Epitaphs for democracy, if I could modify the words of Felix Frankfurter, have turn into trendy when more. And, the phenomenon is not distinctive to India, exactly where democracy has been pronounced dead — or, at ideal, in essential shape and worsening. Indeed, most political commentators view the Indian case as a symptom of a international malady: a close to-universal turn to authoritarianism. The lots of embodiments of this phenomenon, from Viktor Orbán to Recep Erdogan to Donald Trump, are cited with disturbing frequency.
It was unavoidable, then, that democracy be a prominent theme at this year’s edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Literature, right after all, is the language of the present, and anxiousness with regards to the state and fate of democracy has been a mainstay of modern writing.
Over the nine days of the fest, lots of elements of democratic life had been touched upon, trends of political behaviour dissected, and threats to democratic results discussed. But, the core concern animating JLF’s phenomenally inter-textual programming was this: How did liberal democracy, the revered political model that launched a thousand revolutions, turn into so frail in only 3 decades because its ascendancy was believed to mark the finish of history?
The usual suspects had been all repeatedly invoked — weak institutions, globalisation and its discontents, rising inequality, neoliberalism, rampant misinformation, decreasing social capital, and populist nationalism. The actually thrilling intellectual foray, having said that, came early on in the festival, with celebrated journalists Anne Applebaum and Edward Luce forwarding the notion of democracy’s inherent imperfections.
Applebaum drew on her ring-side reflections on the ideological fractures that have shaped Western politics, compiled in Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. She contended that the notion of a all-natural progression toward democracy is rather new, dating only as far back as the fall of communism. Historically, democracies have neither been inevitable nor necessarily tough, and the types of perversion of democracy that we practical experience today are not with no precedent. Luce, author, most not too long ago, of The Retreat of Western Liberalism, echoed the sentiment. For him, there are lots of options to democracy, all of them worse, but lots of of them, frighteningly, really plausible. And, an autocratic state is only the most notorious bogeyman.
As early as 1997, journalist and political commentator Fareed Zakaria was currently writing of the rise of illiberal democracies. He employed the term to describe a international phenomenon in which popularly elected — frequently re-elected — governments habitually exercised energy in excess of their constitutional mandate, and at the expense of the rights and freedoms of citizens. Zakaria argued that when electoral democracy flourished in the late 20th century, constitutional liberalism waned.
At the time Zakaria was writing, the Emergency had currently distorted liberal democracy in India, in a manner that was to turn into a terrible and unsurpassed instance for decades to come. But, Tripurdaman Singh points out that the seeds for the monstrosity of the mid-1970s had been laid as far back as 1951. Discussing his book Sixteen Stormy Days: The Story of the First Amendment to the Constitution of India, he argued that the roots of the tension among person rights and social reform are practically inescapably old. Unfortunately, in India, even that venerated champion of democracy, Jawaharlal Nehru, favoured the latter more than the former, revealing his tenuous connection with liberal values when he restricted cost-free speech.
Dissecting the decline of liberalism with journalist John Micklethwait, writer and essayist Adam Gopnik noted that it is the permanent situation of liberalism to be continuously on its deathbed. The Left and the Right have constantly attacked liberalism, mainly for factors of inefficiency or incompetence. Gopnik’s personal book, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism stands against the charge of liberal failure. He argues that what we see as the illness of liberalism are, in truth, symptoms of affluence, a tendency to take for granted these factors which liberalism supplies — for instance, civil rights to sexual minorities, which only liberal democracies assure — and to deprecate these which it fails to provide.
Micklethwait, who not too long ago co-authored The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic has Exposed the Weakness of the West and How to Fix it, concurred. The view that authoritarianism is element of the remedy is, in his opinion, a mistaken one. In the context of handling Covid-19, Micklethwait argued that the nations with the ideal functionality have been liberal democracies, China and USA becoming outliers.
The challenging challenge for liberalism, according to Micklethwait, is to reform state financial policy. In its modern day avatar, the social and financial elements of classical liberalism have split, raising, on the one hand, the spectre of major state, and on the other, of unbridled neoliberalism. At JLF, the latter was the higher bring about of concern.
