Vandita Mishra writes: Not just about the Emergency

Indian Express

7 hours ago

Dear Express Reader,
This has been a week of commemoration of the Emergency as a cataclysmic event in the distant past. This has been a week to acknowledge that the shadows cast by the suspension of democracy, 1975-1977, are long.
Many of the challenges for a democratic politics are the same, and they have been routinised — the weaponisation of laws to shrink spaces for dissent and free expression, a politics of labelling and distrust, attempts by the Executive to undermine and subdue other institutions like the Media and the Court, demonisation of the Opposition. Other challenges are new, because in its long journey, democracy itself stands at a different milestone.
At that time, when India's democracy was less than 30 years old, Emergency was the result of, and it contributed to, a waning of brightness — it capped a draining of the lingering idealism of a newly independent nation that had pledged to be not just a representative democracy, but one that abides by rules of the game laid down in the wise and layered Constitution it gave itself. The Constitution set up a mosaic of monitory institutions to scrutinise power, enforce accountability, enable checks and balances — political theorist John Keane has christened this new historical form of democracy, worldwide in the post 1945 era, as 'monitory democracy'.
Today, 50 years after the Emergency, India's monitory democracy is showing signs of wear and tear. It is also dealing with the pressures of the age of communicative abundance. In a global context, Keane writes that 'historical comparisons show that the combination of monitory democracy and communicative abundance is without precedent. It produces permanent flux, an unending restlessness driven by complex combinations of different interacting players and institutions, permanently pushing and pulling, heaving and straining, sometimes working together, at other times in opposition to one another…' Even as this combination makes democracy more exciting and viral, it also has corrosive effects. It breeds cynicism, disaffection and distrust vis a vis Parliaments and parties, governing institutions and leaders. Parliamentary democracy is being publicly 'wrong-footed', says Keane, there is 'decay amidst abundance'.
In India and elsewhere, this fraught juncture is now the site of the rise of a populist politics. 'We the people' becomes 'Me the people', there is a relentless search for the Other and the enemy within, and the winner takes all. The populist moment seizes on the prevalent disillusions, as much as it speaks to rising aspirations, to frame an agenda of anti-elitism. It also propagates a politics of anti-pluralism.
The week in which 50 years of Emergency were marked ended with a rising — and disquietingly anti-pluralist — clamour that seems to give the lie to the self-righteous lip service to democracy over the last few days by the BJP-led establishment.
An RSS general secretary set the ball rolling, asking for a discussion on whether the words 'socialist' and 'secular', added to the Constitution's Preamble by the Indira Gandhi government during the Emergency, should be retained. He was joined by the Vice President, who said that the change to the Preamble was a 'sacrilege to the spirit of sanatan' and the words were 'nasoor', a festering wound. A BJP chief minister chimed in: 'Socialism' and 'secularism' are Western concepts, have no place in Indian civilisation, he said. And two Union ministers added the weight of their office to the argument.
This, when successive post-Emergency regimes have not reversed the Preamble amendment, even as other changes have been rolled back, and the Supreme Court has upheld it. Secularism was described as a 'basic feature' in the 13-judge bench Kesavananda Bharati ruling even before the Emergency-era amendment, and the non-justiciable Directive Principles of State Policy have been invoked to recognise that 'socialism' was an ideal for those who framed a Constitution for a society of great inequalities.
It is evident that the real aversion is not to 'socialist' — in fact, on the broad direction of the economy, all post-liberalisation governments have looked the same, more or less. This choreographed controversy is about 'secular'.
The Narendra Modi government, now in its third term, has presided over the steady challenging of the constitutional commitment to secularism as equal respect for all religions, and a spreading Hindu-isation of public institutions and spaces. The PM's conduct of the rituals of consecration of the Ram Temple at Ayodhya in January 2024 marked a turning point. It underlined the message that, amid growing polarisation, the religion of the majority community would now be a visible marker of the life of a diverse and multi-religious nation, demanding deference, if not prostration from all.
So, at the end of a week like this one, is a question: Who is responsible for ensuring that the Emergency does not come again? Who is expected to take on the burden of an anti-Emergency politics that guards against attempts to chip away at pluralism and democracy?
In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, 'democracy-in-danger' and 'Constitution-under-siege' became electoral slogans and while the outcome saw a whittling down of the BJP government's numbers, it was certainly no mandate for the Opposition. Does that mean that the people don't worry, or worry enough, about the spectre of diminishing democracy?
It is possible that for a people cynical about power politics, democracy's predicament is not a trumping argument because they see no good guys out there. And that for the optimistic and aspirational, the system seems strong and self-correcting enough, does not require their ministrations. It could be that when voters feel disrespected, or 'dis-esteemed', they are more likely to grant governments the licence to rule arbitrarily, and to look for strongmen with a steel fist.
Or it could be, simply, that for all the talk about democracy-in-danger, democracy never really was on the election menu, because the Opposition was unable to make a case that was eloquent or vivid enough.
Whatever be the real story of the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the onus is not, it should not be, on the vulnerable voter. Protecting democracy's letter and spirit is also a task too large to be left only to the Opposition — in fact, it must not be seen as a project that is partisan. Keeping democracy whole requires influential institutions and powerful stakeholders to take ownership of it, instead of putting it only on the Opposition or passing the buck to 'the people'.
Till next week,
Vandita