Ever since independence in 1947, India has been a gloriously messy democracy. In Sunil Khilnani’s analysis, our way of being democratic has been “untidy, massively complex, unsatisfying.” Or to use the words of an interviewee of Saeed Akhtar Mirza from his brilliant series A Tryst With the People of India, we have “happily muddled through” after independence, and created our own unique paths as a democratic nation despite the challenges of our size and diversity.
Like in other countries, there’s constantly been many unfulfilled promises and goals, and to our credit we have continued to utilise democratic means and constitutional norms to work towards them: some of the best examples being the passing of the Forest Rights Act and the Right to Information Act in the mid-2000s. The story of India after 2014, of course, is quite different.
The run-up to the 2014 parliamentary election was as messy as our polity could get, with massive anti-corruption protests, acrimonious media debates, and a no-holds-barred censuring of politicians in power including of the prime minister. When the Indian public voted out the 10-year-incumbent Congress party-led alliance and handed the mandate to a supposedly development-centric BJP-led alliance, the prevailing mainstream sentiment aligned neatly with the ‘messy democracy’ model: the nation had once again muddled through the challenges of the 2000s and the 2010s, and created a new path for itself: that of “minimum government, maximum governance”.
Today, ten years of the exact opposite state of affairs later – maximum government, minimum governance – India is a messed-up democracy, not the messy democracy it used to be. We no longer know how to muddle through. Instead, we are sinking deeper and deeper into a totalitarian abyss. To me, like for many conscientious Indians, witnessing this degradation first-hand has been a disturbing experience. What follows is a brief account of the early years of this decade-long nightmare – a nightmare which likely might go on for quite a long while.
When no one feared being arrested for critical posts on even the PM
In 2011, when the so-called Anti-Corruption ‘Movement’ was being orchestrated, I was naive enough to extend my wholehearted support to the protests. Each day my flatmates and I eagerly watched Nikhil Wagle’s prime time show, especially to follow his commentary on the Anna ‘aandolan’. We celebrated the arrest of Suresh Kalmadi, cursed the arrogance of Kapil Sibal and Manish Tewari, and shared countless memes and jokes and ‘forwards’ on politics and politicians (no one feared being arrested or otherwise harassed for publicly posting critical stuff on even the prime minister).
Besides, I turned myself into a hashtag activist, started following journalists on Twitter, participated in anti-corruption rallies in Maharashtra, and went on a pilgrimage of sorts to Ralegan Siddhi (the ‘model village’ where Anna Hazare lived).
To my mind these were all important things to do. Actively contributing to public discourse and action, after all, was the hallmark of a democratic citizen, one who was aware that democracy meant much more than just elections and voting. Besides, going by my Facebook interactions, it looked like most of my friends and colleagues agreed. Then when election day arrived in May 2014, I joined them in voting against the Congress party and giving BJP a ‘chance’.
During his first week in office, Modi made quite a drama of bowing at the steps of the Parliament building and ostensibly signaling his admiration for democratic procedures. But it was quickly clear – if it had not already been – that the outward respect for democratic ideas was a sham, that Modi and his close associates believed India had “too much democracy”, and that they were interested primarily in ruling, not in governance.
Modi assumed neither the decency of the outgoing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, nor dialed down what looked like his primary identity over that of prime ministership: being a BJP-RSS spokesperson. He began spending a large amount of his time outside New Delhi campaigning to bring BJP-RSS to power in state elections, or outside India on foreign trips accompanied by Adani et al. The fortunes of his extended parivar (the RSS and the Gujarati corporations) appeared more important to the prime minister than the welfare of the people of the nation.
It also became clear that the Union government intended to prop up its chosen street thugs and social media trolls, encourage their polemics to keep the society on a constant boil, and thus distract the public from basic issues including even their own miseries – all well-known fascist strategies to cling to power. This was evident in the giddy glee of the extremists who lynched Mohsin Shaikh just a few days into BJP-RSS raj (everyone arrested has been acquitted by now); the insanity around the films Haider and PK; the reactions to health minister Harsh Vardhan’s support for a “noise-free” Diwali and Barack Obama’s and Aamir Khan’s comments on religious intolerance; and the general deluge of fake news, misinformation, and allegations of “anti-national” and “anti-Hindu” against folks not toeing the lines of the thugs and trolls (like the courageous JNU students and faculty in February 2016).
