Dire need to stem the rot plaguing democracy

Neera Chandhoke

Political scientist

OVER the past decade or so, authors across the world have spoken about the decline of democracy, democratic backsliding, democratic recession and even the death of democracy. The waning of democracy has been attributed to the rise of right-wing authoritarian populists in the West and other parts of the world. Admittedly, populists have won elections by cobbling up impressive coalitions across classes and, in India, across castes. Electoral victories by huge margins are not the cause of democratic backsliding. The worry is that democracy has been reduced to mere elections.

In a book provocatively titled How Democracies Die (2018), Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt suggested that since the end of the Cold War, democracies have corroded not because they face guns but because of the ballot box. Their analysis is bang on. Election results can throw up authoritarian leaders with scant respect for the institutions and processes of democracy. Democracies do not die because the army executes a coup. They die because leaders with a frightening ‘will to power’ take control. They die when abuse and incivility are heaped upon political opponents and dissidents through social media. They die because the rule of law and civil liberties are consigned to the margins. And they die when the media becomes an agent of power and shrugs off its role as a defender of civil society.

Comparativist Larry Diamond wrote in 2020 that between 1974 and 2005, a majority of the states were democratic. Thereafter, we witnessed a democratic recession, first in a weak form and then in a strong one. This phase was prominently marked by the collapse of freedom. The demise of freedom followed disdain for institutional checks on power, a weakening of the political Opposition, the independent media, civil society, and social polarisation. The script is depressingly familiar.

There is a reason for concern. Why would the electorate opt for leaders who have scant regard for substantive democracy? From the 1970s onwards, the masses in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have courageously fought for democracy. They have confronted bullets, tear gas and police batons. They continue to do so. Protesting farmers have been attacked by the coercive arm of the state. Their fight for justice is a fight for democracy. Democracy is worth fighting for. We should be supporting the protesters. But today, political solidarity appears to have lapsed. Perhaps people suffer from what, in the American context, has been called ‘political fatigue’.

Many scholars wonder at the sights and sounds of contemporary democracy. The popularity of right-wing populists is mind-boggling. The secret of their success is simple: they make history, the present and the future sound simple through linear narratives of victimhood and reiteration of wrongs heaped upon one community by another. History is not simple; it is plural, complex, contradictory, nuanced and contingent. Simplified and mediocre histories of eternal grievances are likely to be dismissed by serious scholars. The problem is that this has been harnessed to fiery political rhetoric and vocabularies of retribution.

If anyone should be furious at this alarmingly simple rendition of a complex history that has witnessed conflict but also cooperation, it should be the historian who invests so much in unravelling layers of the past, so painstakingly and laboriously. Mediocre and lazy history-writing, films that glorify ultra-nationalism, the scripting of songs celebrating violence and the writing of hateful literature are crimes against humanity. There is a difference between rigorously researched scholarly works and hastily penned court histories that breathe vengeance. Responsible scholars and writers bring societies together; they do not force them apart the way political leaders are wont to do for the ignoble purpose of winning votes. Historian Eric Hobsbawm had famously written that historians feed into nationalism. Today, histories that intend to harm can be held responsible for the sentiment that we do not need substantive democracy — elections that legitimise strong leaders are enough.

Elections are around the corner in India, and it is time to consider what we want and what we deserve, what a group of journalists who have kept the flame of democracy alight through independent reporting and commentaries stand for, what civil society activists who are in prison struggled for and what the vision of our students who are expelled from universities because they ask inconvenient questions is. It is time we began asking hard questions. Do we really want an India where the religious majority owns the country? Do we really want an India where people are swept into an endless coil of ethnic strife?

History holds many lessons that we should learn. The most valuable lesson is this: in many countries, unnecessary harping on historical wrongs has led to genocide and war. We can only avoid that when we struggle against the destruction of substantive democracy and recognise that elections are but a moment in democracy. The objective of democracy is to ensure that citizens connect by entering into multiple conversations about what our society is and what it could be. We need an imaginative Opposition that calls out the government on issues that matter, such as unemployment and also the threat to democracy. Democracy has been mislaid; we are missing it.

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