THE multiple crises of democracy in South Asia have general characteristics as well as country specific roots, trajectories and consequences. In this essay, I reflect on how the new crisis of Indian democracy is likely to present an unprecedented challenge to entire South Asia.

What is India’s new crisis? It is a crisis of its South Asian civilizational legitimacy. Although India’s political class as well as bureaucratic, intellectual and media elites continue to believe that India represents the political and civilizational core of South Asia, there is a growing sense that India no longer inspires the citizens in the South Asian neighbourhood in any politically trans-formative way. This is particularly noticeable in the accelerated decline of India’s capacity to enhance the chances of democratization within its own society as well as in South Asia.

India’s democratic thinking and legacy has both pre-modern as well as modern sources. Philosophical pluralism and pluralist tolerance of worldviews and cultures is the most important pre-colonial democratic legacy of India. The democratic political thought which emerged during India’s anti-colonial struggles, as powerfully spelled out during the Constituent Assembly debates, is widely seen in entire South Asia as an articulation of a particularly South Asian imagination of democracy. It is with a sense of pride that non-Indian students of law and politics from South Asia could read the works by Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, B.R. Ambedkar, or the edicts of King Asoka, for inspiration in their own thinking afresh in search of a modern South Asian democratic imagination. Hasn’t India now come to a historical phase where fellow South Asian citizens feel both embarrassed and shocked about the new political model India seems to offer to the world?

The political and ideological forces that control the Indian state at present seem to be bereft of any transformational thinking for their own society either. The ways in which all the small South Asian states have opted for strategies of realpolitik with their giant neighbour also indicate that India has lost its moral standing within the region. They no longer seem to look up to the Indian example for a renewal of the democratic imagination. Why? India seems to be at a crossroads, making a rapid exit from its legacy of pluralist democracy and civilizational tolerance. This civilizational shift in India is felt quite strongly outside Indian borders.

 

Meanwhile, the crisis of democracy in South Asia has been a continuing theme for decades. Each South Asian country has its own unique history, causes, manifestations, intensity and trajectories of its democratic crisis.

This fairly large South Asian story began in Pakistan during the mid-1950s when the civilian political leadership failed to consolidate the democratic foundations of the new state. The military stepped in to overthrowing democracy in 1958. Pakistan’s political history since then has been interspersed with occasional return to weak democratic rule alongside an almost permanent hold over the entire state and political process by a powerful military branch of the state. Pakistan now has a political order within which the military institutions and personnel have a disproportionately dominant presence over political parties and civil institutions. A weak democracy in Pakistan represents the extreme case of democratic fragility in South Asia. Popular aspirations for democracy have found only occasional and cautious acknowledgement by the elites who control Pakistan’s state institutions.

Sri Lanka is a unique instance of a democratic crisis evolved along with consolidation of democratic institutions. A key aspect of democracy’s failure in Sri Lanka is the persistence of an ethnic-majoritarian unitary state – an ethnocracy – without constitutionalized arrangements for minority rights as political rights. The latter required reforming the state to enable the autonomy rights of minorities to be institutionalized. The unwillingness of the political elites to reform the state within the framework of democratic devolution eventually led to a protracted civil war. Even after the ending of the civil war in 2009, the Sri Lankan state remains unreformed and it is this that marks the primary deficit area in Sri Lanka’s democracy, leaving it as an ageing democracy with no inner dynamism, essential for renewal and reinvention.

 

The crisis of democracy in Bangladesh is felt most tellingly in the inability of the civilian political leadership and political parties to utilize the political space available in a post-military, post-authoritarian context. A softer version of a one-party state has developed in Bangladesh against the backdrop of a prolonged internecine battle between the leadership of the two main political parties. The Bangladesh government has also been fighting a multiplicity of mini civil wars with its own citizens.

Nepal, a newcomer to the democratic club, after a prolonged popular resistance to a modern authoritarian monarchy in Asia, finds itself at the crossroads in the post-monarchy, post-civil war democratic transition. Somewhat similar to Sri Lanka, the core of the Nepali crisis is the inability of the political elites to agree on the nature of the post-civil war state and its constitutional foundations. Although there is a general agreement about the federalist reconstitution of the state, the exact nature of the federal structures remains an unresolved and intractable issue. This has once again divided Nepali society and the political class. Democratic consensus for a new state form seems to be a difficult goal to achieve.

