Seventy-five years ago, the dawn of Indian democracy was baptized in blood, tears and loss of lives and livelihoods. It was also burnished by the hope of a new future. The reborn Indian revelling in the ecstasy of united identity didn’t realise that the tryst with destiny was happening at the crossroads. There were roads less taken since the journey was yet to begin. As I wrote in one of the special issues of the India Today magazine, my own journey began with unsolicited displacement.
Driven out with my mother and seven siblings from a comfortable house in Dera Ghazi Khan, now in Pakistan, I spent my childhood in a refugee camp in Jalandhar, then a small town in Punjab. Dismemberment, discombobulation, distance, dislocation and despair were my personal Partition tropes. It was also my crossroad. With no permanent shelter or vocation, street hawking was perhaps the family’s best option to survive.
A good education was a luxury. For a Midnight’s Child like me, a ramshackle, four-room municipal school laid the foundation for what I would become 20 years later. By the century’s end, India would become a Global Knowledge Empire with me one of its picayune subjects. In the years that followed, I witnessed the heat and dust of politics, the rise, fall, and rise and fall of the Gandhis, and the birth of other political dynasties—some regional and others national. I recorded the emergence of the coalition and opportunistic politics and nefarious nexuses in big business. As a journalist, I noted the financial policy tides that shaped India’s economic coastline and painted on paper with pigments of pan-power political rainbows. As India Today magazine’s editor in 1996, I would often stand on the terrace of our Connaught Place office to ruminate and recollect.
I would run my gaze along New Delhi’s skyline to register the changes in the city and its power centres since I came to India as a little boy with little to my name. From my perch, I would watch the ebb and flow of crowds through the Metro station, whose entry and exit were in the same block. My mind would drift to the railway over-bridge under which I had played as a child.
As a primary school student, I vaguely remember the first Lok Sabha elections of 1952. Crowds of youngsters in spotless white homespun applauded and crisscrossed the streets, waving Congress flags and shouting “Chacha Nehru Zindabad” Then it was the Congress vs none. In 1957, the political tapestry was tricolour. Children like me would collect toy merchandise of the Congress symbol—a kisan and two bullocks—from the party’s office. Then India lacked even a dozen national and local parties in total. Only the Republican Party of India sought votes in the name of caste or community.
Congress ruled both the Centre and the states. India began as a participative democracy where maximum leaders and institutions played a significant role. Though the Congress enjoyed an over two-thirds majority in Parliament, it allowed the tiny Opposition its say. But the Opposition ranks were populated with giants like EMS Namboodiripad, Ram Manohar Lohia, Acharya Kripalani, Syama Prasad Mukherjee, Piloo Modi, and Nath Pai—all leaders with limited geographical influence but occupying equal mind space as the ruling party leaders. But by the late 1970s, it became an age of peregrination. India’s political pin codes had changed.
I had changed residence, moving from a slum to a slightly better habitat. Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial style was driving many Congress leaders to seek greener pastures and split the motherlode. Such departures sowed the seeds of caste and community-based outfits. But the Gandhis rarely lost control. But the divisions allowed the valedictorians to become the first real Opposition. After Partition, the first wound democracy suffered was in 1959 when Indira, as Congress president, persuaded her papa premier to dismiss Kerala’s elected Communist government. Then, her son Sanjay advised her to impose the Emergency. Later, her other son Rajiv was party to her decision to dislodge Andhra’s NTR government. Such transgressions exposed Constitutional infirmities. During six decades of Congress rule, over 100 state governments were dismissed. Legislatures became subservient to the Executive led by the all-powerful Prime Ministers.
As they netted massive mandates in their personal name, the progressive political participation of other institutions diminished. Parties became vessels to ferry personality cults along the national mainstream. In the ’70s, Congress president DK Barooah declared that ‘Indira is India, India is Indira’. His was the first perversion of the idea of democracy. Between 1952 and 1984, prime ministers amassed more power. Parties became just instruments of promotion. History had played a cruel trick on the fathers of the Constitution, persons of eminence who had never imagined that their trust in the future system would be misplaced. They had conceived a framework of checks and balances guarded by three pillars of democracy; the legislature to frame laws, the Executive to implement them and the judiciary to uphold the rule of law.
