Jaffrelot then notes a few important differences between Indira and Modi, notably the erosion of the over-representation of upper castes among members of Parliament and Legislative Assemblies; meanwhile, their percentage has risen in states the BJP won from 2014. In India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, for example, he finds that the new assembly has 44 per cent upper caste MLAs—12 per cent more than in 2012, and the highest share since 1980.
The similarities, and even the differences, lead Jaffrelot to conclude that India’s new populism relies on an ethno-religious definition of the nation. He notes that this is an ‘ethnic democracy’ model, a term formulated by Israeli social scientist Sammy Smooha to describe Israel’s trajectory, where even though the regime remains in tune with the democratic constitution in practice, minorities are marginalized.
I agree with Jaffrelot’s observations. But in my opinion, the fact that in free and democratic India, the styles of working of Indira and Modi (their forceful public policies and the unemotional way they deal with political opponents or those who fall from favour) have been accepted, or as Kakar says, ‘submitted to’, indicates a larger and more sinister issue—that democracy per se is not good enough. If, in our current governance system, there are not enough checks and balances to limit encroachments on freedom, it is time we reconsider the sort of governance system that works for us. The guarantee of collective freedom is not the only criterion for the viability of a governance system, but it is an important one. We cannot allow the bindings of the immense complexities we have ourselves created just to feed and shelter ourselves, to be the basis of another self-made trap in the form of a governance system that gives us bread but restricts our freedom.
Here, I would add that our tradition of public discourse—focused on domestic politics and politicians—is useful only if it serves in the immediate or even long term as an effective check on the government. Indeed a system of elections and voting is dependent on the people’s understanding of the problems to be addressed and their perception of what others seek. This is a perspective put forward by John Stuart Mill, who emphasized on seeing democracy as ‘government by discussion’, a phrase that was coined later by Walter Bagehot.25 In the context of India, then, is public discourse playing a major role in allowing us to freely express the changes we desire and expanding our collective understanding of the government our vote must elect? We certainly need to ask ourselves whether our habit of speaking about politics everywhere, from farms to buses, reading about it on eighteen out of twenty pages of the newspaper every day, and watching triple-deck bands of breaking news on television related to the politics of our land is helping us work with the government or other stakeholders to ensure our collective well-being.
This is an important question to ask because if the answer is ‘no’, there are two concerns: first, this is an enormous waste of public energy on a system that is of our own making, a case of ‘much ado about nothing’, and second, it raises the possibility of an information gap between the governors and the governed.
There is no point being ‘argumentative Indians’ if the information given out to the public is carefully censored. If the government seeks to influence the media, then what are we left to talk about except praising the government and giving subtle hints about our inconveniences. Even post-Independence nationalists in civil society could argue intelligently and mobilize different perspectives towards building institutions, because they had some sort of transparency on the goings-on and possibility of criticizing the powers that be if needed.
I worry that we are so caught up in the ‘form’ of democracy that we have forgotten that its essence is slipping.
What I mean by ‘form’ is our assumption that declaring ourselves a democracy is enough, or that having plenty of public discourse on politics is beneficial. We stop short of assessing if the so-called hardware and software of democracy—to use Guha’s terminology—are being respected.
The essence is the guarantee of our freedom. Ever since man decided to live in groups, we’ve asked ourselves—how do we live together in a way so that all of us can enjoy our freedom to immerse ourselves in our instinctual activities, and allow others to do the same as well? I reiterate this because we must remember that governance systems, old and new, were created to help us maintain that balance.
Now, if talking about governance has become our larger preoccupation without any productive use of that talk to effectively ensure our collective freedom or anything else we feel governance must provide we Indians have gone terribly off-track on our evolutionary ascent.References
BBC News. 2014. India’s dark history of sterilisation. 14 November. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-30040790.
BBC News. 2011. Egypt: Cairo’s Tahrir Square fills with protesters. 8 July.
Das, Gurcharan. 2002. India Unbound, first edition. (New York: Anchor Books).
Drèze, Jean, and Amartya Sen. 2013. An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Economist (US). 2014. What’s gone wrong with democracy. 1 March.
Guha, Ramachandra. 2016. Democrats and Dissenters (Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India).
Higgins, Andrew, and James Kanter. 2015. Leaders from Eurozone work into morning on Greek crisis. New York Times, 12 July.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), p. 9.
Jaffrelot, Christophe. 1996. The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s: Strategies of Identity-building, Implantation and mobilisation (with special reference to central India) (London: C. Hurst and Company Publishers).
Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2017. Populism, remixed. Indian Express, 24 March.
Kakar, Sudhir, and Katarina Kakar. 2007. The Indians: Portrait of a People (New Delhi: Penguin Books India), p. 21.
Rawls, John. 2001. The Law