In the current previous, the only scholarly consensus on the definition of neoliberalism appears to have been constructed about its capaciousness. However, the struggle to define has not impeded recognition of its modus operandi: neoliberalism refashions citizens into buyers, and democracy into a industry practical experience. In the meritocracy of the industry, then, inequality becomes a virtue.
In practice, neoliberalism’s language of efficiency and deserved gains and losses has meant, celebrated linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky pointed out, a transfer of practically $50 trillion from the reduced 90% of the American population to its leading 1% more than the final 40 years. Inequality and populist authoritarianism, for Chomsky, are inextricably linked. Nor does the impunity neoliberalism affords to income spell fantastic news for electoral practices. In a separate session on elections, Navin B Chawla and Neel Kantha Uprety, former chief election commissioners of India and Nepal, respectively, highlighted opacity and corruption in campaign funding as one of the most significant challenges facing South Asian democracies.
The impoverishment of the middle classes even as the planet becomes richer — and the phenomenon is a actually international one — has also meant, for philosopher Michael Sandel, a corrosion of the widespread fantastic, empathy, social capital, and well-being. In The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? he explores this dark side of meritocracy which precludes from the realm of worthwhile and dignified contributions to society something that is not tangible in monetary terms.
Sandel’s, then, is a plea to adjust the terms of our politics, to reaffirm dignity of work, and emphasise democratic citizenship creating.
Chomsky’s prescription for that democratic work is hearteningly old-fashioned — educational programmes, organisation, and activism. In an atmosphere exactly where the country’s youth are encouraged to quit activism in favour of financial productivity, parading a dangerously false binary, amongst other lies, a contact to exercising that 1st democratic appropriate of cost-free speech and assembly can be bracing.
The activist impulse also discovered resonance amongst a panel of jurists. Justice Albie Sachs, former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and Justice Madan Lokur, former judge of the Supreme Court of India, had been each unequivocal in their assistance for judicial activism as a indicates to maintain democratic constitutions alive and evolving. Justice Sachs noted, for instance, that the appellation of an activist appears to be reserved for these who employ legal mechanisms to additional the bring about of the disempowered, when these working with the exact same indicates to favour the propertied elite are believed of as becoming neutral. Legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar, as well, emphasised the existence of a disciplined course of action by which unwritten constitutions, hidden among the lines of the written one, can go behind, beneath, and beyond the latter with no unravelling them.
If the streets and the courts had been the most well known websites of well known protest and social activism in the 20th and early 21st century, today, it is social media. Avijit Michael, founder and executive director of Jhatkaa.org, and Nida Hasan, nation director of Change.Org, attest to the upsurge in digital activism. For Michael, digital campaigns permits for higher engagement with choice makers, specially in the context of shrinking democratic space. Technology may have created protesting much easier, but it hasn’t, in Hasan’s view, taken away from the effectiveness of digital campaigns. Virtual gheraos can be as effectual as physical ones.
Critical theorist Homi K Bhabha, having said that, took situation with the unqualified categorisation of social media as a democratic platform. It could be so in terms of access but not necessarily in completely in its ethics, equity, and morality. Nearing the close of the literary and political extravaganza, then, Bhabha turned the concentrate when more on the confluence of liberalism and democracy. Democratic procedures, he reiterated, are vital but not enough for democracy to survive its fragility, what is necessary is a commitment to democratic values.
Zakaria’s illiberal democracy may be an analytical category of some worth, but one ought to ask oneself if it is not a contradiction in terms.
Indeed, if the Vladimir Putins of the planet are appropriate and liberalism has outlived its goal, one could even ask oneself if democracy — particularly, the Indian democratic experiment, with its noble promises of equality, freedom, and justice — as well has turn into redundant.
On the face of it, factors could look dire. But, if cost-free speech seems to be vanishing, one need to have only turn one’s interest to the setting in which the restraints on cost-free speech are becoming criticised. If one fears the strategies in which technologies can maul the truth, one need to have only be reminded of the medium on which ‘the greatest literary show on Earth’ was held.
Pessimism, in Applebaum’s opinion, is irresponsible. Liberal democracy could not now be that strength which in old days moved heaven and earth, but that it survives but is proof of that which abides — the inherent instinct to strive, to seek, to come across, and not to yield.
Suvanshkriti Singh is a freelancer