Indian Instincts

by Miniya Chatterji

  There always seems to be so much going on in the governance of our own country that we have little bandwidth to learn about the domestic affairs of any other country. The public discourse overall tends to be dominated by an enormous focus on our politics and politicians’ lives and problems.

  As economist Amartya Sen has pointed out, we have a tradition in India of being discursive or ‘argumentative’.1 Over various works, Sen has delineated the historical recognition that public discussion has received in India. As one of the earliest examples of this, he mentions the organized discussion of the Buddhist Councils, started in the sixth century BC by Ashoka, which brought together different points of view represented by participants from across India and even abroad. In the sixteenth century, Emperor Akbar also organized public discussions on religious differences.2 Referring to a less distant past, subalternist Ramachandra Guha extols the intellect of the leaders of India’s freedom struggle to argue in subtle and sophisticated ways with each other.3

  Indeed, intellectuals in India and abroad are delighted by public discussions about politics, which they often say is the basis for democracy. In saying so, they are not referring to the narrowly institutional view of democracy that characterizes it mainly in terms of elections, even though this view has its champions, including Samuel Huntington, who wrote: ‘Elections, open, free and fair, are the essence of democracy, the inescapable sine qua non.’4 But those who consider public discussion the basis of democracy believe that it is through the exchange of views concerning political questions that people broaden their understanding. They are enabled to make intelligent political choices, not just at the ballot, but also while participating in various other policy and governance decisions. John Rawls has called this ‘the exercise of public reason’, and in his book A Theory of Justice he laboriously argues how democracy is fundamentally linked to public deliberation.5

  Making a case for Rawls’s argument in the Indian context, Guha distinguishes between the ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ of democracy.6 He writes that while the scholarly and popular understanding of democracy tends to focus on the ‘hardware’—multiple political parties, free, fair and regular elections, freedom of the press, an independent judiciary, freedom of movement—little attention is paid to the ‘software’. These are the cultural and emotional aspects of democracy, which include free public discourse on politics and governance.

  Just this difference—Huntington’s institutional definition of democracy versus Rawls’s discursive view—highlights the various meanings of democracy in contemporary times, its debated areas of focus, and the plurality of ways to attain it. Intellectuals, as much as the public, have occupied themselves with thinking about this subject, leading to an enormous body of academic work on it the world over.

  I would argue that democracy—in fact, governance as a whole—which was intended to be a means to an end, seems to have become the goal in our times. For centuries, governance systems—within tribes, kingdoms or nations—were established so that people could roam freely, speak and act in a way that allowed other members of that collective to do the same. Instead, in a Frankensteinian turn of events, today we excessively speak about and are bound to act in accordance with our governance systems that may or may not have our individual or collective interest in mind. This is the central point that I wish to expand upon in this essay.

  In the early years of human evolution, it was our own idea to create some sort of a system that would support us in our instinctual activities of surviving, exploring, procreating—and we have discussed this in the first part of this book—in a free yet organized manner. Over thousands of years, we have experimented with creating and trying out various old and new forms of this ‘system’, and democracy is one of them.

  Today, there is a near-unanimous acceptance globally—almost a moral imperative and missionary zeal—that every country must be a democracy, without having an equally unanimous agreement on what democracy means. In fact, the meaning of democracy varies so much that it is possible to trace its various ‘versions’ of democracy to different eras in time. For instance, the discursive democracy of the sixth century BC Buddhist Councils was not that of an elected government. Even in ancient Greece around the same period, only the minority of adult male citizens—excluding slaves—were involved in the consultative processes of governance, but the government itself was not voted into power. On the other hand, institutional democracy is said to have emerged much later, catalysed by the English Magna Carta charter in 1215, and the French and American revolutions of the eighteenth century. Ultimately, it took the form of adult franchise—initially male and eventually female citizens as well—in Europe and North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was only in the latter half of the twentieth century that democracy was established as a form of government.

  In 1941, there were only eleven democracies in the world—Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the US and Chile. This number went up in the second half of the century as democracies were established—in the most difficult circumstances possible—such as in Germany, India and South Africa. Further, decolonization created new democracies in Africa and Asia, and regimes became democratic in Greece (1974), Spain (1975), Argentina (1983), Brazil (1985) and Chile (1989). The Soviet Union collapsed, creating many more democratic countries in central Europe. Democracy took on varying institutional forms, based on the basic principle of a government made up ‘of the people’ as opposed to a composition of the elite, such that in the year 2000, American think tank Freedom House classified 120 countries, or 63 per cent of the world, as democracies.7

  However, in this millennium, there have been many setbacks to the establishment of democracy. Hegemonic powers have initiated war on other countries in the name of establishing democracy, leading to millions of lives lost, and immense wealth and history destroyed.

  It is true that dictators have been brought down in undemocratic regimes. The ‘Arab Spring’ began with the people’s revolution in Tunisia in 2010 as they brought down a dictator and established a representative government. Other countries in the region, such as Egypt and Libya, also tried, but their fate was different.

