The Assault of the Caveat

A PORTRAIT OF INDIA as a land without justice, all adjectives that make a democracy meaningful included, is the customary caveat in any analysis of Elections 2024, certainly in a section of international media and in the angst-powered domestic punditry. It’s true that the limits of democracy mirror the insufficient creativity in the management of it—or the excessive faith of those who have harnessed its best and worst impulses in themselves. What is glaring is the lazy capsulation of ideas to give dissent a veneer of authenticity. So in the buzzy bazaar of ‘Whither India’, certain terms that capture the ‘controlled’ democracy are flying off the pages. Their translations and lofty intentions, when seen in the neutral space of lived experience, tell a story about the uses of misreading politics for the sake of a liberal conscience.

Take that recurring term: India in the grip of an autocracy. If the pre-1989 communist era launched the Maximum Leader, the one who originated from the mythology of revolution and peaked in the terrorisation of liberation, the post-Soviet era consecrated the strong leader, the one who draws upon the capital of hurt to sedate a questioning people. Such leaders are towering over compromised institutions not just in post-communist societies that have failed in their experiment with freedom. The cult of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and the neo-tsarism of Vladimir Putin in Russia are triumphs in me-alone leader turning wounded national pride into a cultural weapon in the fight against the so-called imperial decadence. Another easy addition to the list is Turkey’s Erdogan, the anti-Atatürk version of supreme leadership in a Muslim-majority country caught between the legacy of secularism and the groundswell of Islamism. And political dissent is a dangerous vocation in Erdogan’s democracy.

There is a different kind of strong leader, the one who owes his strength to the impatience of democracy. When Narendra Modi won in 2014, the mandate shattered the leadership model normalised by the exigencies of coalition politics and the extra-constitutional powers of the Higher Command in politics, which in the hoary tradition of Congressism only meant the First Family. The leader before him, one who was given to India by the party’s Our Lady of Deliverance, took his cues from the oracular power behind the prime minister. Today, there may be any number of liberals in their urge for an ideal alternative to Modi finding in his predecessor a gentle affirmation of the India they had lost. Which only means, at a time when denialism is the preferred left-liberal shield against change, choreographed meekness too is leadership. The best part of the period between the end of Indira Gandhi’s reign and the advent of Modi is marked by stagnation and vacillation, inevitable in coalitions inhabited by leaders whose combined worth is smaller than their individual influence. In a fragmented polity, every secular idealist from the left side of the argument could find his or her piece of India.

Modi’s leadership has changed all that. The politics of continuity has been replaced by the politics of renewal, and this cultural shift in the exercise of power has unsettled the old establishmentarians. They couldn’t, and still can’t, come to terms with the rigours of conviction politics as practised by Modi. That’s why a leader answerable to his own set of moral principles is less acceptable than a leader answerable to extra-constitutional power centres. That’s why a campaign against corruption is less acceptable than all those headlines about corruptions. And that’s why the casual deployment of words like majoritarianism allows some to ignore the constitutional honesty of a government in separating development from appeasement. Power that is indebted to the moral standards of its wielder and the aspiration of a people alone legitimises conviction politics. Modi is perhaps the only leader in a democracy who wields such power with generous popular endorsement.

To read the style and sweep of his power as autocracy or authoritarianism is to confine him to a space defined by comforting liberal clichés. And the laboured appreciation of India’s progress under him with the now familiar caveat only reveals the intellectual dishonesty in engaging with an India fast shedding its cultural inhibitions. After all, it takes some moral courage to spare a democracy that is not fragile enough to be collapsed under the weight of one man’s conviction to the mandate he relentlessly fights to preserve.

About The Author

S Prasannarajan

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