The media became the fourth pillar, expected to be the watchdog to ensure the other three did their job impartially. Today all four neither balance nor check each other’s greed to usurp authority. Nowhere is it written that the prime minister can suspend fundamental rights and jail the Opposition like Indira did by invoking the National Security Act in 1975 without Cabinet concurrence. The President signed the Proclamation of Emergency, ignoring proper procedure. The founding vision of democracy didn’t foresee a Prime Minister-led executive superseding senior judges and appointing a junior jurist as the Chief Justice. The contours of democracy had transformed into a single silhouette of unbridled power. Indira once said: “The power to question is the basis of all human progress.” Resilient Indian democratic genes hit back. Her every deed was questioned. She faced the wrath of the same people who had installed her on her lofty seat.
She is the first Congress PM to lose both power and her own election. This birthed the first experimental coalition of conflicting ideologies and individuals, which floated the Janata Party rule in 1977; it collapsed in less than three years under its own contradictions and power lust. Elections brought back the same person who was denounced as dictator just 30 months ago. After a decade of dynasty rule, Indira’s assassination gave her party its last hurrah in the form of a massive mandate. It was also the last opportunity to stop or pause dynastic succession. But President Giani Zail Singh, led by emotions and personal loyalty, appointed Rajiv as the PM even before the CWC or the CPP could meet. The Congress model revived other dynasties across India—the Abdullahs in J&K, the Chautalas in Haryana, the Gowdas in Karnataka, the Badals in Punjab and the Yadavs in Uttar Pradesh. The transition from a guided democracy to dynastic democracy was total.
However, Rajiv lacked his mother’s Machiavellian streak. He was challenged by his Finance Minister, V P Singh, the first leader with the Congress gene to democratically dislodge family rule. Unfortunately, Rajiv was killed, signalling the end of Gandhi’s tragic and adventurous era. In 1991, a Brahminical cabal conspired to anoint Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao as AICC President; he was the first non-Gandhi Congress PM and headed a delicate minority government. The Gandhi moxie declined as a vote puller. Indian democracy accepted other legitimate leaders; single-party rule gave way to H D Deve Gowda’s multi-party coalition in 1996, followed by Atal Behari Vajpayee, who helmed a government of 22 parties. Half of India by then was run by other dynasties or regional parties.
The Coalition model lasted for 15 years until Narendra Modi appeared as the nemesis of bloodline politics. He brought back single-party rule after three decades. His electoral energy also reduced the Congress to just 42 MPs, erasing its eligibility to be a recognised party in Parliament, which it had dominated in 1951.
Indian democracy has come full circle. Today, India @75 is a global power. A country once begging for food is the world’s fastest-growing economy and a global technology titan. However, genuine democracy is yet to take root in the soil of its popular psyche. The Opposition’s growing irrelevance, the judiciary’s plummeting credibility, fawning tv-terrorists and overpowering Executive signal its slow decay. Legislatures have become ominous operas of viciousness. Two decades ago, it was decided that state Assemblies and Parliament would meet at least for 100 days in a year.
This has never been implemented. Prime ministers and chief ministers have turned their ever-expanding residential premises into the real estate of governance. Parties lack internal democracy and have junked genuine organizational elections. Their office bearers are chosen by the privileged few.
The Election Commission ignores dubious electoral conduct. Party meetings are now colourful circuses held in air-conditioned venues. Leaders rarely meet their MPs or MLAs. Ministerial offices resemble posh corporate offices with armed guards restricting access. Democracy has become a fight between “us” and “them”.
Democracy connects leaders with the people who choose them. Seventy-five years later, the gap between the electorate and the elected has widened. From “Chacha Nehru Zindabad” to “Indira is India” to “Har Ghar Modi”, Indian democracy is a prisoner of performing personalities. Our resurgent yet exclusive democracy is a democracy of the few, by the fewer and for the fewest. It has been grabbed by a tiny prosperous India and leaving a penurious Bharat out.
PRABHU CHAWLA
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com
Follow him on Twitter @PrabhuChawla