Three Cheers for Democracy

WE HAVE JUST entered a year that is all set to reassure us that democracy still works, and for the better, much to the disappointment of anyone out there planning another tome on the unravelling of an exhausted system of governance. And the year, with elections likely to be held in as many as 60 countries or more, will also test what it takes for a politician to get a safer constituency in the popular mind, and we may exclude those Leaders with a Capital L who are certain to get 99 per cent of the votes. Better stick to the familiar, though I must admit that I write this from a place that, despite the burden of history, doesn’t work as an ideal or even as a metaphor for leadership today. Seen from a wintry, rainy London, politics is the Theatre of the Inauthentic, and in the lead role is a politician for whom no idea—or ideology—is bigger than the office he holds. All opinion polls predict a “slaughter” at the next hustings for the Conservatives, who can no longer afford to take themselves for granted as the natural rulers of Great Britain. Why? No answer is more apparent than the current prime minister, who owes his passage to Downing Street to a Westminster coup—and to a bit of Et tu, Rishi. He may owe his eventual evacuation—as the polls suggest—to the speed and slickness with which he shuffled identities. What a journey it was: from a junior minister to No 2; from a loser in the party race to a prime minister with PowerPoint sharpness; from inflation warrior to reluctant tax pleaser; from boats stopper to immigration vacillator… To add adjective to him is meaningless today, for it is just Sunakism, which is not Right or Left or Centre, let alone Conservative. It is not conviction or even convenience. It is the power of being there, just there.

So much for the Westminster model. But wait. He’s the MPs’ choice. People have not endorsed yet. Democracy may yet turn out to be a system of ruthless realism and reason, the rock on which conservatism itself is built.

Across the Atlantic, democracy offers a three-way fight between a superannuated gerontocrat, a raging swashbuckler playing victim, and the courts. The president and his party, weighed down by biology and ideology, are hoping that the courts will achieve what they can’t in November. Still, to gauge the mind of democracy, which has a habit of defying political ventriloquism, we need to linger a bit longer with the man who continues to be caricatured and condemned in equal measure as the worst personification of democracy, with no marks given to his last term, despite his relative triumphs in economy and foreign policy. Only the denials in defeat and the horror of January 6 remain. The inevitability of Trump, unsettling for liberals and inspiring for the “deplorables”, only brings out a polarising trait of democracy: its moral neutrality.

For its moral content, welcome home. Set aside all those textbook exclamations about Indian democracy and spare a moment for measuring the depth of a relationship, which is perhaps the most intense in a democracy. The relationship between power and emotional nationalism plays out nowhere as spectacularly, and consistently, as in India today. At a time when leaders, among them dictators and half-made democrats, try everything from manipulation of history to invention of hurt, to make a working relationship with people, Narendra Modi, by being just Narendra Modi, has already formed a covenant with the largest number of the world’s most volatile voters. It is explained by the power of authenticity in politics, and its success in achieving that rare symmetry between political biography and national destiny. The life of one politician has become a nation’s definitive story in change. Maybe in 2024 those who suffer from Modiphobia will go beyond lazy labelling such as autocracy and majoritarianism and find out why he is more complex than their portrait of him in black and saffron.

POSTSCRIPT Islamophobia is passé it seems. October 7 has changed everything, most profoundly the victim state and those who view its victimhood through the prism of wokefulness. Israelophobia prevails. It is burning bright on Ivy League campuses and in London streets. Cry, My Beloved Gaza could be a noble sentiment considering the death toll and famine in a place whose original tragedy should be traced to Hamas’ rule. For the young, no dissent is as romantic as anti-Israelism, and Gaza being the most searing statement of conscience. Will this demographic disparity in assessing Israel’s existential struggle have a say in great-power attitude towards the Jewish state?

2024democracyDonald TrumpNarendra Modipolitical ideologyRishi Sunak