The Search For Democracy

Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception…

He who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived…

The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar…

― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

Witness the last paragraph of this book, which is at once a classroom textbook for serious reference or compulsory course work in politics and society. It’s a critique of democracy, its post-independence history in India, its evolution into a mix of feudal, semi-feudal, modern society; it also looks at other forms of governance, such as in Hongkong, where democracy has been finally murdered by a totalitarian China; or, Singapore, a kind of capitalist dictatorship with trappings of free market freedom.

It’s also a personal journey through life and times as a child, a youngster, a citizen, and a bureaucrat in the governance system; the book is a scholarly synthesis of theory and praxis, as reflected in the dominant and subaltern narratives of the contemporary era.

Writes Renuka Vishwanathan: “The journey through the nooks and crannies of politics confirms that democracy is still a distant dream. Elected legislatures cannot represent the view of the majority. We have indeed miles to go before people take charge and rule themselves.”

When we were kids we were told many stories by our teachers in small town ‘convent’ schools, inside the ‘drawing rooms’ of our humble homes, and on the streets and cricket grounds. One was that our first effervescent, visionary and extremely hard working prime minister, ‘the maker of modern India’, as he is called, had a favourite poem. This book of poems used to be beside his bed, next to the yellow-light of a table lamp perhaps. The poem was famous, and evoked optimism, beauty and resilience: ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by Robert Frost. The last stanza of this poem in rhyme – he had chosen to underline.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

But I have promises to keep

And miles to go before I sleep

And miles to go before I sleep…

When we are yet again searching for the authentic meaning of democracy in contemporary India, it is important to understand the politics, the intent, and intellectual worldview of Jawaharlal Nehru, with all his mistakes and contradictions. Especially in the current state of quasi dictatorship imposed by a Right-wing Hindutva regime in Delhi, camouflaged as democracy. Indeed, in the current scenario, under this regime particularly, Nehru has been routinely castigated, vilified, condemned and abused – and by individuals who can’t measure up to half-an-inch of his majestic stature.

For a government which has largely failed on all fronts, and whose foreign policy is in shambles, all their failures have been diverted to the Nehruvian past. Blame Nehru, is the key word, even as not one public sector enterprise, in coal, steel, petroleum, railways, airports, etc, or prestigious academic institutions, like the IITs, IIMs, JNU, AMU, or AIIMS, have been built by them.

If the farmers had not led a protracted and peaceful struggle, braving the repression for almost one year in heat, cold and storm, the three notorious farm bills, alleged to be heavily loaded to benefit sundry chosen capitalists, would have destroyed both Indian agriculture, and the lives and livelihoods of tens of thousands of farmers, and farm labourers.

Instead, there seems to be a hurry to give away much of the public sector to one Mr A, from Gujarat, like the flourishing airports. Well, Mr A is popularly dubbed as the best buddy of Mr M, also from Gujarat. In clichéd Marxist terms, this is called crony capitalism.

For a freedom fighter, Nehru spent many more years in jail then Mahatma Gandhi. Between 1921 and 1945, the peak years of the freedom movement, he was jailed nine times, and he spent almost nine years in prison. Gandhi reportedly spent around 6.5 years in imprisonment, mostly in British India, and also in South Africa.

For a leader who came from an elite background, surely, life in prison was not easy. And, yet, he wrote scholarly and well-researched books on the re-discovery of India, and gave us profound glimpses of world history, books, which are still read, and widely sold on the pavements across the cities and towns of this country. Surely, he never wrote a book on ‘Entire Political Science’ – that is, if such a book exists in the history of politics and social sciences in any part of the world.

Surely, Nehru learnt the first lessons of democracy in the freedom movement, in the suffering and exile of prison, in the hard and peaceful anti-colonial struggle with the freedom fighters, including a large number of women, such as Kamala Nehru, among others. He learnt it from the armed struggle of the brave revolutionaries, from Bhagat Singh, Ashfaqullah Khan, Chandrashekhar Azad, Ramprasad Bismil, to Khudiram Bose, Jatin Das, Kalpana Dutt and Pritilata Waddedar, among others, many of them imprisoned, tortured, hanged, or sent to the dreaded ‘kala paani’ of distant Andamans.

Those who never participated in the freedom movement, those who were then glorifying Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, the concentration camps and mass murder of Jews, and the Holocaust, and those who were hell-bent on sowing the bitter seeds of hate politics in colonized India, while tacitly aligning with the British, they would certainly have no clue about the sacrifices made to achieve political freedom and secular democracy in a pluralist country. Indeed, people across the caste, identity and religious spectrum, including women and youngsters, participated in the freedom movement, as they did in the first war of independence, in the armed mutiny of 1857.

They hate Nehru and his vision of a modern and secular democracy, because they appear to be such ‘little men’ in front of his political vision and intellectual stature, and the universal respect and love he was bestowed upon by the entire country. He routinely wrote long, insightful and endearing letters to the chief ministers of the various states, as he wrote to his daughter, Indira Gandhi.

