State of the Union: A democracy in peril

During the press conference by the four Supreme Court judges, Justice Jasti Chelameswar made a rather prophetic statement. He said: “The four of us are convinced that unless this institution is preserved and it maintains its equanimity, democracy will not survive in this country.” Though that statement was made in the context of the ongoing difficulties among the judges of the Supreme Court, it has wider import. The key words are “institutions have to be preserved”. Any and every democracy rests on the foundation of strong institutionalism. The elected executive is not the repository of the will of the sovereign. The other institutions are also equal stakeholders and arbiters of the destiny of nations. The founding fathers of the modern Indian state assiduously built and nurtured independent institutions, namely a robust legislature that could hold the government of the day to account. An independent judiciary, a free, fearless and vibrant media, an autonomous Comptroller and Auditor General and last but not least an impartial Election Commission. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Indian state over the past seven decades has been the management of civil-military relations through the maintenance of civilian supremacy. It is for this reason alone India is one of the few countries liberated from the yoke of imperialism after the end of the Second World War that never fell victim either to a military dictatorship or one-party totalitarian rule.

However, today democracy is indeed in peril. It has not happened overnight, but in the past 44 months the pace of jeopardy has picked up an alarming momentum. The process of institutional decay commenced with legislatures working overtime to make themselves completely redundant to both political processes as well as political discourse in the country. Since the early ’70s, state Assemblies competed with each other as to who would become the most classical manifestation of how legislatures should not function. Even Parliament did not lag behind in this competition. By the ’90s it was breaking news the day Parliament functioned without any disruption, walkouts or unruly scenes rather than the other way around.  The great Indian media made itself the second casualty. In the nascent years of the Indian democratic experiment, while radio and later television was government-owned, the print media was and has always remained in private hands. Even then there were allegations of corporate interests playing a role in deciding editorial agendas. The phenomena of the Jute Press.

It led the editor of the Patriot, late R.K. Mishra, to famously remark in the Rajya Sabha in 1974: “I would submit that the ministry of information and broadcasting is being too touchy about this talk of the freedom of the press. Now, where is the freedom of the press? What do we have? In India we have the freedom of the newspaper owner; in India we have the freedom of the newspaper proprietor, and in some cases the delegated freedom which is enjoyed by the newspaper managers.” However, notwithstanding this lament by one of India’s most distinguished journalists then, the Indian press had inculcated the tradition of independent-minded editors and fearless working journalists. The history of the media industry bears eloquent testimony to the fact that editors of great calibre, who had the conviction of courage to stand up to newspaper owners, led it with great distinction.

All this started to change in the mid-’80s and since then it has been a journey downhill. The opening up of the television and radio space in the early ’90s further exacerbated this decline as the indiscriminate issuance of licences led to market fragmentation rather than diversity. However, what has happened in the past three years and eight months is portentous. The BJP/RSS has deliberately polarised the media, especially television into “us media” and “them media”. Either you sing paeans of the government or be prepared to be targeted. NDTV, the Wire, Tribune and countless other organisations who had the gumption to speak truth to power have paid the price for sticking to the time honoured convention that the press must be contrarian to the “powers that be”. The next self-inflicted wound was the CAG under Vinod Rai. As the supreme audit body with constitutional immunity, it was expected to function in a responsible and decorous manner. Unfortunately, for reasons that are still shrouded in mystery, in those six years, the CAG decided to throw all circumspection and restraint overboard and became the bludgeon to smash the credibility of the then UPA government to smithereens.

Sensational unverified numbers derived from dubious and flawed benchmarks were hurled without care or caution into the public discourse. Those traumatic templates are now finally getting unravelled in courts of law. However, what this entire episode underscores is that even one institution if it decides to go rouge can play havoc with democratic traditions. The next institution that has not covered itself with much glory recently is the EC. The manner in which the dates of the Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat elections were delinked was totally unnecessary. The recent decision to recommend the disqualification of 20 AAP MLAs, a few days before the retirement of the current Chief Election Commissioner, has raised red flags notwithstanding the merits of the recommendation.

Finally, among this entire general decline in moral and ethical standards, deterioration of establishments, the judiciary stood out like a shining beacon that embodied and epitomised the hopes and aspirations of over a billion Indians. Not only did it become the last vestige of justice for people exasperated by an obdurate and cynical executive, but also, more importantly, through landmark judgments over the decades it defined and delineated the course of our national life. It is in that context the current standoff in the Supreme Court is extremely worrying. For the courts of law have only their moral authority to enforce their will. If that gets eroded then the institution opens itself up to questioning, that can soon turn into an organised inquisition. Among the chaos people then start looking for a messiah to provide them deliverance. For many other nations that have been on a similar trajectory as India is today these false gods have been either the military or civilian dictators. In both cases it spells the death knell of democracy.