An unfraternal democracy

Indian politics over the past decade makes the case for a revisionist history of the republic. The success of the Sangh Parivar in imposing a communal common sense on Indian politics should encourage us to review India’s republican past in the light of Narendra Modi’s ascendancy. We should ask why our democracy, built on the simple majorities of a first-past-the-post system, took so long to become majoritarian.

The question is a provocation because it implies that democracies left to themselves will build political majorities around a dominant ethnic identity. It suggests that the principle of majority rule will turn the members of nominal demographic majorities into self-aware majoritarians. This is a large claim, too large for a magazine article; what we can do here is look at India in the context of South Asia to understand how our neighbours answered this question. We might then be able to place India in a range of regional responses to the temptation of majoritarianism, grounded in the history of post-colonial South Asia.

The standard Indian response to its South Asian neighbourhood has been an assertion of exceptionalism that contrasts India’s formal commitment to secularism with its neighbours’ adoption of state religions relatively early in their political journeys. In this framing, South Asia is a misleading geopolitical term that forces secular India into the smelly company of smaller majoritarian states.

India is not yet a formally majoritarian state, but given the current state of its political institutions, unsympathetic critics might argue that it only ever was a formally secular one. The reasonable position might be to accept that India was pluralist in an imperfect way, which was more than its neighbours managed, but remained susceptible to the political appeal of majoritarianism. What helped the Indian political system hold out for as long as it did and why did it finally succumb?

Also Read | The crisis of the secular opposition

Post-colonial South Asia pioneered a style of unfraternal democracy that prefigured the recent illiberal turn in many countries across the world. The work of imagining the subcontinent’s nations had to be done in the presence of the colonial state. The process was hurried and contested and was cut short by the priorities of the Raj. The constitutions that these new nations gave themselves used the language of liberalism to paper over arguments about representation and identity. With India and Pakistan (and later Bangladesh), these arguments ended in partition with its attendant consequences: ethnic cleansing, near-genocidal violence, and memories radioactive with the long half-life of communal resentment.

Majoritarian turns in India’s neighbours

Of India’s neighbours, Pakistan was established as a Muslim state. Its experiment with democracy was brief; the Pakistani military captured the state by the mid-1950s and never relinquished its self-appointed role as the guardian of the Islamic republic. The Muslim supremacy inherent in the notion of a Muslim state was elaborated by Pakistan’s civilian politicians and generals as they tried to shore up the ideological foundations of a predatory, semi-feudal state.

General Zia-ul-Haq, through his Hudood ordinances, made Islamism the common sense of Pakistani politics and created a state debauched in equal parts by religious bigotry and a parasitic military. The spectacle of Imran Khan, born again as an Islamist revolutionary taking on Pakistan’s military establishment and its civilian proxies is a drama about democracy but it is a play where only Sunni Muslims have speaking roles.

Sri Lanka, the best of South Asia’s democracies, a literate, middle-income state, with civic amenities and standards of public hygiene alien to its neighbours, began its long descent into majoritarian madness in 1956. Solomon Bandaranaike passed the Sinhala Only Act, replacing English with Sinhala as the sole official language, effectively shutting Sri Lanka’s Tamils out of the country’s bureaucracy. The related anti-Tamil pogrom in 1958 was directly responsible for Tamil alienation and the demand for a separate state. This led to three decades of civil war between an avowedly majoritarian Sinhala state and an ideologically secessionist Tamil movement.

In Bangladesh, nationalists liberated themselves from the hegemony of a non-Bengali Pakistani establishment and tried briefly to create an inclusive nationalism that included Bengali Hindus. Of Bangladesh’s two main parties, the Awami League professes secular inclusion while the Bangladesh Nationalist Party is committed to a Bangladeshi variant of Pakistan’s doctrine of Muslim supremacy. Paradoxically, Bangladesh’s constitution designates Islam as the state religion but upholds the principle of secularism. The net result is an inconsistent majoritarianism. The size of Bangladesh’s Hindu population has steadily declined since 1971.

Myanmar’s junta, like Pakistan’s, has sought legitimacy by presenting itself as the defender of the faith, in this case Buddhism. Its majoritarians, like Sri Lanka’s, used the bogey of the enemy within to violently purge the Muslim Rohingyas from Rakhine province. Ironically, Myanmar’s transition to something approaching democracy earlier this century precipitated the violence. Erstwhile “liberals” like Aung San Suu Kyi became implacable majoritarians, complicit in this ethnic cleansing because there were more votes in Buddhist chauvinism than in liberal principles.

Generalisations about the timing of India’s majoritarian turn are tricky unless you were at the sharp end of it, but it can be reasonably said that explicit bigotry against minority populations was not respectable within the metropolitan middle class till the early 1980s. This is not to say that minorities were not the targets of communal violence or discrimination before that, but merely to note that bigotry in big cities was covert, not proud.