He liked to smoke his cigarettes, and openly so, and had a refined taste in clothes. He wore a red rose on his elegant achkan over a white churidar with a Gandhi cap. (No obsessive, fancy dress competitions for him, please!). It was he who made the ‘Nehru jacket’ famous. And he would laugh whole-heartedly -- without an iota of worry on his forehead.

Nehru was educated, enlightened, modern and non-dogmatic. He had the guts to listen to dissent and his opponents with an open mind in Parliament and outside; he met journalists regularly, and laughed on the cartoons and caricatures made on him – he surely had a sense of humour. Compare this with the number of press conferences the current PM has had with journalists since 2014. Or face to face chats with a non-loyalist journalist; the last was perhaps Karan Thapar after Gujarat 2002.

One should see Nehru laugh with such joy when he met Albert Einstein at his residence in Princeton, New Jersey, on November 5, 1949, this time in an elegant black suit and tie. Notably, in this US trip, this was the only private meeting which Nehru had, in the presence of both their daughters. They exchanged letters routinely, agreed and disagreed. For instance, Nehru politely disagreed with Einstein on the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine. Einstein praised his book, ‘The Discovery of India’, and the abolition of ‘untouchability’ in post-independence India by law.

So what is the point of this book, especially in contemporary India, especially in the current phase of ‘acche din’ since the ill-fated summer of 2014?

“Well, but it will be our mess,” Gandhi is reported to have told the British, who believed that India in the hands of Indians would be a big mess. So how is this mess shaping up now, right on our face?

The author asks: Does democracy exist? Can it even be attained? Do most of us want it? Are we gravitating towards democracy? What are the essential elements of democracy?

Machiavelli wrote that even if the ruler does not believe in democracy, it should ‘appear to be a democracy’. That is, the deception of democracy! Does India appear to be a democracy, as its current Vishwaguru proclaims so often, or is it a deception?

Is it a secular democracy for the brilliant Muslim scholars, young women and men, who are rotting in prison for almost five years, on what are widely believed to be cooked-up charges?

Umar Khalid made a speech, where he has quoted Gandhi a few times. He never propagated violence. All these young dissenters were picked up because they were peacefully protesting against the CAA, an anti-constitutional, sectarian and polarizing move, which was transparently discriminatory. Almost the entire country protested with tens of thousands joining protest marches, including the mothers and sisters of Shaheen Bagh near Jamia in Delhi – a non-violent, mass civil disobedience.

CAA was withdrawn, but these scholars became the scapegoats of a revengeful regime. Politically, they were jailed, to send a message – that we don’t like young, educated, modern Muslims to express dissent in public spaces. Or, protest. Or, become popular student leaders, inspirational icons, opinion leaders, widely admired. This will not be allowed.

Has the justice system, the Indian Parliament, the ruling and opposition party, come forward to give justice to them, as they spend their best years rotting in prison? Who will compensate for these precious years lost? And, what about their endless suffering, and the suffering of their families and loved ones? What kind of democracy should allow this brazen injustice?

And, yet, the entire country seems to have left them to their fate, including their universities, the civil society groups, the political parties, including the Left. Umar Khalid recently wrote that he is reading Fyodor Dosoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. Sometimes he feels that things, strangely, feel the same, as in a Siberian prison, where Tsarist Russia had condemned the great writer, often in shackles, and compelled to do hard labour in these slave labour/death camps. On death row, Dostoyevsky was almost shot dead –he escaped by sheer chance, or luck.

“We are not alive though we are living, and we are not in our graves though we are dead.”

This is the quote Umar cites from the novel; “... at many places, I felt as if he was narrating things and occurrences that I see around myself here at Tihar.”

For a strong, resilient, brilliant scholar, with a ready smile on his face and a superb sense of humour, and a doctorate from JNU, this is a pessimism and sorrow which should make the nation ashamed. But this democracy has neither shame nor sensitivity. The condemnation of peaceful dissenters seems absolute, and universally acceptable; while justice eludes, endlessly.

And why only peaceful dissenters?

Look at how they treated our world champion women wrestlers – while protecting a ruling party bahubali accused of sexual harassment of women wrestlers! He was for long protected by the ruling party and its bosses, even while the wrestlers were going to throw their medals into the Ganga. They dumped the medals anyway, on the street, in full media glare, near the new Parliament, and one Olympic champion, in tears, quit the game -- was anyone punished? Did Indian democracy do any form of self-criticism? I don’t think so.

Or, take the series of grotesque mob-lynching of Muslims after 2014, as a public spectacle, beef or no beef. The vigilante squads still roam free, hounding citizens, the minorities, forest-dwellers, ordinary folks, young couples – does democracy operate for them in terms of law? No.

The bulldozers became a political symbol in UP, flaunted as a public spectacle. Even now, even in Delhi, the homes of the poor are routinely bulldozed, throwing them out on the streets – heat or cold. Is democracy aligned with the poor, and those on the margins?

