No One Versus No One Else

MUCH HAS BEEN MADE of the year of the elections, though less has been said about whether 2024 marks the unstoppable impulses of democracy itself. Elections in some places are a necessary circus to pro­vide illiberal societies with faux legitimacy, an occasion for the pre-chosen Leader to keep the struggle for authen­ticity alive. No tinpot potentate can resist the temptation of forcing a captive people into an election which can have only one outcome, and that alone perhaps explains why, in the history of the hustings, those elected with the highest margins are the ones with the least regard for the institutions of a civil society. Elections have already ceased to be the most accurate measurement of democracy’s liberal content.

That said, 2024 is also a celebration of freedom’s volatil­ity that unbridled democracy alone offers. Two elections stand out, and they tell, together and separately, in the most compelling narrative style, of the maximisation of popular choice in undoctored democracies. They tell what matters in a free society is not the lofty assumptions of a few that reject the wishes of the majority as the psychological cost of a hypnotised democracy. Such assumptions, apart from their contempt for the spontaneity of popular will, only show how the comfort of denialism pretends to be the conscience of dissent.

What is being played out in America is the best case of rejection­ism as a political position of the lib­eral class that thinks the ultimate power in a “hypnotised” democracy lies not in an elected office but in the sovereignty of arguments. What sets the Biden-Trump rematch apart is not a riveting drama of warring ideologies starred by two gerontocrats, one showing diminished mental acuity and the other swelling with rage and ancient grievances, but the elasticity of the American Dream.

Biden’s visible biological dilapidations are forgivable and tolerable in liberal defence because his opponent is the greatest threat American democracy faces today; presidential infirmities are preferable to the subversion of the outsider. This kind of rejectionism saves the liberal conscience-keepers of democracy from the crude sociol­ogy of resentment in societies scarred by successive Estab­lishments, Left or Right. It allows a lofty few to reduce the hard realism of political choices to a Manichean cliché. Rejectionism is a false verdict in a contest that takes place in convenient moralism. The challenger must be evil.

The story is structurally and thematically different in the other big election of the year, staged in India. The challenger, unlike perhaps anywhere else, embodies no coherent argument but is a collec­tion of disembodied voices signify­ing nothing but their staggering incompatibility with the fast-chang­ing story of India, politically as well as culturally. The sheer volume of it certainly says something positive about the patience and possibilities of Indian democracy, but what it con­veys convincingly is the magnitude of an unequal electoral space.

The truncated coalition, its only raison d’être being the inevitability of Narendra Modi and the shared fear of being left out of India’s future, probably unknowingly, declares its own paradoxical existence. What I.N.D.I.A. announces is not the plurality of the democratic space but its division in the name of unified opposition. Even if they find unity in playing up the Fear of Modi, their intrinsic irreconcilabilities make General Election 2024 a solo act.

It is not that India has not been here before. No other country, perhaps except for Italy, has matched India’s abil­ity to pit one against the many, as if the cultural variety in national unity is the most obvious mark of its democratic stability. Still, the many had a core. In another time, the purpose of unity against the entrenched power was spelt out in a story more compelling than the one told by the incumbent. The Janata Party triumph set the standard for the rejoinder with strong moral content. For once, ideal­ism was stronger than the arrogance and cynicism of absolute power. When democracy was treated as a dis­posable concept by a leader who was most indulged by it, the idealists were endorsed by India as redeemers. Every character in Indian democracy’s first multi-starrer in dissent had moral as well as political legitimacy, and their idea of the alternative was larger than their spheres of electoral influence. Their struggle against power was built on the foundation of Jayaprakash Narayan’s vision of an anti-authoritarian India. ‘Change’ was the opposition motif, and it was authentic.

What I.N.D.I.A. projects is not an alternative story of change but the staleness of a hoary past. It is sustained by people whose India is smaller than the sum of their regional relevance. The Fear of Modi alone can’t keep together a gaggle of egos, their ambition bigger than their influence. Its most visible face continues, much to India’s amusement, to be a character in search of a script. His free-speech rights have become an inad­vertent reminder of his remoteness from the India he is struggling to comprehend. The India he and his allies want remains unknown to Indians.

Noisemakers are not storytellers, and India, for the last ten years, has only one storyteller. A political campaign, at its best, is about harnessing popular imagination, about the maximisation of ideals. Modi is alone, within his party and beyond, in turning the future into India’s most shared story. Once he is in the fray, he becomes the story and the storyteller, and that is why General Election 2024, too, is all about him, him alone. For I.N.D.I.A., he is an overwhelming reflection of a nation they have lost without even the consolation of a good fight; for a huge majority of India, as his acceptabil­ity grows with every day he spends in power, he tells of a future in which they can see themselves as equal protago­nists. No one else matters, on both sides of the aisle, in the national conversation on change.

This turn in Indian democracy is not about a shrinking of choices. It is about how one man has come to represent an idealised version of choices an unforgiving democracy can imagine. And that is what a democracy, at its most creative moments, does to campaigners who never run out of stories. In the clash between no one and no one else, I.N.D.I.A. fights its fears as India just waits for celebrating its choice. Such rewards in a democracy come only when some fighters never take a pause in their journey across the minds of a nation.

Arvind KejriwalGeneral election 2024ideologyIndian democracyMamata BanerjeeNarendra ModiRahul Gandhi