The prime minister even made it a point to put his unofficial stamp of approval on many of the most abusive, deplorable individuals on social media (and continues to even now). And which conscientious Indian can forget the then-new-low of Modi dragging shamshans and kabristans into his characteristically tasteless and divisive political rhetoric.
I wasn’t an analyst or an academic, and sorely lacked a deeper understanding of politics. But nevertheless as an ordinary Indian I felt embarrassed that my hatred towards the Congress party had blinded me to the absolute and immediate dangers of bringing the BJP-RSS to power. Moreover, I realised to my shame, that the intense anti-Congress hatred of young voters like me during 2011-13 had been carefully manufactured by a partisan media machinery (now better known as ‘Godi media’) and other groups. Even today, after a full decade of the BJP-RSS’s massively corrupt tenure, the mainstream media will hardly use the terms corrupt and corruption to describe its functioning. It is worth noting that the Modi government’s financial corruption precedes the recent electoral bonds and PM-CARES scandals, with many question marks over where the tremendous amounts of money collected as new types of cess since 2014-15, like Krishi Kalyan cess, has gone.
I began airing my opinions on the post-2014 developments in everyday conversations, social media posts, and writings for independent media outlets. Harking back to my enthusiastic participation in the earlier anti-corruption protests, I believed that speaking truth to the BJP-RSS’s power was my duty as a democratic citizen. I was born in the late 1980s, and as long as I could remember, we the people of India had enjoyed tremendous (if not absolute) freedom to criticise, castigate, and ridicule politicians and elites. Among the most fun parts of the Marathi newspapers that my father read, and the English ones that I could access at the town library, were the daily political cartoons, including by the legendary R.K. Laxman. Among the most memorable movie moments from my childhood was one from Krantiveer in which Nana Patekar publicly yells at and mocks politicians who incite communal violence for political gain.
As it turned out, all of my pre-2014 reminiscences increasingly felt made-up: I was realising that very few of my friends and colleagues had grown up with the civic memories and values that I associated with the 1990s and 2000s. Maybe R.K. Laxman actually never existed. Maybe Krantiveer was just a fragment from a weird dream. Maybe Yeh jo public hai yeh sab jaanti hai was a figment of my imagination gone berserk.
It was all really surreal, the change which I saw in so many around me after the 2014 election. I painfully remember how routine conversations with old friends and colleagues began to feel a bit weird, as if there was something bristling under what seemed to be surface niceties. On at least three occasions, some old friends finally decided to lay bare what they were thinking. I am not kidding when I say that all of them, on separate occasions, asked me the same question: Why do you hate Modi? Among other things, I remember telling them that in the past I had criticised the UPA government’s policies and conduct with the same conviction, but had never been asked Why do you hate Manmohan Singh? They were completely unfazed.
The anti-national tag
This state of affairs extended to social media posts, and quite all of a sudden I stopped receiving positive responses for my views and analyses. WhatsApp group conversations often became heated. Facebook posts frequently saw angry comments. After I moved to the US in 2016 for a PhD, my very own friends, some of whom had known me for decades, suddenly began reprimanding me: You live abroad, so you don’t get to say anything about “our” India. Before I knew it, the baseless barbs of being ‘anti-Modi’ had regressed to the juvenile allegations of being ‘anti-national’ and ‘anti-Hindu’.
It is worth reiterating that these were the same individuals who not long back were cheering my political views and opinions in the run-up to the election. They were the same citizens with whom I had stood shoulder-to-shoulder during rallies and candle marches against the Congress government’s policy blunders. They were the same folks who refused to apply the ‘live abroad so don’t comment on India’ rule to those NRIs who sang praises of Modi and BJP-RSS. Most exasperating of all, these were people who knew me for years or decades, and were well aware of who I was, including my “patriotic” credentials. Their conduct was completely unexplainable by any rational, commonsensical logic. I still remember the shock and agony of reading some nasty comments on my FB posts by a kaka (‘uncle’) – father of a school friend. For years, I had been to his home on countless occasions and spent hours in fun banter conversing on all sorts of topics, and it took just one social media post calling out the BJP-RSS for him to cancel me and jettison all of our past camaraderie.
