Archive for July 2023
On India and democracy
The Journal of Democracy, which is published for the National Endowment for Democracy in the USA by Johns Hopkins University Press, has included in its July 2023 issue a symposium titled, ‘Is India still a democracy?’ The five articles together offer any observer of India a mostly balanced view of the current political state of the country. I found the group of articles (and the introductory editorial) compelling enough reading.
While not intending this posting to be a review of the journal’s symposium, I found some passages from each article worth unpacking and examining. The introductory editorial states that “India’s politics have been far more open, competitive, and democratic than one would expect from a country with its low level of socio-economic development and its high degree of ethnolinguistic diversity” and that “Narendra Modi, who since capturing the government in 2014” has “engaged in what is by some accounts a wholesale dismantling of the democratic institutions, norms, and practices that made India such a miracle.”
There are two assumptions these rest on. One is that India’s politics between 1977 (the end of the ‘Emergency’) and until 2014 (when the BJP-Modi first term began) was proceeding along acceptable lines. Two, that democratic institutions are crumbling since 2014. I think both these assumptions I cannot agree with, as a resident of India, and also because they are contradicted by the arguments made in two if not three of the papers in this symposium.
The editorial goes on state that what we are seeing is “a frontal assault on the world’s largest democracy, in the service of a majoritarian, ethnonationalist project that seeks to root out all forms of difference and impose a stultifying conformity on India’s hitherto-vibrant political and social fabric”. These are difficult terms to employ – majoritarian and ethnonationalist – and I daresay that the ordinary Indian voter would find them incomprehensible. Because the Indian voter, ever since the first general elections in 1951-52, has voted and still votes based on what he imagines has been promised.
This is the essentially immature character of representational democracy in India, which has not changed over 70 years, and whose immaturity has very cleverly been exploited by the BJP since 2014 (but also during the early 1990s), and equally cleverly by the Indian National Congress and various national and regional political parties and groupings throughout the decades of independence.
The first article is ‘Why India’s Democracy Is Dying’ by Maya Tudor, which could be read as her own examination of the question she asks: “So has India really departed the shores of democracy? And if so, is India’s transition into hybrid regime reversible? The answer to both questions is yes.”
A passage that helps the structure of her article is the one in which she enumerates five institutions that are central to a country’s designation as democratic. The five are: (1) elections for the chief executive and legislature (“first and most important”), (2) the presence of genuine political competition (“countries where individuals have the right to vote in elections, but where incumbents make it difficult for the opposition to organize are not generally considered democracies”), (3) governmental autonomy from other forces (“such as powerful military elites”) that can halt or wholly subvert democratic elections, (4) civil liberties, (5) executive checks (“what prevents an elected head of government from declaring l’état, c’est moi”).
An useful list. Employing it I see that No 2 has been missing or is ineffectual since 2014, my verdict for No 3 would be no, the government is not at all autonomous, not because of a military elite but certainly because of powerful indigenous corporate interests (veteran India-watchers will not have failed to note the meteoric rise in the fortunes of the corporate houses of Ambani and Adani since 2014).
No 4, civil liberties, deserves a symposium of its own, no doubt. It has become temptingly convenient to state that civil liberties in India has become more constrained in India since 2014 because of what the editors have described as “ethnonationalism”, but more experienced India-watchers can very well argue that the western concept of civil liberties could hardly take root in a country whose constitution reads as if it was written by a police constable, as Tripurdaman Singh so aptly points out in the second article.
No 5, executive checks, have certainly all but vanished. Perhaps the first stage of executive checks is operable in Parliament itself, through the Parliamentary standing committees, which both monitor and evaluate the workings of government. From my own experience of working with the central government machinery, I found that during the two terms of the UPA-Manmohan Singh government (2005-09 and 2009-14) the standing committees went about their work, conducted some very well known public consultations (such as the one of GM seed and crop, and another on a vaccination programme), and their reports carried weight. Over the last five or six years, I cannot recall a single such committee having completed its task in the manner it is expected to. But then, this has as much also to do with a key point made in Vineeta Yadav’s article.
‘The Authoritarian Roots of India’s Democracy’ by Tripurdaman Singh, the second article, flows from his argument that “Step after step has been and is being taken that tends toward … an inevitable authoritarianism interspersed with democracy”.
Singh explains that this authoritarianism interspersed with what I would put as the simulation of democratic motions “could not be done without securing the state that was to do it”. Secure the state from what and for whom? The ‘for whom’ part is more easily identified – “attempts to solve social questions through political action”. What this leads to, he says, is “invariably antithetical to freedom”, substantial restrictions of civic freedoms and the “licensing of coercive state power to redress socio-economic inequities (and arguably even to regulate social identities)”.
