On path to the 'Great Dictator'

A trail of foreboding links 1953 to 2017 in our unfolding history. Babasaheb Ambedkar, in an interview with BBC, expressed the concern that democracy in India could become a failed experiment. Come 2017, we are on that path, sliding further down the ranks of 'flawed democracies' on the Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Democracy Index from rank 32 to 42 in a year's time.  

Just in case anyone thinks that the global rating is unfair to us, recall the alarm sounded by the four senior-most judges of the Supreme Court in January: 'Indian democracy is in peril'! This rare articulation unprecedented in the judicial history of any country -- went unheeded. Instead, orchestrated attempts were made to damn them as 'the dirty four'. This trigger-happy eagerness to stymie inconvenient voices symptomises what ails our democracy.

It is not as if our democracy has taken a beating by accident. Its current disarray was latent in the electoral intent of BJP in 2014. Narendra Modi and Amit Shah designed that election as a conquest. Hence the intention to eradicate the principal political opponent – the Congress -- as their prime, electoral goal. It is in a military conquest, not in a democratic election, that the antagonist is ground down to the dust. In a democracy, even the victor knows that the role of the opposition is as vital as that of the ruling party for governance to be benign. The hegemonic attitude of the present dispensation, not only towards opposition parties, but even towards allies, militates against the spirit of democracy.

That attitude of 'conquest' extends in the attitude of the Modi-Shah-led BJP to citizens at large. A hallmark of the outlook of the conqueror is the assumption of unfettered right to dictate and direct the life of the conquered. Historically, conquerors have taken over the wealth, life and liberty of the vanquished and re-shaped them as they pleased. Was demonetisation any different? Even assuming nothing but good intent behind it, the peremptory and callous way in which it was implemented, with utter disregard for how it traumatised millions of people, was a slap in the face of democracy. Only conquerors could deal with the private wealth of the conquered in as summary and arbitrary a fashion as in this instance.

What about the predicament of religious minorities? The security and welfare of minorities is deemed the litmus test of the wholeness of a democracy. Since the ascendancy of NDA, religious minorities – Muslims, in particular -- have come under unprecedented stress and strain. The preservation of the distinct identities of religious and linguistic minorities – as against their coerced assimilation into a putative mainstream -- is basic to averting the degeneration of democracy into fascism. A style of governance that hems in the minorities and escalates the pressures and burdens on them is a poor specimen of democracy.

The rule of law, which bridles the tyrannical propensities inherent in every State, is yet another crucial index to the health of a democracy. The worst nightmare that citizens belonging to minority communities and scheduled castes can face is the indifference of the State to their right to live in safety and security.

Clearly, atrocities on minorities and Dalits have increased in recent years. Unruly agents of instant justice –cow vigilantes and anti-Romeo gangs being two familiar examples -- to whom the rule of law seems outsourced, are an aberration in a democracy. Yogi Adityanath's Uttar Pradesh topped the list of communal riots last year. Lynching of Dalits and Muslims, based on rumours and suspicions, have happened in various states under BJP's watch. If a State fails to uphold the rule of law vis-à-vis the life and liberty of its citizens, is it a democracy anymore?  

A third issue of special significance – especially for the great Indian middle class - is education. The immoderate eagerness of the RSS to ideologically slant, nay disrupt, education to promote its agenda of cultural nationalism and to prejudicially re-orient the minds of students for the BJP's electoral gain is not unknown. The issue here is not one, primarily, of quality of education but of undermining our democratic culture.

Democracy is a shared way of life built on maximising the worth and welfare of all citizens. That can begin to be meaningful only if citizens are enabled to imbibe a liberal culture of rational, even heretical, thinking. There is no greater enemy to human progress than conformity and obscurantism promoted by religion. This corrupts democracy, as Upton Sinclair pointed out, into a "bludgeoning of the people, bludgeoning by the people, and bludgeoning for the people".

The sanctuary of education has been ideologically infiltrated since 2014 – whether it be through the appointments of incompetent and partisan vice-chancellors of universities or heads of institutions of national eminence, or the stigmatisation of the liberal spirit in institutions 'notorious' for it. Antiquarian orientations and advocacies have been smuggled into education, and regrettable attempts made to 'sanitise' school textbooks to the extent of belittling even recent history. Minority educational institutions are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain their identity and to exercise their constitutional rights. These, and a host of correlative pulls and pressures deflect the course of education from being a tributary that enriches the mainstream of our democratic culture.

Wake-up calls like our sliding rating on the Global Democracy Index need to be taken seriously at a time when domestic non-endorsement of the dogmas of the establishment is damned as anti-national and reality is camouflaged with propaganda.

(The writer is former principal, St. Stephen's
College, New Delhi)