Was there a more ominously forgettable idea spawned in independent India that all governments once elected simultaneously must be made independent of the electorate for five years, no matter what enormities they commit?
All in the name of cutting the costs of democracy and leaving the powers that will be to feed corporate coffers without let or hindrance.
Make no mistake: this turn to the totalitarian right presupposes that democracy must be made a mere adjunct to profiteering, rather than letting the principle of representative governance be the soul of the republican order.
This nefarious attempt to de-politicise democracy then seeks to reverse the history of collective human evolution.
Let us reiterate with conviction: the subject of human history is the evolutionary quest of human organisation from the hunting-gathering stage to the attainment of human equality through the systemic arrangement of representative governance.
All that after vanquishing monarchies and absolutisms of various definitions and records of oppression.
The subject of human history emphatically cannot be allowed to be the cynical discarding of democracy at the hands of the money bags who rode the shoulders of liberty through the last four or so centuries only to make their piles and then kick the democratic ladder from behind.
Economic monopolies like nothing better than political monopolies; and neither are to the emancipatory purpose of the vast masses of humankind.
Uncompromisingly, as a most laudable editorial in The Indian Express has stated with forceful candour, elections must be held whenever and wherever they are due, or when governments fall. They should be in accordance with current constitutional injunctions, regardless of what inconvenience it causes the profiteer.
As to intent: it has already been commented that this move pushed by Narendra Modi – handed out as a fiat emerging from a congenial committee which had no scholarly expertise – is meant to obtain not a ‘one nation, one election’ order, but a ‘one nation (Hindu), one party (BJP), one leader (is it a surprise that someone who believes his birth to have been ‘non-biological’ may also persuade himself of his likely immortality?)’ paradigm.
A new Caesarism stalks the republic.
It is to be hoped that in the days to come, not only parliament and the states, but “we the People” across the republic will make it known that India’s riches reside not in Dalal Street but in the streets and bylanes where women and men pride themselves on being citizens of a republic, owners of their governments, often regardless of the penuries they suffer from one dy to another.
No idea in independent India asks to be nipped as deep in the bud as this that the Modi dispensation now seeks to peddle.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
