Democracy’s topsoil is blowing away

Since these are tricky times, let us begin this week with a trick question: what do the following events have in common with each other?

• The huge, and sometimes violent, protests in Noida last month by factory workers and domestic help over increase in minimum wages

• The refusal of a high court judge to recuse herself from a case in which her children are employed by one of the parties, and she herself is reported to have attended functions organised by that party's affiliates

• A gherao of judicial officers (appointed as adjudicators in appeals by deleted voters) by thousands of such disenfranchised voters in a district of West Bengal

• The deletion of names of almost 30 lakh voters in West Bengal, who had voted in previous elections and possessed all the required documents, because of an opaque, algorithm-driven 'logical discrepancy' feature not provided in any law or used in any other state

• The holding of polls without deciding the pending appeals of these 30 lakh unfortunates, and the callous indifference of the Supreme Court to their constitutional right to vote, saying that they could vote in the next election!

• The imposition of a casteist bail condition on Adivasi Dalit accused (but not convicted) by an Odisha court to the effect that they should clean police stations every morning for two months, demeaning their dignity and making a mockery of the law

• The defection of seven Rajya Sabha MPs, led by one Raghav Chadha, from the AAP to the BJP

• A poor tribal in Odisha being compelled to carry the corpse of his dead sister to a bank in order to prove her death, just so that the meagre balance in her account could be transferred to him as the heir — KYC converted from Know Your Customer to Know Your Corpse

• The dismissal of cases of hate speech against leaders of a political party by a court on the grounds that their utterances did not amount to expressing hate or inciting violence. One of these speeches included the now infamous exhortation: 'desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maro salon ko'. The other was a video of a chief minister pointing a rifle at a target with a picture of a Muslim man

The incidents noted above differ in context, content, import and location, but they all contain one common element: the complete collapse of what makes a developed country — governance, common law, societal values, empathy, the rule of law, trust in the government or its institutions, the idea of equity and even-handed justice.

Taken together, they point to the breakdown of something cumulatively more precious — democracy itself. They vindicate the far-sighted and cautionary words of Dr Ambedkar: that democracy in India was only a thin layer of topsoil which could be blown away easily and should not be taken for granted.

A devil's wind is blowing through the country these days, removing Ambedkar's topsoil and exposing the outcrop of power lust, greed, religious bigotry, casteism and violence that have always underpinned our society.

We had expected that progressive governments, democratically elected, would over time erode and disintegrate these negative features of our civilisational landscape, but the opposite has happened.

Successive governments, more so the one we have had for the last twelve years, have only reinforced these flaws and fault lines; they have been made the driving force behind national (even international) policies, they are being embedded in laws and educational curricula, they have become unapologetic instruments of state policy, they are the agenda on which elections are now being fought.

The defection of Raghav Chadha only confirms this terminal decline because it shows that a liberal upbringing and London education are no shield against the unscrupulousness of India's politics, and it vindicates the mounting distrust of politicians in general.

The executive has even managed to brutalise our society to a point where the top 10 per cent care only for their own comforts and privileges, leaving the other 90 per cent to survive as best as they can. We are among the most inequitable countries in the world, and proud of it. Democracy is the last thing which can emerge from this witch's cauldron.

We had naively expected that when the executive went on a rampage, our judiciary at least would rein it in and preserve the rule of law. That hope has been belied and now lies trampled in the dust, as some of the above episodes demonstrate.

We have today plumbed depths lower even than the ADM Jabalpur moment of Emergency days. Then at least, there was a constitutionally legitimate state of Emergency in place; today we do not have even that fig leaf to cover the government's naked pursuit of absolute power.

Then there was one ADM Jabalpur judgment; today we are being shredded by a thousand judicial cuts every day, whether it be on denying bail, allowing elections to be stolen from under magisterial noses, redefining hate to suit a particular ideology, spurning any notion of accountability, or throwing overboard any restatement of judicial values.

A Constitution alone cannot make a democracy, or ensure that a democracy survives. For that to happen, the topsoil has to be tended carefully, its nutrients lovingly added and preserved, the negative infestations and weeds kept away; the gardeners have to be people of wisdom and empathy, people who love what they are doing, not mercenaries seeking the maximum payouts.

Sadly, it is the mercenaries and carpet-baggers who own our patch of land today. What remains of the topsoil will be blown away soon, leaving a rocky outcrop, a civilisational desert of no value to anyone but these rapacious seekers of power and their hirelings. They will rule over a wasteland, but then, as Satan mused in Paradise Lost: 'Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.'

Views are personal. More of the writer's works can be read here

Avay Shukla is a retired IAS officer and author of Holy Cows and Loose Cannons — the Duffer Zone Chronicles and other works. He blogs at avayshukla.blogspot.com