This column usually attempts to look at one big news point in the preceding week with a wider political economy lens. The past week, though, has been unusually chaotic.
On June 10, Friday prayers were followed by protests by Muslims over disrespectful comments on Prophet Muhammad by two (now suspended/expelled) Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokespersons. The protests became violent in many places, including in Uttar Pradesh (UP). The Yogi Adityanath government responded with the controversial (but by now usual) bulldozers demolishing houses of accused action. The latest action of the UP administration has been used to argue, once again, that minorities are increasingly becoming a persecuted lot in India and democracy is under threat.
From Tuesday, Lutyens Delhi descended into chaos as Congress leaders and activists took to streets against the Enforcement Directorate (ED) questioning their leader Rahul Gandhi in the National Herald case. On June 15, visuals of the police entering into Congress headquarters and roughing up leaders and journalists were used to raise apprehensions that India was increasingly becoming an authoritarian State where the political opposition was being silenced and intimidated with the might of the State.
While these two events have dominated the news cycle around democratic space (or lack of it) in India, perhaps the most profound, even if satirical, statement on the state of democracy in the country came from Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut after the loss of his partys candidate in the Rajya Sabha elections held last week. If the EDs control is given to us for two days, then Devendra Fadnavis (former chief minister of the BJP) too will vote for us, Raut said.
Rauts radical candour he admitted to misusing a State agency to intimidate political opponents if given an opportunity is among the most honest admissions of the fact that the temptation to resort to undemocratic means is a secular vice in Indian polity. Kerala police banning anybody and everybody from wearing even a black mask or carrying a black umbrella during the programmes of communist chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan he has been facing protests over allegations of involvement in a scam is yet another example of the fact that abuse of State power to curb democratic rights is not the preserve of any party or ideology in India.
What is the larger takeaway of these examples? Are concerns around democracy to be dismissed as merely cynical and opportunistic overtures? Before resigning to such cynicism, another question needs to be asked. Is adherence to democracy, at least as it is perceived in the examples referred to above, seen as a virtue by the people at large, or at least even a significant majority? If this were indeed the case, authoritarian leaders would fear a backlash before deploying such measures.
If there is no democratic support for democratic politics, then is it a case of democracy subverting democracy?
There is growing evidence, such as from surveys conducted by the Pew Research Centre and CSDS Lokniti that social preference for authoritarian leaders is high in India.
To be sure, there is a growing concern that democracy might be losing traction not just in India, but across the world. There is a mounting perception that democracy is in retreat all over the world. Larry Diamond, perhaps the foremost authority on democracy worldwide, believes we have entered a period of democratic recession. International conditions are clearly less favourable for democracy today than they were in the years following the end of the Cold War, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write in their 2018 book How Democracies Die.
Levitsky and Ziblatt, to their credit, do not end the argument on a note of despair. They identify a concrete challenge for protecting American democracy, which is the subject the book primarily deals with. Few societies in history have managed to both multiracial and truly democratic. But there is precedentand hopeHistory shows that it is possible to reconcile democracy with diversity. This is the challenge we face, they write.
A lot of people in India, who see in the BJPs current political dominance a political strategy of othering of minorities, especially Muslims, will agree with the importance the authors place on reconciling democracy with diversity.
While there is a lot of merit in this statement, it does not tell us the complete story of the crisis of democracy in present times. Last weeks Muslim protests against disrespectful remarks on the Prophet are a good example. It is entirely likely that those who were protesting on the streets would completely agree with the BJP government if it announced bringing a draconian law against blasphemy in India. It can be said with a reasonable degree of confidence that such a proposal will have reasonable democratic appeal among Hindus as well.
To be sure, as Pratap Bahnu Mehta has pointed out correctly in his recent essay Hindu Nationalism: From Ethnic Identity to Authoritarian Repression, there already exists a version of the blasphemy law in India.
It has to be admitted that the politics of free speech was in part shaped by interpretations of Section 295 of the Indian Penal Code, which gives the state the power to ban speech that intentionally offends religion. This has functioned as a version of blasphemy law in India It encourages political mobilization on behalf of censorship, since you know there is already an acceptance of the principle, and you can expect the government to respond. In a society comprised of different group identities, this identity has a competitive dynamic. If you have three religious communities X, Y and Z, and if a piece of art or novel offensive to X is censored, Y and Z will also often measure their recognition of their community identity by asserting similar claims, Mehta writes.
Will this kind of bipartisan consensus or competition on asserting the right to stifle free speech strengthen democracy in India?
