with the First Five Year Plan. In retrospect, at least in C&K’s view, that discourse appears to have been a tragedy: after 2014 ‘vikas’ appears at the very least, a brutal farce. But the arc of that tragic Nehruvian venture was defined by the need to address growth with equity The critique is comprehensive but leaves the reader wondering what this has to do the death of democracy.
At the outset there is a framing that attempts to tie in the two emergencies thus:
“The drivers [of this social emergency] are many, but the net result is that social decline is ruining the spirit and substance of democratic politics. Slowly but surely, Indian democracy is experiencing social death.“ (28)
So when did Indian democracy have a social life to start with? The authors leave us no room for doubt that it never did. Democracy they say is not just “games of throne type of politics” and one needs to focus on social foundations that are being degraded. Political/public institutions can be durable only “if citizens ‘down below’ in everyday life live to the full its norms of equality, freedom, solidarity, and respect for social differences.” 29 And then the clincher:
“democracy is a form of social life and self-realization that feeds upon what Hindus call ātman, a shared sense that every living person is bound to others in breath and body, mind and soul, by the innermost essence of equality” 29-30
Who could argue with that definition, this vision of the good life? Surely, like all ideal types, it frames an essential quest of the human spirit in a world nasty brutish and short? Seeking empirical evidence of this definition is like trying to find heaven on earth. Democracy in this vision falls short all over; in fact one could wonder if it ever existed except in our dreams or the despot’s nightmares. All that one could say with some humility is that at various points in world history, humans tried and succeeded in some measure in their journey to that good life.
The authors’ definitional trope contains its own answer. Of course democracy has failed if we measure that failure by our inability to have reached that haloed destination. All that the authors tell us is that along with that social failure, the game of thrones too played out in favour of the despot. Democracy, in their view, had no chance to start with. Small wonder, as they quote BR Ambedkar ruing the failure of democracy as early as 1953 to the BBC.
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As you read along the narrative appears to move away from the popular-left sense of a great betrayal of the god since 2014. For C&K the temples of democracy had received their first knock as early as 1951 when Prime Minister Nehru who had barely assumed office had introduced the First Amendment to the Constitution.
The authors take note of Tripurdaman Singh’s researched “Sixteen Stormy Days: The Story of the First Amendment of the Constitution of India” to flag their point of departure for their delineation of how the fledgling magna carta of Indian democracy could be manipulated to serve the interests of executive power by snubbing the judiciary even if the author of that manipulation was none other than Nehru himself, aided by the author of the draft Constituion B.R.Ambedkar.
“The First Amendment—in contrast to its American counterpart—curbed free speech and expression, put limits on the right to property and equality, and allowed exemptions to the fundamental rights prohibiting discrimination on the basis of religion, race, and caste.” (226)
Without putting too fine a point on it, it can be argued that such comparisons are odious if only because the United States has hardly been a paragon of Constitutional proprieties given the history of not just the way the judiciary is appointed but by the very lack of fundamental rights for the Blacks and Native Americans who in fact were hardly recognized as people by the founding fathers of the oldest democracy in the world..
But step back a bit and reflect on the complexities inhering in Nehru-Ambedkar’s tweaks to a mint-fresh Constitution. The reality was far messier than could possibly be reflected in the text. The issue facing Nehru and Ambedkar was the dilemma of social reform and personal freedom, of social justice versus personal liberty. A society riven by severe inequalities, the product of ancient and colonial histories presented this dilemma in stark terms. In the push for the First Amendment, the dire need for social reform won out and, viewed retrospectively, proved salutary in its ripple effects of an empowerment of the victims of social and economic oppression.
But the Amendment did something more; it tilted the axis of agency towards the poor by pointing them in the direction of resistance and struggle. The reforms created possibilities, the first-level cognitive power among the dispossessed that they could affect change in their social condition; that they, as organized collective forces could push back domineering attempts by successive governments to dictate the agenda for them.
In effect, that First Amendment, expressive in its best-case scenario as a top-down reform agenda generated possibilities of a radicalisation of a people who had been led to believe that with Independence, they had achieved empowerment. Their new found consciousness and cognitive powers created pathways to a swrajya through dissent and struggle.
Think of the trade union struggles in cities, the peasant movements throughout rural India from the sixties on that gave teeth to the slogan of Land to the Tiller; organised struggles for better wages that forced state governments to pass legislations mandating minimum wages for rural labour.
The authors miss out on these historic transformations: the drive for reservations that empowered dalits into an educational system that, yes, was an inherited colonial legacy; under the circumstances, Ambedkar could not but just hope that reservation would help fill the learning deficit among the lowest castes and engender a social mobility denied them so far.
Perhaps the experiment failed in its objectives of creating growth with equitable distribution. Perhaps the idea of distributive justice as understood by the founding fathers and successive governments did not work out; we have C&K to thank for their meticulous chronicling of those failures in the social substructure. But that failure provided the idea of distributive justice a new home among the dispossessed.
Now the poor knew that the gifts of distributive justice would not fall like manna from the heavens, or in this case from the corridors of power, constituting thereby a cognitive leap into agency and autonomous yet collective action through dissent; they were becoming what Amartya Sen saw as the argumentative Indian.
Dissensus rather than consensus helped create the site, the arena for what Ramin Jehanbegloo described as publicness. This site of the Political may have many avatars, multiple agonistic spaces to paraphrase Chantal Mouffe but its hallmark is its capacity to confront the sites of politics as the arena of elective despotism if you will.
India’s post-Independence history provides manifold sites of such confrontation that do not preclude bargaining for privileges/benefits. What marks them out is their collective character, their refusal to accept or submit to what is perceived as injustice.
Splintered into so many spaces of dissent, together and discreetly, they form the basis for a radical interpretation of democracy that persists even as the site of the game-of-thrones type of politics inches towards what C&K term “elective despotism”. Consensus will not be hammered down throats; lynching, gaslighting dog wwhistles will not prevent the farmers from entering the history books with their long drawn sustained resistance to the farm laws. The Muslim women of Shaheen Bagh, came out in protest against the Citizenship laws; C&K acknowledge this in the latter part of the book.
But it was not just a protest; it was a birthing of a new hegemony, a radical democracy in which they portrayed signs of what agency meant for women traditionally not seen out in protest; of what Democracy, in the very words of C&K mean “a form of social life and self-realization…”
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C&K term India as the world’s largest failing democracy. From the viewpoint of New Delhi and the site of elective politics perhaps it is: never before has authoritarianism moved so close to despotism with a poligarchy (to adapt C&K’s term of poligarchs) so naked in its intent and ambition. And yet, dissent prevails. On the upper reaches of the Ganga a group of sants, Hindu priests at a place called Matri Sadan have been fasting, using Satyagraha methods to protest against the sand mining mafia.
In the last part of the book, C&K list a series of struggles that they aver hold out the hope that “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…” (290)
So democracy lives! After all the critique and a reverse telos of a slide into despotism evident from the First Amendment on, C&K find hope of rescue. But it comes too late, half-hearted and uncontextualised. The roster of protests do not appear part of, define the protracted and convoluted, one might say argumentative nature of democracy (Functionally anarchic?) striving towards that ideal of a social life of common good and elf-realization. That struggle, the striving, defines a radical democracy set into motion paradoxically after the First Amendment; 1947 got us freedom from the British but it did not get the dispossessed their due. For that they had to organise, not through petitions in the courts alone but through mass action, not by bowing to a consensus on development discourses but through dissent and the creation of sites of the Political signifying a pluralist agonistic democracy.
A pluralist democracy that can stay the blood-stained hands of despotism.
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Brilliant review.