Let us believe the official fiction. Let us pretend that the five-day special Parliament session has indeed been called to discuss “Parliamentary Journey of 75 Years starting from Samvidhan Sabha – Achievements, Experiences, Memories and Learning”. And now that we are on a fantasy trip, let us also imagine that our worthy parliamentarians are all wise men and women engaged in a collective pursuit of truth.
So, what indeed is the story of the 75-year journey of parliamentary democracy in India? I reckon we might hear three different stories in this session. All of them would be false and seriously misleading. We need to tell ourselves a more truthful and enabling story. After all, human beings are story-telling animals. Our stories make us who we are. Stories can saddle us with an unbearable burden of the past or gift us a better future.
Three untrue stories
Let us hear the first story of the much-delayed but inevitable recent fruition of democracy. This bizarre and brazen version could well be the dominant story that you get to hear in this session. Bharat, the mother of democracy, was deluded by a polluted Western version practised by its Anglicised elite for a few decades. This alien and limited opening was used by the people to assert their voice, their culture. With the dawn of true democracy in 2014, the democratic majority finally prevailed. Bharat finally had its madhur milan with destiny – a new name, a new vision, and a new sansad building.
We can also anticipate two counter-narratives opposing this official history during this session. The first could be an exact mirror image: A story of the rise and rise of Indian democracy until it met a fatal accident in 2014. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s sudden rise to power was an authoritarian coup in the name of democracy. Though they do not put it so bluntly, it is amazing to see how easily our elite buys into this story of “Kya se kya ho gaya”.
The second counter-narrative, more popular among the radical circles, is the story of the inevitable decline and fall of democracy. In this reading, democracy was always a fragile achievement, if not a pretence. Those who tell this story offer different reasons for the inevitable collapse. It could be the persistence of an undemocratic culture. Or the hierarchical caste system. Or the Indian model of capitalism. But they all agree that the bubble was bound to burst.
The problem with all these stories is not just that they are untrue. It is that all of these are very poor guides for action. At this critical juncture in our history, these stories invite us to just sit back — either rub our hands in glee or wring them in despair.
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Indian democracy survived worse
All these three stories fail to understand both the successes and the failures of Indian democracy. Indian democracy has defied the theory that we inherited from the West. The received understanding of the preconditions of democracy suggested that it required some degree of affluence and widespread literacy. If so, India should never have been a democracy in the first place. The received model insisted that democracy requires an oscillation of power within a multiparty competitive framework. If so, the founding decades of Indian democracy that were dominated by what was called the “Congress system” could not be characterised as democratic. If we believe the received European notion that the cultural boundaries of a nation and political boundaries of a State must coincide, then India, with its deep diversities, should never have survived beyond its first decade. If we believe that robust institutions are necessary for a democracy, then India should not have survived the onslaught of Emergency. And once democracy became “the only game in town” and was buttressed by an unprecedented rate of economic growth, Indian democracy should not have faced the crisis it faces today.
Simple stories of democracy do not tell us why Indian democracy did not collapse in the face of serious challenges. It could have collapsed in the mid-1960s, in the aftermath of the India-China war, or at the death of Jawaharlal Nehru and the subsequent crises that included serial famines. Democratic enterprise had collapsed during the Emergency but for Indira Gandhi’s overweening self-confidence and misjudgement that led to the election in 1977. The intersection of Mandal and Mandir, with the sudden collapse of the Congress and the economic crisis, all around 1990, was another possible challenge. Compared to all these moments, 2014 was the most improbable juncture for democratic collapse.
Call it ‘democracy capture’
So, let us imagine that our Parliament arrives at a different, more layered but truer story of what has happened to our democracy. The current crisis may be described as “democracy capture”. To call it “democracy capture”, rather than, say, “authoritarian capture of democracy” or merely “crisis of democracy”, is to remember that democracy is both the object and the subject of this capture. The apparatus being seized is democracy, a constitutionally sanctified and ideologically legitimised form of governance. The means being deployed are also democratic, at least seemingly so — by way of an electoral majority attained in “free and fair” elections. It is to remind us that the formal procedures of democracy have been used to subvert the substance of democracy.
This subversion is not just an accident in an otherwise well-planned journey. Nor is it the endpoint in the inevitable decline and fall of Indian democracy. The conditions for this capture were shaped by our post-Independence history, yet it was not inevitable. It was indeed contingent but was not a fluke or merely an accident. Modi did what political leaders often do: Seize upon a very difficult chance and convert it into a personal triumph. At the same time, this democracy capture could not have happened without some structural weaknesses within the Indian democratic enterprise.
Let us imagine that a new wisdom dawns upon our parliamentarians in the new building, thanks to a perfect vastu. Parliament might say: Our journey of the last 75 years is our own. We are not reliving Europe’s biography or its autobiography. Nor have we resumed the unfinished journey of the ancient Indian republics. Our democratic enterprise was an open-ended journey with no predetermined starting point, route, or destination. We were to be guided by the values laid out in the Constitution, which itself was a distilled wisdom of our civilisational heritage. In this journey, we cleared the path as we moved along. We manoeuvred many dangerous turns and allowed complacency to set in. And we skid on a much less slippery slope. We let ourselves down. We also let our country down. We accept the responsibility of allowing our democracy to be captured. We, the people of India, resolve to recover the sovereign, socialist, secular, and democratic republic of India.
Sounds incredulous? Not to me. I have just seen Jawan and am learning to read the truth of fantasies.
(Some of the ideas here are drawn from the introduction to my book Making Sense of Indian Democracy)
Yogendra Yadav is a political scientist and national convener of the Bharat Jodo Abhiyan. He is also a co-founder of Jai Kisan Andolan and Swaraj India. He tweets @_YogendraYadav. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)