Another example which underlines the often underappreciated tension between democracy and democratic appeal are the large-scale protests which unfolded in Kerala after the Supreme Court allowed women of all age-groups to enter the Sabarimala shrine, discontinuing the traditional practice of not allowing women of menstruating age to enter the temple.
The protests were supported not just by the BJP but also the Congress, a self-proclaimed secular party. While the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M)-led Kerala government initially tried to uphold the courts decision, it suffered a huge political backlash in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and made a tactical retreat on the issue after the Supreme Court (technically) stayed its original decision in 2019. Its victory in the 2021 assembly elections vindicated its reneging on this issue.
What is one to make such seemingly irreconcilable contradictions between democratic appeal and democracy?
A book by American economist Arnold Kling offers an interesting take on this issue. In The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divide, Kling argues that political discussion in the US has increasingly become obstinate and intolerant of opposing viewpoints rather than being deliberative. This, Kling argues, is largely a result of what he describes as motivated reasoning around three tribal coalitions progressive, conservative and libertarian.
All these coalitions or political languages, as Kling calls them, see things around a central binary. For a progressive, the highest virtue is to be on the side of the oppressed, and the worst sin is to be aligned with the oppressor. For a conservative, the highest virtue is to be on the side of civilizing institutions, and the worst sin is to be aligned with those who would tear down those institutions and thereby promote barbarism. For a libertarian, the highest virtue is to be on the side of individual choice, and the worst sin is to be aligned with expanding the scope of government, he writes.
While the book uses mainly American examples, it is not very difficult to situate the main argument in an Indian context. The Indian Left for example, has always focused on a progressive narrative by highlighting the difference between haves and have-nots. However, its standpoints on religion and property rights have been seen as an anathema by conservatives and libertarians.
Similarly, the Hindu Right, of which the BJP is the biggest political representative, often argues from a conservative position that it is on a quest to restore Indias ancient cultural prowess to make it into a super-power or Vishwaguru and this project is not possible without destroying the left-liberal political-intellectual eco-system which has mechanically imposed ill-suited ideas from the West on India.
Each tribal coalition, Kling argues in his book, thanks to its blinkered political vision, cannot even understand the political language in which the other coalition is speaking and adopts a process of fast political thinking as opposed to a more deliberative slow political thinking to quickly disagree with the other sides positions.
Once again, Indian examples are not very difficult to find. It is a common tendency to see the BJPs electoral rise as a reflection of growing bigotry among Indias Hindus just as every defeat of the BJP is attributed to a victory of secularism in India.
The three languages of politics play a prominent role in motivated reasoning, which narrows our minds, producing friction, anger, and frustration with those with whom we disagree. The three languages let us reach closure too readily, so that we lose sight of the ambiguity that is often present in difficult political issues. We can reason more constructively by remaining aware of the languages of politics. Being aware of your own language can allow you to recognize when you are likely to be overly generous in granting credence to those who provide arguments expressed in that language. Being aware of other languages can give you better insight into how issues might appear to those with whom you disagree, Kling writes.
As is obvious, Klings framework gives an insight into why democratic appeal and the cause of democracy can often be in conflict in a society. This is more likely to be the case when the electorate consists of significant sections who subscribe to each of the political languages which Kling describes.
To be sure, Kling himself argues that just acknowledging the fact that people might have different filters to view politics does not necessarily guarantee a political consensus. With language, there is hope that you can translate what you want to say in your language into the language that someone else understands. Unfortunately, there is no one-for-one translation that takes you from a given political language to another. I believe that most difficult political issues are sufficiently complex that they cannot be understood fully using just one heuristic, the book says.
The Indian case, obviously is far more complex than the American case discussed by Kling, as there are likely to be competing takes on the central binary even within a political language group. For example, whether class or caste should be treated as the basic fault line in the oppressor-oppressed category has been a big debate in India. Similarly, the left-liberal section champions a so-called composite culture of religious harmony in India as against claims of a glorious Hindu civilisation by the BJP and its fellow travellers. Both these groups claim to fighting a political battle to preserve Indian civilisation.
The limitations of such a framework notwithstanding, Indian politics will be inching closer to democracy and cultivating democratic appeal for it, if it made an effort to appreciate the importance of looking at political issues from more than one lens. Whether or not this will happen will largely depend on the quality of discussion within political parties and the amount of freedom (or lack of it) which political leaders have to articulate different viewpoints vis--vis that of powerful leaders or in many cases just one supreme leader within a political parties. Of course, the larger question about whether or not individual politicians are actually committed to democracy in spirit or are just using it to grab power will always remain.
The views expressed are personal
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Terms of Trade | Does democracy have a democratic appeal in India? - Hindustan Times