Don’t blame democracy

These arguments can be combated by listing the virtues and achievements of Indian democracy. But an appeal to those achievements often impedes reflection by not acknowledging the crisis that the detractors of democracy describe. The crisis that they talk of is palpable enough. But to blame democracy for this is a bit like the man looking for his lost key under the lamp post not because he lost it there but because he sees light there. It is, in effect, to misidentify the source of these troubles and dangerously insinuate democracy’s guilt. But the fault lies elsewhere.

Indeed, to blame politics for most of it is to displace responsibility in a manner in which we collectively have become so adept. Two such sources stand out. The first is the dominance of the state in Indian society. For a society that traditionally had its centre in civil society rather than the state, the state became much too central in the way it affects the lives of individuals. The state rather than performing its important functions became a protector of a whole series of interests that were aligned with it to such a degree that the mediocrity and indiscipline and the lack of ability to provide basic goods that we associate with it were almost inevitable. The centrality of the state and the manner in which it became the conduit for channelling resources to particular groups raised the stakes of politics more than is decent for any society. This state flouted some basic principles of governance: first, that no state should act as if it is richer than the society it is situated and second, that it should attend to providing a basic general framework for its citizens to flourish rather than attempt to do their flourishing for them. The distortions the state produced had the effect of crowding out a whole series of mechanisms and incentive structures like the market that often elicit better performance.

This state was able to sustain itself so long as the range of interests that sought to capitalise on its resources was not broad enough to undermine it, and so long as some of the credibility it had inherited lasted. As soon as the juggernaut of interests became large enough to pull the state in different directions, it began to grind to a halt and its capacity to carry out its functions began to diminish. And as soon as its inherited credibility dissipated, the state attempted to create a security syndrome that often justified its violence. The result was first, that ghastly Emergency, and second, the various forms of identity-based violence that were the hallmark of the eighties and the nineties, which led to an unprecedented coarsening of political life. The threat to India’s survival in the last 20 years have come more from its authoritarian than its democratic moments.

The centrality of the state unfortunately also aligned with a hollowing out of the internal restraints of civil society. Arguably, the acutest writer on modernity, Alexis de Tocqueville, in ascertaining why 19th century France was prone to alternate between factionalism and despotism, argued that one of the preconditions for the success of any democracy was a background moral consensus, which when internalised could rein in the excess of individualism and ambition that modern society was prone to. Tocqueville thought that in instances where democracy was successful Christianity, predominantly Protestant, had been able to provide such a restraint and France’s woes stemmed from precisely the lack of credibility of its traditional Catholicism. It is not too difficult to make the case that the ethical core of the major religions that are present in India has been hollowed out to a degree to which they are unable to provide the kinds of moral restraints that any democracy needs. Their capacity to form consciences has been depleted by their alignment with crude identity concerns. Is it any accident that both the current forces of Hindutva, and fundamentalism associated with other religions revel in the kind of amoralism that characterises politics in general? It is not necessary that these internalised moral restraints be religious. But many of the traditions that could have provided such resources are now in an appalling state and there is nothing yet that can effectively replace them. Our politics is not amoral because of democracy but because the background features of some quarters of our society have made elementary distinctions between right and wrong otiose.

The polemics against democracy confuse democracy both with an overbearing state and a hollowing amoralism of civil society. For both of these, authoritarianism will be a cure worse than the disease.

The writer is with the Harvard University Committee on Degrees in Social Studies