Needless to say, such tensions were surfacing all over the country. Tens of thousands of conscientious Indians were having to face similarly absurd reactions to pretty basic opinions and arguments. At a fundamental level, these reactions were foolish and hypocritical. How come BJP-RSS supporters considered it okay, even patriotic, to criticise an Indian prime minister when it was Manmohan Singh, but the same act became blasphemous with Modi?
How was it acceptable to openly express critical opinions about the Indian National Congress, but the same act became taboo with the BJP?
How come openly criticising our own country and its systems was a routine affair pre-2014 (for example, the cafe scene in Rang De Basanti), and all of a sudden such honest self-reflection has become treason?
All in all, the early post-2014 period was a time of betrayals. People betrayed long-standing friendships, even family relationships, to label others as ‘anti-national’ or ‘leftist’ (as if it’s an evil thing!) or ‘anti-Hindu’, etc. There are countless stories of such fissures. But over and above these interpersonal betrayals was what can be termed The Great Betrayal of India’s democratic values.
By overnight redefining democracy to mean “unquestioningly support the ‘elected’ PM, his party and his parivar”, millions of Indians, mostly from the more privileged upper and middle classes, had decimated in one go our painstakingly inculcated civic and democratic values. I often think about how until May 2014, many folks in my social and professional networks were gung-ho about criticising powerful ministers, about holding a prime minister accountable for their government’s and party’s misdemeanors, and about sharing satirical (even atrocious) memes about political leaders and elites.
After the election, it is as if they just plainly forgot what their own lives and conversations were like in the past. When confronted, they came up with lazy rationalisations which only proved one point: they had convinced themselves that Modi and BJP had to be treated completely differently from other prime ministers and parties.
To put it differently, a large proportion of India’s well-to-do classes believed, even if they didn’t say it out loud, that Modi was less of a prime minister and more of a shahenshah (to use Rahul Gandhi’s famous label). They made it clear that they favoured our legendarily noisy democracy only when and where non-BJP parties were in power, while with BJP-RSS in power they preferred quiet compliance. They were all relatively well-educated folks with access to socioeconomic privilege and to multiple resources, including the Internet for basic fact-checks of Modi’s and BJP ministers’ regular lies and exaggerations. Nevertheless, they had collectively decided that they did not want to be dynamic citizens of the Republic of India, but docile subjects of Modi’s ‘Bharat’.
Modi himself tested their docility with demonetisation in late 2016. And how well all of them cheerfully endured some misery, minimised the great miseries of others, and slandered critical voices, to prove their unquestioning loyalty towards the badshahi!
Today, 2014 seems like way back in the past, though it’s only been ten lousy years. Unfortunately, many of the folks who voted for the BJP and its allies then have continued to enjoy their role of a passive praja that looks down upon active citizens and looks away when they are harassed, jailed, or worse. As enthusiastic consumers of the BJP-RSS’s communal and casteist propaganda, the docility and the callousness have by now become second nature to them. But in the interim, millions of Indians have turned 18 and become potential new voters.
To these new voters I say: The adults around you have screwed up big time. At the altar of their favoured shahenshah they have betrayed not only old friendships and timeless democratic values, but also your present and future. As a nation, we Indians have never been so foolish, so docile, so servile – it is embarrassing, really.
The enforced amnesia of pre-2014 India might make you think that there is no alternative but to live under the supposedly benevolent autocracy of the likes of Modi and his parivar (for all we know, your crucial 20s might be spent genuflecting to the badshahi of Ajay Bisht). However, if you scratch under the surface of the dominant narratives, you’ll find stories of a vibrant nation with its pragmatic voters who have thrown up massive surprises now and then, often showing errant politicians their proper place.
So, go out without fail in the coming weeks and vote wisely. Who knows, you might end up playing a historic role in helping rehabilitate our royally messed-up democracy to its erstwhile glorious messiness.
Kiran Kumbhar is a historian, teacher and former physician, currently affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