  It was 2011, and I was standing in the middle of Tahrir Square in Cairo, carrying a placard that read ‘Indians for Egyptians’. Thousands of us were in the midst of the Egyptian uprising against President Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled the country for over thirty years. Standing amid a sea of humanity screaming for freedom and democracy, I was hit by the familiarity of these two words: ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. I had missed hearing of them since I moved from Paris to Cairo a year and a half earlier.

  At the time that I had relocated to Cairo, I was twenty-nine years old and had just quit the race to build a ‘career’. I chose to exit my successful investment banking career, left my job managing a hedge fund in Paris, and moved towards doing everything that I truly loved. This meant that I chose to live in Cairo, where my partner at the time was also living, where I read books and wrote opinion pieces for various Indian newspapers on social issues, and developed my not-for-profit organization working for improving the status of women in the Middle East and India.

  I thought I had adjusted to living in Mubarak’s Egypt. In the old and dusty city of Cairo, even as an ordinary foreigner, my movements were always under the scanner. The local groceries delivery boys, for instance, would report information about me to the authorities, however irrelevant it may be to the working of the Egyptian government. Inquiries would be made by government officials each time the day after I had invited a large group of non-Egyptian guests to my home. The government had a way of knowing my change of home address or job, and they would inform me with attempted subtlety that they were tracking my movements. For example, just a day after my partner and I relocated to a new apartment in Cairo, we found in our letterbox a magazine whose cover loudly proclaimed ‘India–Egypt friendship’. It was published by the Foreign
Ministry, and addressed to both of us.

  When I heard of the likelihood of the uprising one day before it happened, I was tempted to brush it off as a rumour. At that time it had seemed so implausible to believe that the Egyptians would rebel against the regime. But it was a marvellous phenomenon—on 25 January 2011, 90,000 people who had never dared to raise a word against the establishment flocked not just to Tahrir Square in Cairo, but also to the streets of Aswan, Ismailiya, Mahallah and other Egyptian cities, screaming ‘kaifaya’ (enough).

  On the second day of the uprising, I joined the Egyptians at Tahrir Square—once a regular traffic roundabout, now a full-fledged revolution ecosystem. The military with its guns, anti-regime activists from every rank of society, the international media with their cameras and, occasionally pro-regime supporters on horse, donkey and camel back—they were all there. The picture was complete and incredible.

  I stood in Tahrir every day thereafter, adding my energy to the masses. As journalists were being targeted by Mubarak’s forces, I sneaked out several editorials to the Times of India in New Delhi by fax, reporting whatever I saw and felt. Emails were being scanned, social media was completely blocked, mobile phone lines were cut, and low-flying choppers over our roofs watched us round the clock. At night, households in each neighbourhood would take turns to guard the roads, bridges, museums and other public property in their area. At daybreak, we would pick up brooms, sweep the streets and man the traffic intersections ourselves, because these public services had been suspended.

  From this intimate perspective, in my view, the uprising was fuelled by the Egyptian people’s great expectations of more jobs and prosperity, and they saw the fall of Mubarak and the establishment of democracy merely as a means to fulfil them. In comparison to the elite in their country, they felt so desperately deprived of resources, power, jobs and opportunities that they were now ready to lay down their lives to get them. They had been inspired by Tunisia, where a similar uprising had occurred just weeks earlier.

  On the seventeenth day of Egypt’s leaderless uprising, Mubarak stepped down with just a simple televised announcement late in the evening.

  We marched out on to the streets, everyone headed for Tahrir. There, we climbed on to the military tanks and exchanged roses with the army. Everyone hugged each other and cried, proud of the achievement. No historian or academic could have explained to me even an iota of what it felt like to have been a part of history.

  The jubilation was followed by the realization that now there was no one to take charge of the country, and no plan in place either to set up a government based on equal representation.

  As the Egyptians set about their new way of life without Mubarak at the helm, they were woefully disillusioned. The wealth from his bank accounts was not distributed among the people, as they had naively expected. Even months after he was brought down, they were jobless. Many were dealing with the loss of family members—at least 846 people died and 6000 were injured during the seventeen days of the uprising.8 After it ended, the spies on the streets were gone, along with the public security that came along with them. It was not uncommon to hear Egyptians confess that things under Mubarak were possibly better.

  Governance in the country was a mess. The revolution resulted in the only existing organized political entity, the Muslim Brotherhood, briefly coming to power before the military took over in 2013. Since then, there has been hardly any respite from violence, and no progress has been made towards setting up a fair and effective governance system. The dictator has fallen, but whither democracy? Egypt’s people today are neither happier nor freer.

  Even in the West, it is time that we check our assumptions and reflection on the future of democracy. The American presidential election of 2016 was about making a forced choice between the country’s two most ‘disliked contestants’,9 and the European elite that same year put immense pressure on elected leaders in Greece who got in the way of fiscal orthodoxy.10

  When India gained freedom, there were leaders who organized us into a democracy. Nehru was the chief architect, and he had a bevy of intellectuals to help him and even oppose and argue with him on various operational and fundamental issues. One such brilliant conversation stands out for me. I find it fascinating on two accounts. One, the existence of equally passionate yet opposing views on the relevance and indeed need of democracy in India, and two, the fact that it makes us think about the sort of intellectual deliberations that must have taken place at that time, deliberations that we cannot imagine among today’s political leaders in India.

