No country is immune from rising Politics of identity
The collapse of the Sheikh Hasina regime in Bangladesh in the wake of violent and widening street protests is a cautionary tale for the world on many counts. Growing internal dissensions and distress certainly underpinned the crisis, but there is a wider regional and global context that is equally troubling. It is useful to recall that authoritarianism, jobless growth, augmenting inequalities, declining standards of living for significant proportions of populations, and increasing mass distress are not unique to Bangladesh.
Many countries across the world, astonishingly including several in the prosperous and ‘modernised’ West, are experiencing rising disorders, popular rage and the progressive radicalisation of politics and society. Crucially, as was the case in Bangladesh, the fundamentals of the democratic process have long broken down under pressure of what has been described as hyperpartisanship—where political parties are no longer able to speak across ideological lines, to forge a common national agenda even on the most critical issues of security and survival.
Anne Case and Angus Deaton document the rising incidence of what they describe as “deaths of despair”—suicides, drug overdoses and alcoholic liver disease—in the US, and note that America is unique among the world’s advanced economies where life expectancy is shrinking. From a peak of 79 years in 2019, it fell to 77 in 2020 and further, to just over 76 in 2021. In their book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Case and Deaton assemble convincing evidence that it is deaths among non-college-educated white middle-aged males, disproportionately in poorer rural and small-town communities that have been left behind in America’s economic juggernaut, which account for much of these deleterious trends.
It is precisely this demographic that is cleaving to extremist Right Wing and white supremacist ideologies, and who participated in, or supported, the ‘insurrection’ of January 6, 2021, in which a riotous mob overran the US Capitol (the Seat of Congress), coaxed on by then-President Donald Trump, who had lost the elections of November 2020. Five persons were killed and hundreds—including 174 police personnel—were injured.
More significantly, with another polarising election now looming large, there is widespread apprehension that the political divisions in the country have gone so deep that a second ‘civil war’ is becoming an increasing possibility, even as growing numbers of citizens reject the credibility and outcome of electoral processes, and wild conspiracy theories extinguish trust in institutions, leaderships and fellow citizens.
Surveys indicate that at least 20 per cent of the US population now believes that violence is ‘necessary to bring the country back on track’. Significantly, this is substantially the population segment that owns a surfeit of weapons in a country awash with guns (America has 120 guns owned by civilians for every 100 residents). US democracy has been repeatedly ‘downgraded’ on multiple international indices over the past decade, and the country is now categorised as a ‘backsliding democracy’ on account of repeated election manipulations and compounding executive overreach. In 2020-21, the Centre for Systemic Peace, for the first time, classified the US as an ‘anocracy’—a regime that mixes democratic with autocratic features.
If this can happen in America, long (mistakenly) held up as an administrative, economic and governance model for the less fortunate countries of the world, the risks for countries that only aspire to its relative stability and prosperity can only be exponentially greater. The dangers of authoritarian cults and polarising identity politics, today, afflict much of the world, including states with relatively deep democratic traditions and institutional strengths.
These dangers are even greater for a country like India, afflicted by multiple divisions of ethnicity, ideology and faith, with a wide and widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots, located as it is in one of the most unstable regions in the world, and buffeted by the growing uncertainties of a collapsing world order, multiple crises created by a population explosion, and increasing environmental and resource stresses.
Against a backdrop of rising global chaos, only extraordinary sagacity of policy and leadership can steer us away from breakdown. Instead, we find an increasingly strident politics of identity, the tactical deployment of destabilisation and violence within the country by its ruling elites, patterns of systemic oppression against those the regime views with disfavour, and the rampant abuse of the agencies and institutions of government.
These may momentarily tamp down visible manifestations of dissent and public anger. Bangladesh presented an image of relative stability, dramatic economic progress, and the comprehensive containment of once-rampant Islamist terrorism, but the forces of radicalisation and public discontent were long simmering just beneath the surface. Those who hold the reins of power in India today may be lulled into the complacent belief that they are impervious to any comparable threat. But no country, today, is immune.
Ajai Sahni
Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management, South Asia Terrorism Portal
ajaisahni@gmail.com