Subtle dangers to democracy

 The recent trends in Indian politics are very disturbing. The present government says their goal is Congress-free India. Now can you visualize a democracy without opposition? A political system without effective opposition is as good as autocracy.

Let’s try to understand it through a true story about Chinese premier Mao Zedong. The all-powerful leader ordered his subjects to kill sparrows so that they won’t eat grains in the fields and thus there would be more grains for human consumption. The people treated him as a God and on his instructions the entire Chinese human population turned enemies of poor little sparrows. So the sparrows vanished from the Chinese skies. A sparrow-free China it became. But they had forgotten that sparrows don’t eat just grains, they eat pests and harmful insects as well. So with the predators gone, the pests and insects reigned supreme and chucked out entire croplands. It resulted in a terrible famine that lasted for three years.

Similarly, if opposition, that is Congress, is chucked out of the political system, the pests and bugs of predatory tendency to misuse and manipulate power will chuck out our democracy. A healthy opposition is a predator for the bugs and pests of autocracy. The government has to understand that Congress doesn’t merely eat their parliamentary seats; it eats the pests of autocracy as well. The government is legitimate in its efforts to come to power again in 2024 but why shout ‘Congress-free Bharat’. Say we will defeat Congress. If you openly declare that you want to finish the opposition, it only means you want to run this country as an autocrat.

The hallmark of a true democracy is the reach of law and ethical principles followed by the leadership that enable either the law to act or enable a leader’s conscience to step down in case of infringement of duties or any other inappropriate behavior. A lockdown-time little private party cost Boris Johnson his British premier position. Can you imagine anything like this in India? Here the grossest transgressions of duties and misuse of power by the politicians are treated as routine affairs. When there is no fear of the card-castle falling apart in case of the slighted mischief with cards, those in power will take their positions for granted.

Sadly, there are many instances when cloud-piercing cries of genuine suffering go reverberating across the corridors of power and fall on deaf ears. The main reason being that they emanate from poor people’s mouths. And there are so many instances when real thugs, ruffians and rascals are seen getting victoriously crowned after manipulating and hijacking the system in an apparently legalized and institutionalized manner. There are episodes where your soul suffers nightmarish convulsions witnessing the manipulation of the system by the strong, wealthy and powerful. Their eyes shine with a malevolent, piercing sense of pleasure in bypassing the norms and your helpless guts give a disgusting constriction. You feel so helpless. All you can do is to watch in a severely sustained silence.

The show of power is still a frightful lot in the country. And the strongmen of the game, through their titillating tutelage, nurture a cringing breed of yesmen who handover the consequences of misused power to those lower in stature to them.  

There a lockdown-time party can see a prime minister bowing out; here even serious allegations of sexual harassment won’t budge a parliamentarian from his powerful seat. We have a lot of work to accomplish to be a real, strong democracy.

In a really strong democracy, the strongest of the strong can be taken to the dock in case of stepping over the laws. Take America for example. Their ex-president is being put into the dock for official mismanagement and discrepancies. It can happen only in a strong democracy, where official institutions are bigger than individuals occupying constitutional posts. America rules this world because they are the strongest democracy on earth. We are of course the largest democracy but the quality of democracy needs a vast amount of improvement. Here individual leaders are bigger than the seats they occupy. It creates two categories of justice: one for the privileged and the other for the common people.

Yes, we are a constitutional democracy on paper in every sense of the term. But in practice we are missing a lot from the great principles in our brilliant constitution. It will take some time to get a leadership that follows ethical principles and listens to conscience, and institutions and authorities independent enough to penalize even the strongest. I would say we are a work in progress as a democracy which is a good thing and far better than autocracies and pseudo democracies like Pakistan where there is a shadowy deep state pulling the strings. I firmly believe that there will be a day when we will be world’s strongest democracy as well, not just the largest. The strongest democracy is the benchmark where the most powerful is under the same chance of penalization as the weakest in case of falling off the lawful limits.