[A Democracy Which Speaks With One
Voice, Which Elevates Citizen Duties Over Citizen Rights, Which Privileges
Obedience Over Freedom, Which Uses Fear To Instil Ideological Uniformity, Which
Weakens Checks On Executive Power, Is A Contradiction In Terms.]
The recent military coup in Myanmar
was an aberration for contemporary times, as was the coup in Thailand in 2014
and in Pakistan in 1999. Such coups were quite common in the 1960s and 1970s.
More prevalent now is what scholars are calling “democratic backsliding”, a new
concept to depict democratic erosion led by elected politicians, often quite
legally. “Many government efforts to subvert democracy”, write Levitsky and
Ziblatt, “are legal in the sense that they are approved by the legislatures or
accepted by the courts”. They use copious examples from Latin America and
Europe, their respective areas of expertise, and the damage done by Donald
Trump to the US, the land of their birth and residence. What is legal, they
emphasise, is not necessarily democratic. Undemocratic legislation can be
passed, or existing laws manipulated to undermine democracy.
Levitsky and Ziblatt are now
clearly relevant to India. India’s democracy is backsliding, not because of the
generals and soldiers, but because elected politicians are subverting
democracy. Very soon, two of the most widely read annual democracy reports — by
America’s Freedom House and Sweden’s V-Dem Institute — will be published. They
had argued last year that India was on the verge of losing its democratic
status. Let us see whether this year’s reports call India undemocratic, or only
“partly free”.
Partisans of Delhi’s ruling regime
will vociferously decry these formulations, contending that the BJP government was elected
by the people, and it is only enacting what it was voted for. They will say
that parliament has approved BJP’s legislation, from Kashmir to citizenship
amendment, from preventive detention to farm reforms. Therein lies the
fundamental conceptual confusion.
For democratic theory, elections
are necessary, but not sufficient. Elections alone cannot be equated with
democracy. Democracy is measured by a composite index. The overall judgement
depends partly on elections, and partly on what the elected governments do
between elections.
Democratic theory lays out two
kinds of post-election requirements: One pertains to institutional constraints
on the executive, another to civil liberties. Is the power of the executive
checked by the legislature and/or judiciary? Are citizens free to speak? Are
they free to organise and protest? And after the anti-Jewish horrors of
Germany’s “Nazi democracy” (1933-1945), an inescapable question also is: Are
the minorities protected from majoritarian fury?
Democratic backsliding in India is
especially concerning because India’s democracy, according to most leading
scholars, was exceptional. Decades of research showed that democracies could
indeed be established at low levels of income, but they tended to survive
generally at high levels of income. Until recently, barring the exception of
1975-77, India had spectacularly defied this statistically valid theorisation.
Only one developing country, Costa Rica, has a better democratic record. But
Costa Rica is infinitely smaller and six times richer than India. Robert Dahl,
the world’s leading democratic theorist after the Second World War, called
India the greatest contemporary exception to democratic theory.
India’s democratic exceptionalism
is now withering away. Democracies do not charge peaceful protestors with
sedition, do not have religious exclusionary principles for citizenship, do not
curb press freedoms by intimidating dissenting journalists and newspapers, do
not attack universities and students for ideological non-conformity, do not
browbeat artists and writers for disagreement, do not equate adversaries with
enemies, do not celebrate lynch mobs, and do not cultivate judicial servility.
A democracy which speaks with one voice, which elevates citizen duties over
citizen rights, which privileges obedience over freedom, which uses fear to
instil ideological uniformity, which weakens checks on executive power, is a
contradiction in terms. For democratic theorists, these are all signs of
creeping authoritarianism, not of democratic deepening. Elections alone cannot
define what it means to be democratic.
The biggest impact of these
developments is, of course, internal. Those opposed to the ruling regime are
frequent targets of attack — political, legal, physical, financial. But the
impact is also external. Prime Minister Modi has often claimed that since his
rise to power, India has been accorded greater respect in the world. Even if
that was true in his first term, the perceptions are now changing.
The international standing of nations
is normally a combination of the strategic, the economic and the political.
Compared to China, whose GDP is now five times as large as India’s, India
exercises lesser economic power internationally, and the expected economic
invigoration after 2014 is yet to occur. Democracy was unquestionably one of
India’s biggest international assets.
In purely strategic terms, given
the rising anti-China chorus in world capitals, India’s significance will no
doubt remain, but politics may now compete with geopolitics. Because of China,
India will certainly be embraced as a partner, but the embrace will not be
ardent or wholehearted if its democratic backsliding continues. President Biden
can’t define foreign policy in non-Trumpian ways, as he repeatedly claims he wants
to, if democracy and human rights are completely ignored, as they were under
Trump.
In its annual democracy report last
year, Freedom House had put the matter thus: “Almost since the turn of the
century, the United States and its allies have courted India as a potential
strategic partner and democratic counterweight to China in the Indo-Pacific
region. However, the Indian government’s alarming departures from democratic
norms under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata
Party … could blur the values-based distinction between Beijing and
New Delhi. While India … held successful elections last spring, the BJP has
distanced itself from the country’s founding commitment to pluralism and
individual rights, without which democracy cannot long survive.”
Here, then, is the key question:
Will India’s democracy decline further? India today is closer to Indira
Gandhi’s 1975-77 Emergency than ever before. There are, of course, two critical
differences. Beyond Kashmir, there has been no mass arrest of politicians, and
many more state governments are run by political parties that do not rule in
Delhi. If these two variables also change, India’s democracy will be well and
truly dead.