This regulation of identity is an important point, which I will try to expand upon in a later comment. But Singh makes a connection here that deserves a lot more attention than it usually gets, and that is the connection between socio-economic aspirations (more than inequities, I would say) and identity (but identity rather different from the identity associated with ethnonationalism).
“India’s constitution enables and underpins a vast armoury of coercive laws that it places at the executive’s disposal, and creates a political structure dedicated to promoting executive power”. This is I would say a most important insight. It cuts to the core of the question: who is India’s constitution for? He relates how Somnath Lahiri, a Communist member of the Constituent Assembly, described the fundamental-rights provisions as having “been framed from the point of view of a police constable” and goes on to relate how Lahiri taunted leaders of the Congress party in the Constituent Assembly, saying that they wanted even more power than the British government.
That is a taunt whose truth has echoed through 16 Lok Sabhas and into the 17th. “Every government, to the extent that it can command a substantive majority in the legislature, has ruthlessly used state force to push its agenda for social transformation and promote its version of state security. Yesterday it was Indira Gandhi, today it is Narendra Modi. Tomorrow may bring someone else.” In saying so, Singh buries the notion that apparently different political ideologies bring about different approaches to governance and therefore to the practice of democracy.
The third article by Sumit Ganguly is ‘Modi’s Undeclared Emergency’ wherein he says, “Beginning in 2019, however, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi started his second term in office with an overwhelming parliamentary majority, his government launched a steady attack on civil liberties, personal rights, and free speech across India without issuing any such proclamation or going through any constitutional channels, even for the sake of appearance”.
This assertion, while popular, has less substance than it seems to have. My point is not to dilute the real danger that Ganguly describes, but to draw attention to the fact that several well-known instances of social activists and their struggle with government is not representative of the general state of civil liberties and free speech in India. From 2013, when it became very likely that Modi was going to be the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, a raft of new online media publications began to be launched. These gained substantial readership and very shortly began to be quoted by western media.
Ganguly continues: “The government has not been content to limit its harassment to political opponents. It has also exploited legal means to harry any critics in the media, both domestic and foreign. Such incidents are too numerous to catalogue.” Indeed it has been well known in India that to fall afoul of the powerful and politically well-connected is to invite personal disaster and bankruptcy. This has been so throughout the career of Congress as the ruling party, of coalition formations, and since 2014 of the BJP. It is even more so in states, where regional political parties are even more brazen in attacking and silencing political (or any other kind of) opposition.
‘The Exaggerated Death of Indian Democracy’ is the fourth article. In this, author Rahul Verma brings out early what I think is an important point: “..a review of public-opinion surveys will give a clearer picture of how Indian citizens perceive their democracy to be functioning and whether they are worried about the country’s direction. Only then can we say whether Indian democracy is truly in peril”. What does the Indian voter think about, and how does he express what he thinks about using the means available? This, to paraphrase Verma, is what a significant amount of punditry on India often misses.
Verma writes about two such surveys. “More than 60 percent of Indians surveyed for Pew Research Center’s 2020 report on democratic values and satisfaction said they were satisfied with how democracy was working in the country” and “In 2022, the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and the CVoter Foundation conducted a survey of more than five-thousand Indians that asked respondents whether they thought India had become more or less democratic in the last ten years. Almost half the respondents (about 48 percent) said that the state of democracy in India has improved in the last decade, and only a quarter said that it has declined (28 percent)”.
These findings may appear counter-intuitive before the general thrust of this symposium, but they can perhaps be better explained by those within India compared to those outside it. What does the average Indian who votes think democracy is? India has during the 20th century (before 1947 too) been a land through which slogans reverberated. ‘Quit India’ was one, during the freedom movement. During the Indira years there was “garibi hatao” (remove poverty) and “jai jawan, jai kisan” (hail soldier, hail farmer), followed by the famous Twenty Point Programme, the forerunner of much larger, much more expensive and grandiose “development schemes” that later governments would invent.
This is what democracy came to mean for a large portion of the Indian citizenry, who wanted to put poverty behind them, find steady income, raise a standard of living that well into the late 1970s was precarious, and assure their children of education. The Indian apparatus known as democracy brought some of it and promised the rest. That’s what interested the voter far more than the five necessary institutions listed by Maya Tudor or the attacks on them outlined by Sumit Ganguly.
In ‘Why India’s Political Elites Are to Blame’ by Vineeta Yadav, the fifth article, I find a signal of how much for granted the elected representative has taken the voter’s gullibility. Yadav examines “Indian elites’ design and use of Parliament, the courts, and election commissions as well as state agencies”. She finds that “The quality of parliamentary representation worsened significantly after 2013… a positive long-term trend of rising numbers of lower-caste MPs and cabinet members reversed in 2014, while the share of MPs with criminal charges against them (from all parties) increased from 24 percent in 2004 to 43 percent in 2019”.
