The Trust Quotient

SOME OF US are worried that all forms of democracy, from the liberal to the illiberal, are getting infected, and some of us are even more worried that We the People are not allowed to maintain a healthy social distance from the leadership. Do we need to be worried?

This pandemic has, like wars and national tragedies before it, provided many leaders with a Churchillian moment: play it big unless you want to be swept aside by history. Some really played it big, and made their evening press conferences a best-selling stump performance. An Andrew Cuomo there; and oh yes, a Shakespeare-quoting Pinarayi Vijayan here.

And as performances go, Donald Trump is the world’s first leader made-by and made-for television. The novel coronavirus is not the only enemy he has declared war on. The Democrats and the liberal media—and even conservative media with a liberal bend—are on the wrong side of history as he struggles to strike a deal with the virus.

As a performer, Narendra Modi plays it differently, and bracketing him with Trump is lazy analogy. His media presence is amplified by his choreographed absences. It’s less of an irony if you realise that his performance is more dramatic when his struggle is for power, not when he is in power. In power, he is more oracular than stentorian. And what defines his persona is not vulgar aggression but austere authority.

Leaders, in democracies both liberal and illiberal, loom large even as people become invisible. They become more powerful even as people cede civil liberties to the general good. The lofty leaders are at play, as the surveyors and controllers of destinies. They have been rearmed by the outbreak.

The virus is testing their popular legitimacy. It is testing the old decencies of politics. Being transparent is an effort only for those who are inspired by a Xi Jinping: paranoid and scared of their own people. You need not be a Leninist-capitalist to be threatened by facts and questions. Being transparent in the time of a pandemic is to accept the ‘fact’ that the lives of others are more than convenient statistics.

“We are all in it together” only when crisis politics can do without the uses of an enemy. When the righteous me is not set against the opportunistic you. When ideologies are not as infectious as the virus. When crisis politics loses its immunity to hate, the virus buster loses legitimacy too.

Hate sways the political mind when stereotypes take precedence over originals, when holograms are mistaken for the real. In the fight against the novel coronavirus, in some societies, whether free or fettered, Infection is the Other. We are not in it together. Only some are.

The natural companion of hate is fear. Increasingly, the corona battles are being fought in republics of fear. The maximum leader harvests fear, and in a pandemic, some leaders are maximising their powers to become the eternal leader. A Putin may not need a pandemic to do so; an Orban needs one for sure. The Hungarian nationalist, the mascot of right-wing populism, and a survivor of the same ideology that killed his one-time idol Imre Nagy, is today riding on a pandemic towards absolute power.

Fear is what brings us together, as responsible citizens in a knowing state. Fear is also what the desperate corona buster weaponises, and uses for extra-constitutional power. In the politics of the pandemic, played out across the world’s democracies in varying degrees of crudeness as well as sophistication, fear is the most rewarding catalyst. In places where fear is harvested for containing the virus, you forfeit your rights, voluntarily, to become data. Crises need strong leaders, and those among them in illiberal democracies are stronger.

In the end, it is the unbroken covenant of trust that legitimises a leader in the time of a historic crisis. The trust quotient is higher in a leader whose credibility is matched by the instinctive faith of the citizen in his or her ruler. Like communities, elected governments, too, are made cohesive units by trust. In a crisis that asks us to choose between life and death, freedom and death, trust alone maintains the balance.

A labourer walks for days and nights to reach home because he has been told to stay at home, to respect the Lakshman Rekha. Home is where everyone wants to reach, even the homeless. Trust is the most successful vote gatherer, especially when some political scientists argue that the future struggle is between democracy and the people.

It is the poor that make Indian elections a morality tale. And they are the Indian Prime Minister’s largest constituency. They trust him, even when they are displaced and dispossessed, and that is because the oracular leader on the television screen is the image of someone they believe, still.

Only leaders with a higher trust quotient are allowed to cross the Lakshman Rekha during a pandemic.

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