To Kill A Democracy

OVER the past four days, I re-read a couple of books, and completed another, more recent one — all centred around the theme of the slow demise of democracy.

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These two books, which I re-read, are organised around an identical premise: As late as the twentieth century, democracies died — or were destroyed — in a blaze of violence. “Tanks on the streets, tin-pot dictators barking out messages of national unity; repression and violence in tow.”

These are the signs history teaches us to watch out for, but the danger is that while we look for such overt signs of failure, democracies go wrong in ways that we had not anticipated; the symptoms of demise are those we are not trained to look for. “When democracy ends,” writes Runciman in his prefatory notes, “we are likely to be surprised by the form it takes. We may not even notice that it is happening because we are looking in the wrong places.”

Thus, when Modi during his recent trip to the United States told attendees at the Quad meeting that India “was the mother of democracy”, he was being fact-free as usual, but that is not surprising — what did surprise is the number of educated, networked people who jumped to his defence when he was called out for talking through his headgear.

The reason — and both books underline this — is that on the surface, everything seems to be as it should be. Elections — the bedrock of democracy — continue to be conducted; and governments continue to be voted in, or out.

But, argues Runciman, elections are merely the periodic outward manifestations of democracy — government by the people rests on the pillars of truly democratic legislatures, an independent law and order machinery, and a free press.

All can continue to function as they ought while failing to deliver what they should. A hollowed-out version of democracy risks lulling us into a false sense of security. (Because outwardly the pillars appear to hold) We might continue to trust in it and to look to it for rescue, even as we seethe with irritation at its inability to answer the call. Democracy could fail while remaining intact.

Does that sound familiar?

A bill follows a well-charted course before passing into law. The draft bill goes to the relevant Parliamentary committee, which deliberates on the provisions and makes recommendations for changes and amendments. The government redrafts the bill and tables it in Parliament for discussion and debate, at the end of which it is voted on. The constitution provides for detailed discussion of legislative proposals in order to ensure that any bill passed into law does not adversely impact on the rights of the citizens — hence “government for the people”.

In the most recent session of Parliament, as many as 20 bills were passed into law with minimal discussion, or none. And the Parliamentary committee — the first checkpoint designed to weed out bad bills — has been neutered by the simple expedient of being bypassed. In the Modi government’s second term, of 82 bills introduced in Parliament a mere 17 were referred beforehand to the relevant committee.

The effects of such law-making by bulldozer are visible to all who care to see. The three farm bills — The Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act and The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act — were bulldozed through with minimal debate in the Lok Sabha; in the Rajya Sabha, when the Opposition called for a division vote the government knew it could not win, it ram-rodded the Bill through via a farcical voice vote. The result: A law that has since been stayed by the Supreme Court, and has brought out farmers in their thousands in one of the most sustained protests seen in independent India.

Kashmir is boiling over; every day brings fresh news of the deaths of soldiers and civilians alike — a situation as inevitable as it was foreseeable when the government rushed through the bill to revoke Article 370 — again, as in the case of the farm laws, without referring it to committee or providing for more than token debate on the floor of the legislature.

The Citizenship Amendment Act — which, coupled with the proposed National Register of Citizens — triggered countrywide protests in early 2020, is another case in point: a bad law pushed through by a bull-headed government, regardless of consequences. To what purpose? The Act was notified in December 2019; the government was supposed to frame the rules by April 2020, but it missed the deadline; it also missed the extended deadline of July 2020 and, when last heard, the government had sought six more months to complete the task — which means over a year will have passed since its hasty passing with no rules in place, and that is assuming the government does meet the latest deadline. (The fact that no rules have been framed as yet has not prevented the government, when in campaign mode, from promising to implement them in various states up for election — as for instance in West Bengal and Assam earlier this year).

These and other examples speak to the point Runciman was making, that a pillar of democracy can continue to seemingly function as it ought, without delivering what it should — in this case, good law.

Now think of another pillar — the judiciary — which routinely refuses to entertain bail please for months and, in some cases, years at a time despite the fundamental right to life and liberty being enshrined in the constitution. And this is merely one of the more egregious ways in which the courts routinely fail us. As for the media — or to be accurate, large sections thereof — I’d written about the tactic of distraction in an earlier post and I’ll return to the theme again in subsequent posts.