This alone reduces the weighty question upon which this symposium is based to a single trenchant question: what sort of democracy tolerates a doubling in the number of criminals elected? Little wonder then that “Parliament also continued its long-term decline as an institution of policy deliberation, legislation, and executive oversight. The total number of parliamentary sittings has decreased steadily, from a high of 464 days during 1980–84 (the first post-Emergency five-year-term government) to 332 in 2004–2009, 357 in 2009–14, and, finally, just 328 days in 2014–19. The current post-2019 parliament is on its way to having the shortest term of any yet.”
Well of course. Those who have business empires to run (whatever their legitimacy) can’t be bothered hanging around in Parliament, and even more so in state assemblies. This is how the “majority” of the BJP, as mentioned by Tripurdaman Singh, must be understood. India has long been burdened by what is usually described as the criminalisation of politics. I think it is fair to say that since 2014, with the active encouragement of all political parties and fronts and groupings, that the criminal character of Indian politics has deepened and widened.
These are a few views about salient points I found in the five articles. As a collection, I find that the authors have neglected two quite important aspects of India’s democracy. The first is the administrative cadres and their responsibilities. The functioning of governance and administrative machinery is as much an essential part of a democracy as are the observance of the integrity of its institutions. Yet this is the class – a super-class of administrators – which still wears the spurs and wields the crop just as the colonial administrators of the Raj era did.
Not a month goes by without a news report from somewhere in the country that describes a senior administrator grossly abusing his or her office, abusing and mistreating subordinates, harassing district citizens, writing out arbitrary “orders” that emerge not out of a responsive system but to favour interests, of administrators found with assets that far exceed what their salaries could have purchased. What we see from within the country therefore is the rapid criminalisation from the political realm of the administrative circles.
That also helps explain why executive oversight mechanisms exist on paper only. During the 1980-84 Parliament there were 56 short-notice questions and 85 discussions. During 2014-19 there were 8 and 5. Since 2014 the unacceptable practice of passing bills without a quorum has continued. The Union Budget, an annual exercise which even in the 1980s would occupy hours upon hours of discussion, cross-examination and wrangling, has for the last three years been passed almost no sooner than the budget proposals are presented.
The second is what I would call the monetisation of “vikas” (which is taken nowadays to mean ‘development’, but development of a myopic and material sort, for example, national highways, SEZs, new airports, new trains, more “multi-specialty hospitals”, in short anything that is large and visible nd new). It was present during the Congress-UPA terms (Manmohan Singh promoted it and P Chidambaram orchestrated its roll-out) and continued with greater vigour after 2014.
What the pursuit of “vikas” has done is to lock the Indian voter into a feudal relationship with a proximate politician and his enablers in administration. The escape from poverty took place in the last generation, or the one previous to the last. Now India has the world’s largest middle class (the population overtook that of China this year, according to the UN) and that middle class is being geared towards quickly accumulating and quickly spending.
Their concern with the efficacy and responsiveness of democratic institutions is a quantity which surveys are hard put to plumb. Horrific accidents and mishaps – such as three train collision in the state of Odisha in early June, which took the lives of more than 300 and severely injured hundreds more – are tut-tutted about and then the pursuit of “vikas” returns. The electorate pays little attention if at all any to the fact, concerning the railways, that over 100,000 posts in the Indian Railways (including those dedicated to safety) have been unfilled.
Looming above the debris on all sides is the cult of Modi. For several years now the Press Information Bureau, which is the cell in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting that distributes government press communiques, has showcased Modi (there really is no other way to put it) as the omnipotent ruler. Nine out of ten photographs it issues are of Modi, it has special sections for his speeches and his puerile, stilted ‘meet the people’ engagements. But the Modi cult infests states too. Everything from a new government school block in some out-of-the-way district to a new dockyard is inaugurated and “dedicated to the nation” by Modi.
Far more sinister is what has taken place behind the Modi silver screen. The Prime Minister’s Office was enlarged during 2014-19 and more so after 2019, and is today the size of a medium-sized ministry, with 52 senior officials (in the 1980s there was a single principal secretary). Its bloating is directly proportional to the entirely unconstitutional centralisation of power that the PMO now represents. Many line ministry decisions are taken here instead and, having been taken, are relayed to ministries as “prime minister’s orders”. On this basis, what India and Indians are experiencing since 2019 more visibly, is a dictatorial chief executive. The India of 2023 is ruled by edict, not at all by anything that can be considered democratic.
Shaktichakra, the wheel of energies 