Till then Indian politics had not gone too far down the Sri Lankan or Pakistani road. There were several reasons for this, not all of them connected to superior political virtue. First, the Congress’s political rhetoric had been built around inclusive rhetoric designed to head off separatism and later, partition. From Naoroji to Nehru, the Congress invented a Noah’s Ark nationalism, designed to keep all of India’s human species aboard a single vessel. Pakistan was a near-fatal blow to this project, but it survived in independent India as a way of keeping the country together. The Congress’s prestige as the party of anti-colonial nationalism and Nehru’s standing as the leader of that party helped colonial pluralism survive into the early republican era as chivalry. Less high-mindedly, the Congress’s electoral arithmetic made Muslims a valuable part of its political coalitions.

Second, India was much harder to polarise than Sri Lanka or Pakistan because of its size and diversity. Take the matter of language. When Ceylon passed the Sinhala Only Act, it disqualified an entire class of Tamil civil servants at a stroke. Initially the act did not even grant Tamil official standing in Tamil areas, nor did it keep English on as an official language. In the Indian case, the instatement of Hindi as one of the two official languages was balanced by deference to the size of the Indian population that spoke a continent’s worth of other languages. Also, despite the best efforts of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the heterogeneity of Indian Hindus made it hard to mobilise them under slogans like “Hindi, Hindu, Hindusthan”.

1984 in Delhi, and a year earlier, the 1983 massacre of Muslims in Nellie, Assam, constituted grim landmarks in India’s modern history, partly because of the size of these pogroms and partly because of their locations. The Nellie massacre was the culmination of a longstanding Assamese grievance that the demography of Assam was being transformed by Bangladeshi “infiltration”. The parallels with the violence inflicted on the Rohingya are precise and instructive. The massacre of Sikhs after Indira Gandhi’s assassination was historically significant not only for the scale of the horror but also for the brazen complicity of the state and the stark fact that this pogrom occurred in the capital of the republic, not the marches of a frontier province.

The ability of state and non-state actors to kill minority populations and then politically profit from the violence was an inflection point in the history of Indian democracy. The leaders of the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) who were responsible for the Nellie violence became the elected rulers of Assam. The Congress won an unprecedented majority on the back of the Delhi killings. India’s grand old party, stewarded by Nehru’s grandson, ran an advertising campaign that dog-whistled about Sikh taxi drivers and helped the party win an infamous victory. It taught majoritarian parties a lesson in impunity that they were quick to learn. The organised killing of Muslims in Mumbai in the winter of 1992-93 and then in Godhra in 2002 would not have been possible without the precedent of 1984.

Ideological vacuum

What changed in the early 1980s? A plausible answer is that the developmental path chosen by the Congress had run its course. Every other modernising Asian economy had followed the model of Meiji Japan: an initial commitment to light industry to create jobs for underemployed rural workers, universal education for a modern workforce, and trade. India chose autarky and what Ashoka Mody in his book, India is Broken, calls the “temple” model, a reference to Nehru’s vision of dams, central research institutes, and heavy industry as the temples of modern India. When the model failed in its principal responsibility—creating job for India’s millions—and India’s economy hit the buffers in the 1960s and 1970s, the failure discredited the policy architecture of the Nehruvian state with its emphasis on planning, non-alignment, and secularism.

Also Read | Democracy from below

The task of reimagining India was ceded by default to the Sangh Parivar, which filled India’s ideological vacuum with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and the hectoring promise of a Hindu Rashtra. Even the liberalisation of the economy, for which the Congress could and should have taken credit, was hijacked by Modi’s Gujarat, which was successfully sold as liberalisation’s most successful avatar.

Bigotry isn’t destiny

Over the last decade, Modi has shown that death and development, discrimination and targeted welfare (branded as the Prime Minister’s personal generosity), nationalism and nafrat can consolidate election-winning blocs of voters who are appreciative of Modi’s largesse and galvanised by the idea of an enemy within. The furore created by Hindu residents of gated localities when Muslim professionals try to buy into these neighbourhoods is a sign of the popular traction that Hindutva has achieved. These are non-state actors, and this is apartheid from below.

The flattening of Gaza and the West’s active complicity in the violence remind us that a state celebrated as an oasis of liberal democracy can, when its geopolitical stars align, be granted a licence to kill. The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya and the systematic devastation of Tamil areas in Sri Lanka are reminders that quasi-democratic and formally democratic south Asian states can resort to genocidal violence and get away with it. This can happen here; it has already happened in the neighbourhood.

It doesn’t have to happen here, though. The general election earlier this year showed us that bigotry isn’t destiny. The history of India after 1984 also teaches the lesson that the ability to imagine a community and convey that vision to a national audience is a political superpower. It is not a coincidence that the Ram Janmabhoomi movement prospered around the time that network television joined Indians into a national communion. The BJP’s early mastery of social media gave it a head start in setting the republic’s agenda. Till India’s opposition parties create a satvik vision of India to counter the Sangh Parivar’s tamasik fever dream, monstrous violence within the scaffolding of our democracy will remain a real prospect.

Mukul Kesavan is a writer based in Delhi.