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An anvil, of course, is a block of iron, on whose flat top a piece of metal is hammered and battered to give it the desired shape and give it strength. Anvils went out of fashion along with the old blacksmiths bellows and forge, in which fire, muscle and sweat worked together to let strength work tools from metal. But a metaphorical anvil has cropped up practically in every place in India and, on it, democracy is being bashed and battered but bearing up and, it is to be hoped, would emerge stronger for the experience.

At no point in Indias history as an independent nation has democracy been the central theme of widespread popular protest, not even during the Emergency. Yes, people have mobilised themselves in large numbers, on several occasions, for specific causes: for or against reservations, to rebel against governance failure, particularly on holding the price line, against corruption, against the rape of middle class women, against disrespect to a language, to celebrate the triumph of a popular leader, to mourn the death of another, and so on. But todays protests are about the state and citizenship, peoples rights and their ability to assert them against state power. Never before has political mobilisation has been on matters that form the core of democracy.

This is a great development.

Women, young people and the minorities are in the forefront of these protests. Much as the ruling party would like to attribute the protests to the evil machinations of the Opposition, the reality is that a spontaneous current of political awakening, stirred by seeming state contempt for popular opinion and the basic ethos of the Constitution, has been surging across India, among people of all classes and ages, in country and town, bringing people out on to the street, marching, shouting slogans and reiterating the Preamble to the Constitution, in defence of the idea of India as a multicultural nation in which everyone has the right to live with dignity.

In India, political parties have paid lip service to secularism while practising patronage politics. Instead of negotiating the meaning of the secular and the democratic, to re-forge ties amongst communities and within them, parties have chosen to present themselves as protectors of minorities, who would enable them to lead their lives as before, complete with some customs that have little in common with democracy. Such claims to patronage are not just false but undermine minority rights as well.

The ability of minorities to live with security and dignity in Independent India is grounded in liberal democracy and the Constitutional guarantees of freedom of conscience and minority rights, not patronage. The weaker the democratic framework, the weaker also minority rights. It is in strengthening democracy that all subaltern groups have to seek their emancipation not in this party or that leader. A party would be relevant to the extant it champions strengthening democracy.

The premium the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Bill, the National Population Register and the National Register of Indian Citizens have placed on the Constitution shows that this awareness is seeping in. The coming together of two relatively oppressed groups, Dalits and Muslims, in these protests is yet more proof of this new subaltern solidarity for democracy.

Women are yet to join this fight for democracy as those who strengthen the fight for minority rights by fighting for their own rights. Women in India have made progress, of sorts, from the normative status assigned to them in tradition, of being eligible to be beaten, along with dhol, gawar, shudra and pashu (the drum, the rustic idiot, a member of the caste of servitude and animals), yet not recognised as human beings in their own right. The present outcry for their safety and security is the bleating of mens insecurity of their own honour being tarnished by the violation of their women. The normative order that denies women freedom, especially freedom of sexual choice, also reduces them, as a corollary, to objects of desire that need be contained only when such objects are located within coordinates of space and time that are considered decent. For women to gain full equality in access to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, deepening of democracy is the only answer.

Yes, India has acquired the ability to feed itself, it has stayed together as a nation, retained relative strategic autonomy and alleviated poverty and illiteracy. Yet, democracy remains more form than substance, in most parts of the country. Periodic elections are only a means or a symptom, not the totality of democracy. However, on the 71st anniversary of the Republic, substantive democracy is receiving a booster shot.

Jai Hind.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Democracy on the anvil on Republic Day - Economic Times