Gen Z Has Done Its Bit to Defend Democracy

It is said that the singular achievement of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)-led Gen Z movement is to overcome the fear psychosis that has been afflicting the people at large due to the “governance by fear” model being pursued by the Union government and some state governments for the last several years.

At the dawn of the last millennium, Rabindranath Tagore, that great son of India, wrote these captivating lines: “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high … Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.” But in the last five decades or so, India has moved far away from this clarion call.

It all started with the era of the Emergency (1975-77), when a government hijacked the whole edifice of the state, a ruling party and leader who in effect treated the state as their personal estate. It was the imposition of a highly concentrated apparatus of power on a fundamentally federal society and the turning over of this centralised apparatus to inflict fear and anxiety.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

What has happened over the last few years is no different. Though the character and contents are different, there is a common thread between the Emergency and now – ‘governance by fear’. The only difference is that the method adopted then was a single, swift blow, and now it is akin to death by a thousand cuts. The effect on freedom and liberty is the same, probably much worse now!

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR), the monstrous tool of mass disenfranchisement let loose by a constitutional body called the Election Commission and endorsed by the Supreme Court, is the typical example. The present state can be called a neo-Emergency!

What is happening under this neo-Emergency is almost exactly what Steven Levitsky described in his seminal Book How Democracies Die:

“This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy – packing and “weaponising” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy – gradually, subtly and even legally – to kill it.“How do elected authoritarians shatter the democratic institutions that are supposed to constrain them? Some do it in one fell swoop. But more often the assault on democracy begins slowly. For many citizens, it may, at first, be imperceptible. After all, elections continue to be held. Opposition politicians still sit in congress. Independent newspapers still circulate. Each individual step seems minor – none appears to truly threaten democracy. Indeed, government moves to subvert democracy frequently enjoy a veneer of legality: They are approved by parliament or ruled constitutional by the supreme court. Many of them are adopted under the guise of pursuing some legitimate – even laudable – public objective, such as combating corruption, ‘cleaning up’ elections, improving the quality of democracy or enhancing national security.”

Why is this happening in a country touted as the world’s largest democracy? The answer is not far to seek – it entails the deliberate wrecking of India’s Constitution and attempts to ‘govern’ the country outside the ambit of this ‘charter of governance’.

In the run-up to India’s independence, the Constituent Assembly was entrusted with the task of drafting a ‘charter of governance’ for the nation’s teeming, poverty-ridden millions emerging out of the shadow of slavery into the glow of freedom. While the task was on, Sachidanand Sinha, provisional chairman of the assembly, approvingly quoted the resounding words of Joseph Story, describing the Constitution of the United States of America:

“The structure has been erected by architects of consummate skill and fidelity; its foundations are solid; its compartments are beautiful as well as useful; its arrangements are full of wisdom and order; and its defences are impregnable from without. It has been reared for immortality if the work of man may justly aspire for such title. It may nevertheless perish in an hour by the folly, or corruption, or negligence of its only keepers, the people … Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall when the wise are banished from the public councils because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded because they flatter the people in order to betray them.”

Despite its several flaws, India’s Constitution answers by and large to this description. The founding fathers, through the Constitution, had indeed put India’s institutions of democratic governance on ‘solid foundations’ and given us an instrument that was ‘beautiful as well as useful’. The defences of these institutions ‘are impregnable from without’. But because of the takeover of the Republic by the dishonest and the profligate, these institutions are being demolished from within.

The poor is scared while the corrupt prospers

While the honest, the poor and the powerless have been shrinking in fear – the very same fear that kept India a slave country for centuries – the corrupt and the venal ‘on whom India shines’ have been prospering and flourishing and have been strutting the country as if they own it.

There has been blatant inequity and inequality in economic development, resulting in unease and unrest, and in turn the rise of state terrorism to curb this. This is evident from the suppression of fundamental and human rights. Hemmed in from all sides, the Republic of India is tottering and wavering because the profligate and the sycophants have taken over the reins of office.

The Constitution of India established a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic in order to secure to all its citizens justice, social, economic and political; liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; equity of status and of opportunity; and to promote among them all fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the nation.

Sadly, in the neo-Emergency, these primary objectives of independent India are being mingled in dust. Justice has become inaccessible, distant, costly and purchasable. Liberty is being ravaged as if it does not exist. Equity is evaporating with the government abandoning the ‘welfare state’ and opting for a ‘predatory state’. Fraternity is being murdered through hate, intolerance and polarisation. The dignity of the individual is under severe assault. All these are posing serious challenges to the unity and integrity of the nation.

Around the same time Rabindranath Tagore sought an India “where the mind is without fear” (1910), the Tamil revolutionary poet Subramanya Bharati made this clarion call: “I have no fear over anything, Even if the whole world is against me, I have no fear over anything… Even if the sky above falls on my head I have no fear…”

These powerful voices of fearlessness were raised at the height of British imperial rule when we were subjects of a monarchy without fundamental or any other rights. Now, for the last nearly eight decades, we are citizens of a democracy with all the fundamental and other rights. Yet, the vast majority of us are living in fear. This, in essence, is the outcome of an almost perpetual state of Emergency and the ongoing neo-Emergency.

India of today is moving and is bestirred with new urges

Yet, if one has eyes to see and ears to hear, the India of today is moving and is bestirred with new urges. There is intense heart-searching – not out of despair, but in the earnest hope of finding a way out. The old value system has collapsed, but an intense search has already begun for new values for the establishment of a new morality in politics and public life.

Go out anywhere – among men and women, the young and the old – you will hear hundreds of questions, wanting to know why things have gone wrong, are going wrong, and what the way out is.

The organised political parties are unable to offer any answer or solution because they are themselves afflicted with bankruptcy. Most of them are debilitated and devalued in the eyes of the populace.

Manipulation instead of mass action has become their daily fare. They thunder at the hustings, promising the sky and the moon, but beyond rabble-rousing and oratory, there is no sincerity or hard work, no drive for building a mass movement, no endeavour to build independent mass organisations like J.P. did. The same old power game – government versus opposition – goes on. Neither the ruling party nor the opposition are able to safeguard even the integrity of the electoral system through which they get elected.

In the event, India’s democracy is getting devastated and ‘We, The People’ who have given ourselves this precious gift called democracy have to fend for ourselves. Every generation of Indians faces a moment when it is called to defend its democracy.

It looks as if Gen Z has risen to this. Just last year, writing in the epilogue of my book titled Emergency and Neo-Emergency: Who will Defend Democracy, I made this prediction:

“In the prevailing darkness of neo-Emergency, men and women move about like figures in silhouette. This is the twilight when they should regroup themselves for the task at hand. Soon, the sun shall arrive and identify them, and among them shall be seen new leaders with new messages and enriched genuine patriotism – a new resolve to make this land of ours a free, fearless, hate-free, and true DEMOCRACY to live in.”

The sun seems to have arrived. There is a general feeling that the recent protests by Gen-Z assure us that democracy in India will not be allowed to die and that people will turn to the Constitution to safeguard and preserve this country’s future. This will come true if the psychosis of fear is removed from the minds of the people.

The writer is author of the book Emergency and Neo-Emergency: Who will Defend Democracy, 2025, The Browser.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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