Editor’s Note

Freedom is a word not yet banalised by repetition. That is because politics itself has become a repetitive rage against the sins of inheritance. Freedom retains its freshness in a world where the gladiators of change keep crawling out of the cracks in the Establishment. It’s their profusion that makes politics as passionate as the old Greek sport, and we, the spectators, have come to accept the paradoxes of freedom they have sloganised to great success. The paradoxes are overwhelming. Look there. The so-called liberators—some legitimised by elections and some by their versions of celestial mandate—are the ones stifling civil societies, for freedom needs to be controlled by the higher purpose of the enforcer.

The enforcers are everywhere, building their tents on the ruins of the old certainties of both Left and Right. Freedom’s controllers defy familiar definitions of ideology. What they abhor is the centre—rotten and wishy-washy. They inhabit the farthest provinces of salvation, and where the knowing enforcer is the only synonym for future. They are the sole custodians of resentment, a privilege they think frees them from accountability, and even from the reality beyond their shadows. Power is a passage to the absolutism of the chosen one.

One comes across a dozen books blaming democracy, or the liberating isms it once spawned, for it. The prime suspect is liberalism, its misplaced priorities and its self-righteous evangelism. That’s easy to comprehend, considering the earnestness with which it indexed us, reduced us to easy identities. As one of those books argued, “if the logic of identity politics is to divide societies into ever smaller, self-regarding groups, it is also possible to create identities that are broader and more integrative. One does not have to deny the potentialities and lived experiences of individuals to recognize that they can also share values and aspirations with much broader circles of citizens.”

That was stretching the ideal—or diluting the collective desire for change—for the warrior class. The most vocal section of liberals was militarised by the demands of identity; the militarisation was a response to injustice, perceived and real. Injustices mined from history and culled from unequal societies. They knew better than us who we are.

That overreach added to further alienations in democracies. The elitism of liberals made it easier for a new set of freedom fighters—we call them populists—to declare war on the righteousness of identity politics. They launched a visceral version of apolitical politics. They saw in the lofty idealism of the liberal the condescending power of social engineering. They tapped into the ‘silence’ of the majority.

In power, most of them have been convinced by their special place in history, as redeemers who came from below. They were so fascinated with their own special status that they gave in to the temptations of invincibility, a trait shared by history’s me-alone leaders. They, even those who were legitimate beneficiaries of resentment, became our masters of curated freedom. It was, in spite of disruptions in politics we celebrated as freedom’s most passionate street performance, as if the old trajectory of the liberator-turned-autocrat has not changed at all.

The whimsies of democracy have agitated many profound minds. They still do. Some blame it on the exaggerated sanctity of elections, which, they argue, subordinates democracies to the tyranny of representation. The overrated exercise of franchise provides no protection against illiberal instincts of the elected. Illiberal democracies, the favourite habitats of populists, have made elections a futile test of legitimacy.

So what does democracy need? The most obvious answer is: A new management model. As a smart American defender of democracy writes, “there is no particular reason to be optimistic about democracy at this point: those bent on subverting it are at least as busy perfecting a populist authoritarian art of governance as defenders of democracy are racing to issue crisis manuals.” He himself has provided a brilliant manual. We, the citizens, he concludes, need to replace optimism with hope, which always points towards a path where elections will not be all about winning. There has to be a shared sense of dignity between the winner and the loser. We miss such decencies.

Do we miss it in India? Maybe first we need to ask whether the politics of pessimism in India has missed India itself. Most arguments, angst-wrapped or otherwise, still fall back on the old straitjackets of secularism, majoritarianism, inclusiveness and pluralism. These arguments preclude the reality of organic changes in society. They assume, with so much confidence, that societies are built on gravity-defying moral certitudes: every change is superficial, a passing reflection of ideologies and attitudes. They doubt the legitimacy of change.

A recent Pew survey was a revelation, if at all a revelation was required to see the sociology of change (Open carried the major findings of the survey in ‘A Portrait of the Indian’, July 12th). The emerging conservatism of India, marked by its religiosity and a heightened sense of the nation, was not a total repudiation of secularism or cultural pluralism; it was the inevitability of evolution—and the redundancy of superimposed moralities of nation-building. To be secular was to be freed from the anti-modernity of religion, and to be religious was to be imprisoned by unreason. Modernity was something to be acquired by shedding the elemental identities of a social being. The Ideal Man, tradition-proof, had to be created from the progressivism of the socialist age. That man was not destined to last. We saw his fall in the Pew survey.

Still, the Modi era is cultural voodoo in the liberal interpretation. The change in national character has been reduced to the size of the man who understood it better, and tapped into it with the kind of single-mindedness never seen before in Indian politics. The change cannot be undone by politics that borrows its wares from the isms abandoned by India.

Now return to that question of whether the fundamental decencies are missing in Indian democracy. Do elections produce here only the winner and the enemy? It is more than a character flaw; it is about the cultural space where politics is played out. This space is occupied by two types. One is the constant denier. The moral fundamentalism of the denier shuts out inconvenient reality; its protest is rejectionism. It’s not about what it stands for; it’s all about what it can’t accept, no matter how shattering is the cultural disruption around.

It is not dissent alone that is intellectually problematic. The readers of change, the second type, are not the defenders of the ideal; they are compelled to find perfection in the system. They struggle to equate conservative ideals with the exigencies of governance. Can the intellectual right be independent from the government, as it is in, say, the US or UK? We should now know why the argument here, never deviating from the playbook, doesn’t go beyond offending and defending. It is self-censored freedom.

As India enters its 75th, we can certainly afford the will to free our freedoms from our misreadings of power.

Freedom Issue 2021ideologyIndian democracypolitics