Democracy rests not in the ballot box, but in the trust we collectively place in the institutions that sustain it. When that trust erodes — and there is no question in my mind that the process of erosion is well underway — the entire structure crumbles. And it seems, at least to me, that this erosion of trust is deliberate, precipitated by a set of people working towards the goal of ending democracy as we know it.

“The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism,” wrote Levitsky and Ziblatt, “is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy — gradually, subtly, even legally — to kill it.”

IN an essay for the Guardian Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, co-authors of How Democracies Die, laid out the central premise of their book, which is that many democracies today are in reality merely ‘electoral autocracies’ — exactly what the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute of the University of Gothenburg says India has become, in its latest report.

Apropos, V-Dem’s downgrading of Indian democracy is not an isolated instance. US-based Freedom House in its annual report — titled, ominously, ‘Democracy Under Siege — called India a “partially-free democracy”. And the Economic Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2020 downgraded India to 53rd position, calling it a “flawed democracy”.

Read this extended clip from the Levitsky/Ziblatt essay and see if it fits the zeitgeist:

On the electoral road, none of these things (violent overthrows, coups) happen. There are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance.

Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal”, in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy – making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption or cleaning up the electoral process.

Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticise the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. This sows public confusion. People do not immediately realise what is happening. Many continue to believe they are living under a democracy.

Because there is no single moment – no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution – in which the regime obviously “crosses the line” into dictatorship, nothing may set off society’s alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.

The book, published in late 2018 and covering the period upto 2017, is bullish on India — as in the section where, discussing backsliders, the authors say that “importantly, the vast majority of the world’s democracies — from Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru to Greece, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Romania to Ghana, India, South Korea, South Africa and Taiwan — remained intact through 2017.”

That line, read in tandem with the most recent indices, merely underscores the escalating assault on our democracy in Modi’s second term.

THE more recent book, To Kill A Democracy — India’s Passage to Despotism, is now available on Amazon, and in bookstores — this, after some initial hesitancy on the part of Oxford University Press, the publishers. (I wonder why — the authors are clear that India has been on the democracy butter-slide well before Modi came to power; the current regime has merely accelerated the process).

As the title makes clear, this book — unlike the two books referred to above — is India-specific. Authors Debashish Roy Choudhury and John Keane engage in classic connect-the-dots journalism, and produce a forensic analysis of India’s accelerating descent into an electoral autocracy.

In the first third of the book, the authors examine through published data the health of India’s democracy through lenses such as poverty (365 million Indians, give or take a few million, are officially. below the poverty line), food security, the government’s systematic land-grab in the name of development, the collapse of urban infrastructure, the decline of education (A country that, a little over a decade ago, held out roseate dreams of its impending “demographic dividend is now home to an estimated 313 million literate people; another way of seeing those numbers is to say that four out of every ten unlettered people in the world are Indian), and the mass migration to cities as agricultural lands become stressed and rural economies crumble, and the consequent burden on already fragile infrastructures.

From that platform, the authors set out to explore the various ills plaguing the electoral process, beginning with but not confined to the increasing criminalisation of our legislature (Milan Vaishnav’s book When Crime Pays is a mandatory companion read).

Having examined how elections have been systematically subverted and, inter alia, the role of the media in this process, the authors round off their polemic by posing the fundamental question: “What fate awaits a political system called democracy when its social foundations inflict indignity on millions of citizens, and its basic governing institutions begin to lose their bearings and fall apart?”

Indeed. What fate awaits us? I look through my news feed, and everything I see underlines Runciman’s assessment of democracy in the time of Trump:

…symptomatic of an overheated political climate that appears increasingly unstable, riven with mistrust and mutual intolerance, fuelled by wild accusations and online bullying, a dialogue of the deaf drowning each other out with noise. In many places, not just the United States, democracy is starting to look unhinged.

An essay is supposed to put forward a set of postulates, pose relevant questions, and come up with the answers that tie the whole thing into a neat package. The catch here is, I have no answers. The books I read made me look at our world with fresh eyes; I know I don’t like (tepid phrase; “am scared witless by” is more accurate) what I see, but damned if I know what I, or anyone, can do about it, and how.

I wrote of these three books because, (a), I believe it is increasingly urgent that we read, assimilate, and use this understanding to process what is happening around us and, (b), in the hope that some of you may have solutions to suggest, or at least further books and articles to suggest.

The comments are open — please feel free to engage in dialogue (sans abuse and whataboutery, since it needs mentioning these days).