Students of performing arts, appearing for their examination, are attacked mid-way. The university apparently asks the head of the department to go to the police station and file a complaint. The police arrest the complainant and other victims of the attack.
A public meeting intending to criticise the ruling party is announced. The office bearers of the ruling party openly issue a threat. The police, instead of acting against those issuing the threat, ask the speaker to not attend the meeting. Subsequently, an attack on the speaker’s vehicle takes place. Those issuing the threat remain unfettered.
These two “stories” could well fit into a dystopian novel or a Kafkaesque movie sequence. But it so happens that they actually unfolded in an Indian city. And there are many such stories happening across the country. What do they tell us?
Clearly, the immediate onus lies with the police. But is it only the old story of the police working as per the wishes of the ruling party? It might seem so on the surface, but scratch it and one will find that the police are themselves converted to a new way of thinking: That nobody should dare to do anything off-beat, that there should be self-censorship and that if the ruling party does not want a public meeting to take place, that wish should be respected. With elections round the corner, these two and similar stories also tell us something sinister: Even during the election campaign, it will be easy to ensure that the Opposition is not allowed to hold meetings. Grounds will be made unavailable, threats will be issued, a law and order situation will be created, and any criticism of leaders of the ruling party will be construed as hurting some sentiment somewhere.
For the past few years, many have pointed out the rising failure of institutions. These two stories represent the failure of the most crucial institution, the police. With the police openly siding with the ruling party and, in many cases, also enthusiastically adopting its political agenda — such as imparting bulldozer justice and encounter jurisprudence — the conflation between the ruling party and government machinery is becoming near-perfect. This should alarm us because the distinction between the ruling party and the administration is disappearing unrecognisably, mixing vigilante action with law enforcement.
That is where the deeper implications of the two stories need to be understood. In the first, everyone needed to preface their response by saying that certain symbols and deities are beyond criticism, or that everyone should exercise freedoms responsibly, etc. In the second case, either the past utterances of the speaker or his criticisms of a sidelined BJP leader were cited to argue that virulent criticism will not be tolerated.
It is indeed possible to make a case for the fact that the exercise of freedom of expression has to be a responsible act, not a reckless one. We often hear this from leaders and judges. There can be an unending legal and philosophical argument over this. But are we at all ready to engage in arguments? Both instances show that in the name of responsible exercise of freedoms, extra-judicial agencies take it upon themselves to stop or punish its “irresponsible” exercise. This is seldom recognised by the public or the police.
The central complicating factor in this entire saga is a complete lack of awareness of the inconsistency between democracy and such developments as narrated in the beginning. On the one hand, there is an intellectual tendency to imagine a distinction between liberal values such as freedom of expression (FoE) etc. and democratic politics as an unbridled expression of the will of the people. Such a distinction allows the argument that somehow liberal values are a Western import and popular expressions of likes and dislikes of the “public” constitute democracy. On the other hand, there is a widespread belief that the majority and its claims constitute the core of democracy. Thus, FoE and the baggage it operates with can be discarded as foreign or non-essential to democracy. Alternatively, they can be employed as instruments of the majority against the dissenting minority.
An additional dimension that requires careful consideration is the idea of the majority itself. As someone observing the journey of Indian majoritarianism over the past two decades, this writer has always been struck by how easily a claim to being the majority is accepted as an objective reality in political practice, judicial understanding and academic analyses. In reality, the politics of majoritarianism is about creating a sense of majority among a given cross-section of society, the law enforcement machinery and also among those who do not subscribe to the imagined majority.
It is in this sense that the two stories are educational. In the first, the public was not privy to exactly what hurt the sentiments of the majority but the allegation that the skit being performed insulted certain deities was enough to cast a web of negative sentiment against the victims of private violence. Even the police reportedly said that such insults are unacceptable. A majoritarian narrative was constructed and dutifully accepted by almost everyone. In the second instance too, nobody seems to be asking how a private group — a political party — can publicly threaten to disrupt a meeting. Once that crucial question is buried, discussion can veer toward whether the majority likes a particular speaker, toward the past record of the speaker or toward the criticism of some leader. Again, no informed debate has taken place about what exactly was the insulting criticism and how it can be confronted — because the noise and the capacity to disrupt or attack are seen as constituting the inclination of the majority.
As India approaches yet another national election, these two stories pose before us two uncomfortable questions which we as a society are unlikely to attend to: One, are we developing a template of democracy where elections will indeed take place but a systematic and administratively run trickery will unfold to ensure that free campaign doesn’t take place? Two, electoral majorities will endorse the rulers but more than that endorsement, will the manufactured anger and sentiments of “majorities” govern the norms that will undergird the regime?
If the answer to even one of these two questions happens to be in the affirmative, we are on the verge of a redefinition of democracy wherein dystopia passes off as democracy. The past 10 years have witnessed the socio-political groundwork for this redefinition. Gradually, we can feel the emergence of a new intellectual “echo system” that ratifies this. Now, we may experience the actual practice of this idea of majoritarian democracy — where differences, arguments and criticism are excluded from the idea of democracy.
The writer, based in Pune, taught political science
For the past few years, many have pointed out the rising failure of institutions. These two stories represent the failure of the most crucial institution, the police. 
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