Maldives too reflects the inconclusive and fragile nature of the transition to democracy in a post-authoritarian context. The Maldives has a deeply fragmented political elite, driven by personal, business, clan and family rivalries. These rivalries are further fuelled by external interventions by powerful regional rivals, India and China. Next to Nepal and Sri Lanka, the Maldives is a country where the playing out of the regional big power rivalry has become quite transparent.

In Afghanistan, the question of political normalization and the introduction of even a semblance of political stability amidst continuing civil war seems to have acquired greater priority over the democratization agenda. Being a pawn in the global rivalry between the two super powers, infrastructures of Afghanistan’s democracy have been annihilated by the war and violence. Building democracy from scratch is the core task in the democracy agenda in Afghanistan. But faced with a seemingly unending civil war, institutionalization and consolidation of democracy in Afghanistan is a difficult proposition.

 

We can now identify in broad outline some contemporary trends in South Asia’s democracy. The first is that despite the resurgence of democracy in countries where it has occurred, the advance of democratization has either halted (as in the Maldives), or failed to fulfil its promises as in Nepal and Sri Lanka. In other words, there is an ongoing anomaly between democracy and democratization. The second is that in older South Asian democracies such as India and Sri Lanka, new political elites have emerged with new understandings of democracy in which ideologies of ethnic populism, strong government and national security are mixed with a minimally institutionalist construction of what democracy should be. In other words, in both India and Sri Lanka, despite increasing popular participation in the democratic process and robust support for democracy as a political choice, as repeatedly found in democracy surveys, new political elites respond to this popular enthusiasm primarily from utilitarian perspectives that hollow democracy out of its normative core. The third is somewhat of a paradoxical one: the stabilization of formal and institutionalized forms of democracy is not accompanied with any significantly original re-articulation of the principles of democracy so as to reflect democracy’s decades long political life in South Asia.

 

The last point raises a question to which we do not seem to have any credible answer. The question is the following. As passionately highlighted in the State of Democracy in South Asia report of 2005, South Asian people have reinvented the idea of democracy in a substantive way, while giving it a specifically South Asian form, content and character. While ‘the idea of democracy has transformed South Asia… South Asia has reworked the idea of democracy by infusing it with meanings that spill over the received frame of the idea of democracy.’ This mutual transformation of South Asia by democracy and democracy by South Asia has also produced ‘South Asian cultures of democracy, distinctly modern and specifically South Asian.’¹

However, there is a continuing anomaly in South Asia: no political elite in South Asia seem to give expression to this richness of popular creativity and imagination about democracy in the region. Rather, their political thought and action defy the creative democratic common sense of South Asia.

This is a paradox that requires some serious reflection. A tentative explanation that comes to mind is the following: all South Asian states are at a historical turning point in terms of their notion of the state and nation as conceptualized in the old model of the nation state. There are two fundamental factors that seem to define the moment at this turning point. Expressions of ethnic, social and cultural diversities in the form of demands for power sharing and new group rights claims, presupposing the necessity for re-imagining the nation state as a pluralistic political association of diverse communities of citizens are the first. The second is the neo-liberal globalization process that has compelled the states to redefine the old forms of state-society relations and citizenship and thereby reposition the state as the connector with new economic and social elites. South Asia’s contemporary political and social thought has only just begun to grapple with these issues philosophically and conceptually. This is perhaps the theme on which the next breakthrough of South Asia’s democratic imagination will have to take place.

 

It is against this picture of multiple democracy crises and a new challenge to democracy’s re-imagination at a South Asian level that India’s ongoing political transformation presents itself as cause for what one may call severe democracy anxieties. To explain this phenomenon of democracy anxieties about India today, let us first understand the ground for the anxieties, and then their possible consequences for the prospects for democratization in South Asia.

India seems to have reached the end of the road for its Gandhi-Nehru phase of democratic modernity. This transition started during the late 1970s with the transformation of the Congress party into an agency for authoritarianism under Indira Gandhi, a member of the Nehru family. Indian has not been able to fully recover from the grave democratic setback it suffered during the Emergency rule of the late 1970s. The Congress party itself became a victim of it by losing its claim to be the legacy of Nehruvian democracy. The political leadership of the Congress from the same Nehru family has displayed no intellectual capacity to invent, or even understand the need, a post-Nehru and updated version of Indian democracy.

This is a sort of crisis that enabled the proliferation of alternatives to the Congress party at regional and state levels, and eventually at the national level. Almost all these alternative political formations, from regional parties confined to specific states such as Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, to the sole ‘national’ party – the Bharatiya Janata Party – share one disquieting characteristic. They all are better as agents for authoritarian, post-democratic politics than for inventing better visions for democratic regeneration.

