Opinion Vandita Mishra writes: Not just about the Emergency

Many of the challenges are the same, and far too many have also been routinised — the weaponisation of laws to shrink spaces for free expression and dissent, a politics of labelling, suspicion and distrust, attempts by the Executive to undermine and subdue institutions like Media and the Court, the demonisation of the Opposition. Other challenges are new, because in its long journey, democracy today stands at a different milestone.

At that time, when India’s democracy was less than 30 years old, Emergency was the result of, and it contributed to, a waning of brightness — it capped a draining of the lingering idealism of a newly independent nation which had pledged to be a representative democracy that abides by rules of the game laid down in the wise and layered Constitution it gave itself. The Constitution set up a mosaic of monitory institutions to scrutinise power, enforce accountability, enable checks and balances — political theorist John Keane has christened this new historical form of democracy, in the post 1945 era, as “monitory democracy”.

Today, 50 years after the Emergency, India’s monitory democracy is showing signs of wear and tear. It is also dealing with the added pressures of the age of communicative abundance. In a global context, Keane writes that “historical comparisons show that the combination of monitory democracy and communicative abundance is without precedent. It produces permanent flux, an unending restlessness driven by complex combinations of different interacting players and institutions, permanently pushing and pulling, heaving and straining, sometimes working together, at other times in opposition to one another…” Even as this combination makes democracy more exciting and viral, it also has corrosive effects. It breeds cynicism, disaffection and distrust vis a vis Parliaments and parties, politicians and governing institutions. Parliamentary democracy is being constantly and publicly “wrong-footed”, says Keane, there is “decay amidst abundance”.

In India and elsewhere, this fraught juncture is now the site of the rise of a populist politics. “We the people” is giving way to “Me the people”, amid a relentless search for the Other/Enemy within, and the winner takes all. This populist moment seizes on the accumulated disillusions as much as it speaks to rising aspirations. It frames an agenda of anti-elitism but it also propagates anti-pluralism.

It should not be surprising, then, that the week in which the Emergency was remembered and revisited, 50 years on, has ended with a disturbingly anti-pluralist political clamour. It seems to give the lie to the self-righteous lip service paid to democracy by the BJP-led establishment over the last few days.

An RSS general secretary set the ball rolling, asking for a reconsideration of whether the words “socialist” and “secular”, added to the Constitution’s Preamble by the Indira Gandhi government during the Emergency, should be retained. He was joined by the Vice President, who said that the change to the Preamble was a “sacrilege to the spirit of sanatan” and the words were “nasoor”, a festering wound. A BJP chief minister chimed in: “Socialism” and “secularism” are Western concepts, and have no place in Indian civilisation, he said. Two Union ministers added to the chorus the weight of their office.

This, when successive post-Emergency regimes have not reversed the Preamble’s amendment even as other changes have been rolled back, and it has been upheld by the Supreme Court. Secularism was described as a “basic feature” in the 13-judge bench Kesavananda Bharati ruling even before the Emergency-era amendment, while the non-justiciable Directive Principles of State Policy have been invoked to recognise “socialism” as an ideal for those who framed a Constitution for a society of great inequalities.

It is evident, however, that the BJP’s real aversion is not to “socialist” — in fact, on the broad direction of the economy, despite their other differences, all post-liberalisation governments have resembled each other, more or less. This choreographed controversy is about “secular”.

Now in its third term, the Narendra Modi government has presided over the steady challenging of the constitutional commitment to secularism, defined in India as the equal respect for all religions by the state. On the Modi government’s watch has been a spreading Hindu-isation of institutions and public spaces. The PM’s conduct of the rituals of consecration of the Ram Temple at Ayodhya in January 2024 marked a turning point. It underlined the message that, amid growing polarisation, the religion of the majority community would now be a visible marker of the life of a diverse and multi-religious nation, demanding deference, if not prostration, from all.

At the end of a week like this one, then, there is a question: Who is responsible for ensuring that the Emergency does not come again? Who is expected to take on the burden of an anti-Emergency politics that will guard against attempts to chip away at pluralism, and democracy?

In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, “democracy-in-danger” and “Constitution-under-siege” became electoral slogans for the first time in recent history — while the outcome saw a whittling down of the BJP government’s numbers, it was certainly no mandate for the Opposition. Does that mean that the people don’t worry, or don’t worry enough, about the spectre of diminishing democracy?

There could be many answers to that question. It is possible that for a people cynical about power politics, democracy’s worrying predicament is not a trumping argument – because they see no good guys out there. For the optimistic and aspirational, on the other hand, the system looks strong and self-correcting enough, it does not require their ministrations. And when voters feel disrespected, or “dis-esteemed”, in a system with wobbly lines of accountability, they are more likely to grant governments the licence to rule arbitrarily, and to look for strongmen with steel fists.

Or it could simply be that for all the talk about democracy-in-danger, democracy never really was on the election menu, because the Opposition was unable to make a case that was vivid enough or eloquent.

Whatever be the real story of the 2024 Lok Sabha election and whichever the reading of its outcome, the onus is not, it should not be, on the vulnerable voter. Protecting democracy’s letter and spirit is also a task too large to be left to the Opposition alone — it must not be, and must not be seen to be, a partisan project. The work of keeping democracy whole requires influential institutions and powerful stakeholders to take ownership, instead of putting it only on the Opposition or passing the buck to “the people”.

Till next week,
Vandita