  This delectable conversation is in the form of personal letters between Nehru and the social reformer Jayaprakash Narayan, found by historian Ramachandra Guha in the manuscripts of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi.11

  In his letters, Narayan asks Nehru to reconsider the sort of democracy he is establishing in India. He asks the prime minister to look beyond the party system. Narayan flags the need for a focused opposition to the ruling party, and suggests that democracy can be deepened by the energies of individuals and groups who are not themselves politicians.

  Nehru, in response, warns of the disruptive dangers of an excess of identity politics, and presents a qualified defence of parliamentary democracy, saying it is not the perfect system of governance, but at least less harmful than the alternatives. He admits that democracy is ‘full of faults’, but had been adopted in India because ‘in the balance, it was better than the other possible courses. Like any other system of governance, parliamentary democracy depended on the quality of the human beings who staffed it.’

  ‘I do not think that the present system is a failure,’ wrote Nehru to Narayan, ‘though it may fail in the future for all I know. If it fails, it will not fail because the system in the theory is bad, but because we could not live up to it. Anyhow what is the alternative you suggest?’

  Indeed, what is the alternative to democracy?

  Certainly not autocracy.

  As obvious as it might seem, it is important to reiterate this. Four decades after the Emergency was announced in India in 1975, by then-President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed upon the advice of his prime minister, Indira Gandhi, there are still people in the country who suggest that a strong, even dictatorial, rule is the only way to achieve results in India and make economic progress. They feel that nothing will ever work unless there is someone at the helm to force things down our throats. We have not learnt our lesson, and are still mesmerized by authority. As I wrote in the previous essay, we quickly forget our discomfort with following government orders that make no sense for our individual or collective well-being.

  Why is it that many Indians feel that being controlled and spoken down to by a strong political authority is a sign that all is well? The eminent psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar ascribes this to ‘an unconscious tendency to “submit” to an idealized omnipotent figure, both in the inner world of fantasy and in the outside world of making a living; the lifelong search for someone, a charismatic leader or a guru, who will provide mentorship and a guiding world-view, thereby restoring intimacy and authority to individual life.’12

  As Kakar13 puts it, this unconscious tendency to seek an authoritative leader appears even more sadistic when we realize that our human instinct is to roam free. Indeed, the basis of India’s great struggle against the British was the longing for freedom. In fact, I find that in any modern ‘free’ nation, to defend freedom just because it is prescribed in our Constitution and laws—which are both of our own making—is an oxymoron. Instead, I believe that freedom must be guaranteed, first and foremost, because governance systems were created to ensure humans are free and living in harmony. Further, I think it is the modality of freedom that must be contained in our laws, not the justification of it! We knew that collective freedom would be tricky to achieve and so we invented laws, codes, rules and constitutions. This is why modern governments were established—to ensure that humans as a collective are able to maintain our freedom—and not the ot
her way around.

  Alas, the latter is what we have come to. We have created a system in which feeding ourselves requires jobs and bank notes. We had probably thought this system would eliminate the need to go hunting each time we were hungry. It was created for our own convenience, but now it has trapped us. Jobs are hard to come by, as a consequence so are food and shelter. For those with an empty stomach, freedom is a lofty ideal. In the absence of bread, indeed freedom is easily forgotten. Our freedom is at the mercy of the government. If the government gets us our livelihood, even if it isn’t accompanied by freedom, democracy and other ideals like equality and fraternity, we are ready to accept it. The consequences of this miserable desperation are dangerous.

  Lest we forget what happened: on 12 June 1975, the Allahabad High Court ruled that Indira Gandhi was guilty of election malpractice and that she would have to resign.14 Instead of resigning, Indira declared Emergency on the night of 25 June, just a few minutes before midnight. Before dawn the next day, police parties, acting on her orders, had her political opponents locked up in prison. Over the next thirty-six hours, India changed from a liberal democracy to a democracy that supported autocracy.15

  Millions of Indians were outraged, but then they got used to it. There was press censorship, and so it was not very clear what was happening. Initially, public life began to improve visibly—government offices became more efficient, transportation began to run on time, factories became more productive. But soon, this short-lived efficiency declined. Disaster struck harder when the prime minister’s beloved son, Sanjay Gandhi, stepped in. Sanjay ruled with his coterie of sycophantic ministers who unflinchingly obeyed his every order.16

  Meanwhile, the number of Indira’s political opponents in jail reached 1,00,000. Some of them were abused and tortured, while outside the jails every institution deteriorated.17 All public and private media organizations were forced to relay only government propaganda.18 Corruption became rampant. Ordinary people were arrested for no reason. Elections for Parliament and state governments were postponed, and in the meantime, Indira Gandhi was rewriting the nation’s laws since the Congress party, with a two-thirds majority in Parliament, had the mandate required to do so. When she felt an existing law was not appropriate, she got the President to issue special ordinances, thereby bypassing Parliament and ruling by decree.