Opinion Sagarika Ghose writes: Democracy is not in India’s DNA

Yes, in 1977 Indira Gandhi was defeated in north India, but it could be argued that her losses here were mostly because of the enforced sterilisation campaign of 1976 and panic about the government’s drive to forcibly sterilise all adult males. Yet, in the same year as her 1977 defeat, Indira Gandhi made sensational headlines for rushing, on elephant back and through a thunderstorm, to the aid of the Dalit communities of Belchi. On her way back from Belchi, her former constituency Rae Bareli gave Indira such a rapturous welcome that The Guardian correspondent noted: “Indira’s former constituents have forgiven her in ten minutes flat.” Just a year after her defeat, in 1978, she won the Chikmagalur by-poll, and just three years after her downfall, Indira Gandhi returned to power with a two-thirds majority in 1980. India’s voters did not punish Indira Gandhi for long.

Today, across states, politicians at the Centre and the state level have adopted the authoritarian template and still win whopping victories. Are citizens forcing politicians to be more accountable or answer questions? Not really. The Prime Minister has remained silent on the loss of life and mass displacement in Manipur. There is hardly any outcry from citizens on this stony executive silence. Voters in Bengal kept voting for the Left Front for over three decades even though Bengal became a one party state and dissent against the Left was more or less muzzled. Nor did voters think less of CM Mamata Banerjee for arresting academics Ambikesh Mahapatra or Partho Sarathi Ray in 2012. Ahead of the UP 2022 Assembly polls, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath spoke of an “80 per cent vs 20 per cent” election, suggesting that in the prevailing electoral majoritarianism there is no room for those who don’t fit in. In Odisha, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has been elected Chief Minister for five consecutive terms but doesn’t hold press conferences. In India, neither the prime minister nor the chief ministers feel under any pressure to be accountable to the public.

Today, the helpless citizen is totally reliant on democratic institutions to protect her: The courts, the media, Parliament and an impartial law and order machinery. But when majoritarianism rules in politics, then we have illiberal majoritarian democracy not liberal parliamentary democracy. Today parliamentary debate has become redundant. Two significant legislations since 2014, the 2019 revocation of Article 370 and the 2020 farm laws, were passed without full-scale parliamentary debate. There have been 399 sedition cases filed since 2014. The media and the judiciary have also been infected by the culture of majoritarianism and are no match for a super-powerful political executive. Are there any serious citizen protests over the weakening of India’s democratic institutions? No, there are not. The protests against the farm laws in 2020-21 were powerful but confined to a single issue. The 2019-2020 anti CAA-NRC protests were similarly focused on the single issue of the citizenship law.

Today, there are daily and glaring instances of democracy faltering under executive overreach. Exactly a year ago, the Maharashtra government was toppled, MLAs broke away and were flown to hotels to force the collapse of the government. The research scholar Umar Khalid is still in prison, charged under UAPA for allegedly making provocative speeches during the 2020 Delhi riots. Last year the Assam police journeyed all the way to Gujarat to arrest Vadgam MLA Jignesh Mevani for an alleged tweet against the Prime Minister. Earlier this year the Congress’s Pawan Khera was deplaned and arrested by the Assam Police for comments against PM Narendra Modi. Has there been any significant citizen outcry against the breaking of democratic norms in all these instances? The short answer is no. In fact a Pew Research Survey in 2017 revealed the following: Support for a “strongman” unchecked by judiciary and Parliament is highest in India at 55 per cent. Almost half of the respondents, 53 per cent, said military rule would be a very good thing. We Indians don’t seem too bothered by India’s falling democracy ratings.

India has a long way to go before democracy and democratic norms become part of our DNA. The two big trends of our politics at the moment, populism and polarisation, further lessen the democratic impulse among citizens. Voters are happy to vote in “elected autocrats” if they shower freebies at election time. At the same time, public life is so acutely polarised that it is impossible to create consensus on what constitutes a danger to democracy. India’s democracy has been reduced to electoral majoritarianism which insulates leaders from being accountable to citizens.

The writer is a journalist and author. Her most recent book is Atal Bihari Vajpayee