 

The current BJP government possesses all the qualities that qualifies it to be a formidable force for counter-democratic decay of Indian politics and the citizens’ life. The BJP is the political arm of a rabidly anti-democratic political movement, the RSS. It has a political programme, worked out by ex-cadres of the RSS, to transform India into a Hindu majoritarian ethnocratic republic. Its leaders and cadres alike seem to believe that it is their privilege and the mission of destiny to dismantle the old forms of Indian political civilization based on pluralist democracy, social justice and secularism. Meanwhile, the RSS’s strategy of capturing the commanding heights of the Indian state and polity through its ex-cadres in the BJP seems to be succeeding.

 

The transformation of India into a majoritarian ethnocracy in the name of democracy is the most challenging threat faced by India’s polity at present. It is challenging because it has the potential to secure electoral support of the ethnic majority population of India amidst a relentless process of promoting communal polarization as a legitimate political and electoral strategy. The BJP’s recent electoral victories have all been engineered by means of communal polarization and pitting the Hindu ethnic majority against the Muslim minority. Communalization of democracy in India is not good news for democracy in South Asia, because its negative political consequences will certainly filter into the entire South Asia.

There is also a pernicious outcome waiting for India emerging out of a possible consolidation of a majoritarian ethnocratic republic. That is, the loss of India’s potential to produce a better vision for a pluralist and humane form of democratic political order, inspired by its own civilizational past, philosophical traditions, the political legacy of the erstwhile Congress, and the political thought of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and B. R. Ambedkar. Many others such as Narayana Guru, Phule, and Periyar have also enriched India’s own indigenous democratic thought. Their legacies await induction to efforts at re-inventing Indian democratic vision. They are the best source of ideas for a new India and not those whose political ambitions have been inspired by European fascism.

India also faces another risk: being forced to re-invent itself as a developmentalist and national security republic. The new model is likely to be a synthesis of the Chinese model of rapid economic development and the Pakistan model of oppressive governance. The attempts to elevate the Indian military to a supra-civilian institution that should stand above democratic scrutiny and critique, and as the sacred symbol of nationhood and national unity, show how the Pakistani model of nation and state building has found admirers among its rivals too. The narrow reconstruction of the concepts of nation, nationhood and patriotism, abandoning their specifically Indian pluralistic meanings, constitute a shift in conceptualization of what India is in a metaphysical sense too.

 

Other signs of such a shift are also discernible. The way in which the ruling party has employed fear as an instrument of social control and political management has not yet seeped into the minds of otherwise alert Indian political commentators. The gau rakshak phenomenon is its most visible manifestation. It carries a warning that the use of seemingly civilian, small group violence by unidentifiable activist groups – often branded as criminal elements – as a means to discipline and control the ethnic and social minorities is in fact an emerging phenomenon of privatizing and outsourcing violence as a political weapon. And these outsourced agencies of violence regularly enjoy a measure of impunity from consequences, suggesting that the state institutions of law enforcement and justice have already been subjected to what can be called ‘ethnocratization’. Meanwhile, ethnocracy does not abandon democracy altogether. It reinvents democracy as undemocracy.

 

Thus, India’s already weak democracy seems to be in serious trouble at present with the looming threat of it being replaced by something new: a post-secular, post-pluralist ethnocratic state. It will crystallize and bring into fruition the dark political possibilities developed in India since the early last century. Still there are no signs of resistance to it, either emerging or being germinated. The traditional political parties from the Congress to the left and the regional parties, all are in disarray, allowing themselves to be weakened, or rendered lifeless. That is the surest sign of how Indian’s democracy has already lost some of its institutional vitality. Minority and dalit citizens and the judiciary are the only small spaces of some resistance in their own limited ways.

Now, to return to the point raised at the beginning of this essay, once it becomes a majoritarian ethnocratic public, India can hardly be a source of political inspiration for citizens of South Asia. Neither will India have any ideas or examples to offer for democratic regeneration in South Asia. To make matters worse China, the other Asian power which is trying to influence the politics of South Asia, can only be a political model for developmental authoritarianism sans democracy or political pluralism.

Thus, South Asia is not only facing a crisis of democracy, but also a crisis of political transition. India’s crisis will have regional consequences in the sense that the only social and intellectual space in South Asia from where a humane and pluralist democratic vision could germinate would be rendered a political wasteland, at least for some time. A costly and difficult struggle by Indian citizens will be needed to stem this journey to darkness.

 

Footnote:

1. Lokniti, State of Democracy in South Asia, 2005, p. 6.