A Passage to Democracy

IT IS A PARADOX of the free world that democracy is being undermined by the democratically elected. Or that is the story that repeats itself when ideas of governance are increasingly being threatened by the pathologies of power. The story sells because its narrative sprawl includes the last sighs of the disillusioned and the defeated, the resentments of those who gave democracy its original legitimacy. It is no longer the ideal when the elected as well as the contenders have already turned it into an invocation, as a necessary act of piety before the short journey towards unfreedom.

The case against democracy—why it does not work as it should or why it dies prematurely despite popular faith—has become an intellectual urgency, with some of the alternative-seekers extolling even neo-Confucian models in which the participation of all will be replaced by the rule of the enlightened few. Democracy’s obituarists usually find the very elasticity of the system which allows illiberal instincts of the elected to flourish as the fundamental flaw. It is too flexible to let morality stay stable. It has turned the test of popular will into a licence for autocracy. Elections are democratic; elections themselves won’t sustain democracy.

It all comes down to those who owe their power to the generosity of democracy. Today their biography is what gets cited as vindication by demoralised democracy watchers. In the year of the elections, nothing causes as much liberal alarmism as Donald Trump’s third fight for the US presidency. He still believes that the last election he lost to Joe Biden was a grand conspiracy in which he was denied victory. Candidate Trump, in most media portraits and certainly in the Democratic epic on evil, is a convicted felon swimming in a sea of grievance and vendetta, a lying narcissist who had turned the dying days of his presidency into an arsonist’s art. He is, in almost every story not told by himself, a saboteur of democracy itself.

In liberalism’s scariest stories, Trump may be the high-profile example of how democracy is defeated by its own possibilities. There are any number of elected leaders out there who think elections justify how the elected make use of the mandate. They have shown that democracy is not necessarily the power of the many, but a system that allows the power of one to prevail over the powerlessness of many. It is the confederation of such leaders that qualifies as what Anne Applebaum calls Autocracy, Inc. In her book with the same title, she argues that they are winning. “Shored up by the technologies and tactics they copy from one another, by their common economic interests, and above all by their determination not to give up power, the autocracies believe that they are winning,” she writes. Is it an exhausted system of democracy that adds to their longevity?

They are not bound by ideologies; they are united by contempt for the exaggerated virtues of democracy. Some of them have even gone to the extent of calling their system, built on a mythicised sense of the nation, a cultural argument against the West. They are different from the soft autocracies whose administrative efficiency had its admirers in the democratic world. The so-called tiger economies were celebrated as controlled democracies with higher productivity. Today’s autocrats cannot claim copyright over any economic model. (Even Xi Jinping did not create one; he inherited one.) Their numbers are growing, and it is as if democracy is not catching up.

India is not one of them. It is not on Applebaum’s list either. Democracy alone explains why India is not what some of its liberal dissenters, mostly from within, imagine. For Narendra Modi’s most ardent critics, ideological incompatibility equals stifled freedom—and a shrinking civil society. Strong leadership is worse. It curtails basic democratic impulses in governance, no matter the strong leader in question is not a repudiation of democracy but an endorsement. It is not just India’s leader of the Opposition who portrays his country as an unbridled potentate’s scary playground, and he himself its last conscience-keeper on the run, finding secure stages only abroad. An India assembled from the stereotypes of autocracy is a familiar picture in the dissent from within. It is a false portrait.

If democracy is on trial, India, currently dominated by a politician who has been severely tested by it, tells a story of living in it with permanent impatience. In autocracies, elections do not diminish the leader; they only make him stronger. Even a Modi government chastised by elections fails to meet the standards set by the left-liberal dissenting class, for it is ideology that measures freedom here. More so for those who are eager to get India a seat in the autocracy club. The India that Modi brings to the world is made acceptable by democracy. Nothing else.

About The Author

S Prasannarajan

•