If there is a search for democracy, it should be first explored in the body and soul of the poorest, those on the margins, Dalits, the extremely backward communities, the minorities, women. Remember those thousands of emaciated workers, landless labourers, construction workers, men, women and children, barefoot, hungry and thirsty on the scorching summer streets, with a sack of their lifetime belongings on their heads? They were walking miles on highways to reach their humble dwellings in distant villages, as a compulsory lockdown was declared by the PM at a short notice during the pandemic?

We saw such tragic ‘visuals’ only after Partition. Tens of thousands were rendered jobless in one stroke. Did the Indian State do anything for them? Nothing.

In their condemned long march lies the original search and meaning of democracy, and this is not ending anytime soon, whatever be the regime. It’s just that this government does not even have the pretense.

It’s just that free market and globalised India might not look like a totalitarian ‘communist’ regime as in China, or a one-man dictatorship as in Russia, but the vitiated politics of a certain kind has entered, like poison, inside the veins of its society. It is growing now in the hate politics, and the entrenched system of inequality and injustice, whereby dissenters, and the poor, are bearing the brunt. Even while a handful of the super rich, especially two billionaires from Gujarat, friends of the current regime, are multiplying their unprecedented wealth each day.

The relentless ED raids, especially targeting Opposition leaders, the arrest and long prison-terms of top leaders of AAP, the serious questions surrounding the Election Commission, which seems openly partisan, as alleged by opposition leaders (witness the latest allegations by Rahul Gandhi on the Maharashtra assembly polls), the entrenched language of hate speech, the compulsive lack of democratic consensus, these patterns have become so predictable. And this current regime, which lacks a majority in Parliament, and is surviving on crutches, has not really changed its spots.

The opposition demanded a session of Parliament, after the Pahalgam killings, it was denied. Not one of the four terrorists has been arrested. Why was such a massacre allowed in a conflict zone where 10,000 tourists routinely visit, has not been answered. Why not a single security man was present at the tourist site has not been explained. How many aircrafts were shot down, no one knows. How much damage has really been inflicted on terrorists in Pakistan – there is no reality check. Why is there no evidence provided in international forums on Pakistan’s involvement in the terrorist attack? Why has no country condemned Pakistan, or fully agree with the Indian establishment view – no questions asked. How come Donald Trump hijacks this hitherto bilateral issue and takes full credit for the ceasefire, and the foreign ministry and PMO keeps mum? Notice the fact that how the foreign secretary was trolled by Hindutva fanatics, fans of the supreme leader, after the ceasefire – they just wanted Pakistan to be wiped out from the map.

Pakistan was indeed wiped out from the map, reportedly, – by certain TV anchors. No passport thereby would be required to go to Pakistan after the Indian conquest, Islamabad was captured, and so was the Karachi port. The media created a war zone with fake sirens and fake news right inside the studios.

Operation Sindoor was glorified as a patriarchal celebration of protecting the honour and dignity of women. Not a word was said about the death of innocent civilians in Poonch, at the LoC, both Hindus and Muslims. No one reached out to them, barring some brave reporters.

Or, how the Kashmiris helped the injured, gave them food, shelter, transport. while Kashmiri students and shopkeepers were hounded in other parts of the country. So, was the abrogation of Article 370, the army clampdown, the media censorship, the arrests of political leaders and citizens – was it integral to the concept of democracy? Or, was it a lesson well-taught to the Muslim communities once again?

Pseudo nationalism, and hate politics, blind and irrational, has ravaged the inner essence of our secular democracy. A form of invisible censorship operates like a dark shadow in the media, university campuses, inside institutions, in public spaces. A professor is hounded and jailed for putting up a totally rational post in social media. Independent filmmakers have stopped making films. Writers and columnists are afraid of being brave and bold. Academics have moved inside their cushy comfort zones, well, most of them.

Student politics has been pushed to the wall. Campuses like JNU, and its progressive academic ethos, seems to have been crushed, despite the brave struggle after the 2014 witch-hunt. The media remains a stooge. Most independent, honest and neutral journalists have been marginalised. Most NGOs have their funding blocked – so no grassroots work anymore. If this is not another sinister form of Emergency – what is it?

In this scenario, the mess, our mess, as Gandhi said, can’t really be a blessing in disguise. It is getting more and more messy instead.

In the theory and praxis of democracy, in its search and meaning, this book, partly a textbook, partly a practical critique of democracy and its possibilities, is an important intervention. It should be read to rethink, reconstruct and resurrect the original vision of the freedom movement, why we chose democracy, a secular, pluralist republic, and why the Indian Constitution is so sacred to the country.

What credibility can a nation have which chooses to look elsewhere in the face of an ongoing genocide and mass starvation in Gaza. When, once, leaders like Yaseer Arafat were our longstanding friends, and the nation stood with the freedom of Palestine? Witness the fact that protests against the genocide are not allowed in Delhi. Why?

Is it a democracy, or a dictatorship which tacitly backs Benjamin Netanyahu, and toes, shamelessly, the American regime led by Donald Trump. Are we in their camp, or are we on the side of truth, humanity and justice?

Bless This Mess – A Search for Democracy

Renuka Vishwanathan

White Falcon Publishing

Rs 450, Pg 229

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