On the seventeenth day of Egypt’s leaderless uprising, Mubarak stepped down with just a simple televised announcement late in the evening.
We marched out on to the streets, everyone headed for Tahrir. There, we climbed on to the military tanks and exchanged roses with the army. Everyone hugged each other and cried, proud of the achievement. No historian or academic could have explained to me even an iota of what it felt like to have been a part of history.
The jubilation was followed by the realization that now there was no one to take charge of the country, and no plan in place either to set up a government based on equal representation.
As the Egyptians set about their new way of life without Mubarak at the helm, they were woefully disillusioned. The wealth from his bank accounts was not distributed among the people, as they had naively expected. Even months after he was brought down, they were jobless. Many were dealing with the loss of family members—at least 846 people died and 6000 were injured during the seventeen days of the uprising.8 After it ended, the spies on the streets were gone, along with the public security that came along with them. It was not uncommon to hear Egyptians confess that things under Mubarak were possibly better.
Governance in the country was a mess. The revolution resulted in the only existing organized political entity, the Muslim Brotherhood, briefly coming to power before the military took over in 2013. Since then, there has been hardly any respite from violence, and no progress has been made towards setting up a fair and effective governance system. The dictator has fallen, but whither democracy? Egypt’s people today are neither happier nor freer.
Even in the West, it is time that we check our assumptions and reflection on the future of democracy. The American presidential election of 2016 was about making a forced choice between the country’s two most ‘disliked contestants’,9 and the European elite that same year put immense pressure on elected leaders in Greece who got in the way of fiscal orthodoxy.10
When India gained freedom, there were leaders who organized us into a democracy. Nehru was the chief architect, and he had a bevy of intellectuals to help him and even oppose and argue with him on various operational and fundamental issues. One such brilliant conversation stands out for me. I find it fascinating on two accounts. One, the existence of equally passionate yet opposing views on the relevance and indeed need of democracy in India, and two, the fact that it makes us think about the sort of intellectual deliberations that must have taken place at that time, deliberations that we cannot imagine among today’s political leaders in India.
This delectable conversation is in the form of personal letters between Nehru and the social reformer Jayaprakash Narayan, found by historian Ramachandra Guha in the manuscripts of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi.11
In his letters, Narayan asks Nehru to reconsider the sort of democracy he is establishing in India. He asks the prime minister to look beyond the party system. Narayan flags the need for a focused opposition to the ruling party, and suggests that democracy can be deepened by the energies of individuals and groups who are not themselves politicians.
Nehru, in response, warns of the disruptive dangers of an excess of identity politics, and presents a qualified defence of parliamentary democracy, saying it is not the perfect system of governance, but at least less harmful than the alternatives. He admits that democracy is ‘full of faults’, but had been adopted in India because ‘in the balance, it was better than the other possible courses. Like any other system of governance, parliamentary democracy depended on the quality of the human beings who staffed it.’
‘I do not think that the present system is a failure,’ wrote Nehru to Narayan, ‘though it may fail in the future for all I know. If it fails, it will not fail because the system in the theory is bad, but because we could not live up to it. Anyhow what is the alternative you suggest?’
Indeed, what is the alternative to democracy?
Certainly not autocracy.
As obvious as it might seem, it is important to reiterate this. Four decades after the Emergency was announced in India in 1975, by then-President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed upon the advice of his prime minister, Indira Gandhi, there are still people in the country who suggest that a strong, even dictatorial, rule is the only way to achieve results in India and make economic progress. They feel that nothing will ever work unless there is someone at the helm to force things down our throats. We have not learnt our lesson, and are still mesmerized by authority. As I wrote in the previous essay, we quickly forget our discomfort with following government orders that make no sense for our individual or collective well-being.
Why is it that many Indians feel that being controlled and spoken down to by a strong political authority is a sign that all is well? The eminent psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar ascribes this to ‘an unconscious tendency to “submit” to an idealized omnipotent figure, both in the inner world of fantasy and in the outside world of making a living; the lifelong search for someone, a charismatic leader or a guru, who will provide mentorship and a guiding world-view, thereby restoring intimacy and authority to individual life.’12
As Kakar13 puts it, this unconscious tendency to seek an authoritative leader appears even more sadistic when we realize that our human instinct is to roam free. Indeed, the basis of India’s great struggle against the British was the longing for freedom. In fact, I find that in any modern ‘free’ nation, to defend freedom just because it is prescribed in our Constitution and laws—which are both of our own making—is an oxymoron. Instead, I believe that freedom must be guaranteed, first
