by Ravish Kumar
The more privatization increases, the more democratic spaces shrink. Corporates have never had any interest in democracy. But we don’t examine the link between governments and corporations, we don’t question it. We don’t protest the electoral bonds scheme introduced by the government that will turn political donations completely opaque, making it easier for big business to capture the electoral process and impossible for the public to know how and to what extent government policies are tailored to benefit the big donors.
There is a lot that we don’t question, a lot that we just don’t see.
In December 2017, the winter session of the Lok Sabha, the country’s highest legislative body, was postponed because of the high-stakes Gujarat Assembly elections where Prime Minister Modi was scheduled to campaign extensively. The nation’s business was made subordinate to a state election. There was some debate about this in the papers, almost none on television. But how many of us really demanded an explanation? After all, in this age of social media it is possible to launch campaigns and make a lot of noise.
Even those of us who raised the issue of the Lok Sabha session being delayed did not notice a larger trend. For the last thirty years, the number of Vidhan Sabha sessions has dwindled alarmingly in state after state. Consequently, the significance of Assembly sessions in the running of a state government has reduced steadily. The Assembly is the platform where MLAs discuss issues relating to their constituencies and thus evolve into leaders. Today, if MLAs are not ministers, nobody knows them. They do their own thing, winning and losing elections, but are of little use to the people who elect them.
We have stopped looking at these institutions. We don’t bother to ask why a state’s chief minister or the prime minister chooses not to hold an Assembly or Lok Sabha session at the designated time or merely goes through the motions. Is it that we no longer have any confidence in the Vidhan Sabha or the Lok Sabha? I refuse to believe that. If we did not have confidence in these institutions, seventy per cent or more among us would not be exercising our vote in election after election. I think the problem is that we have reduced our chief democratic right, and chief responsibility, to merely the act of pressing a button on the voting machine. Then we return from the polling station and submerge ourselves in the image of the leader who emerges victorious.
To have faith is a good thing, no doubt. But that faith should rest on the foundation of facts, not emotions.
In late 2017, the Pew Research Center, an American think tank, released the results of a survey it had conducted in India during the first quarter of that year. The survey had been conducted among 2,464 people across India’s most populous states. (Yes, 2,464 persons. It is an intriguing figure, even forgetting that the country they were surveying is home to well over a billion people. Why not add another thirty-six people and make it 2,500, at least? Perhaps they had an astrologer advising them.)
The survey found that 88 per cent of the respondents held a favourable opinion of Narendra Modi as prime minister—‘almost nine out of every ten’, said the survey. This in itself isn’t new or startling; some other surveys of the time had reported similar results. It is the replies to other questions that are cause for great concern.
To be honest, I was also worried for the tenth respondent in every batch of ten who did not find the prime minister the most popular leader. I felt like telling him, bhai, when nine respondents have gone one way, why are you standing alone on the other side? Then it struck me: this one man is the real democrat. By standing alone, away from the others, he was in fact doing a great service to Indian democracy. Otherwise, out of sheer anxiety that nine out of ten had gone over to one side, he could have decided to cross over, too, for a perfect ten! But he stood his ground. Whoever he is, I salute him. He has kept the prestige of democracy intact—standing apart and standing firm to ensure the leader had at least one opponent.
Predictably, the 88 per cent popularity rating for the Supreme Leader among 2,464 people led to celebrations on Twitter. I wondered if the people who were in raptures had read the entire findings of the survey. Fifty-three per cent of the respondents favoured military rule in the country. Nine out of ten respondents put their faith in an individual who has come up through a democratic process; an individual who is by virtue of his political career a symbol of democratic aspirations, ascending from the position of chief minister to that of prime minister. Then why did five out of the nine who supported him favour military rule? Didn’t they have full faith in the elected leader they hailed as the most popular?
The respondents would have been asked one question: ‘Do you think military rule is good?’ Over half of them would have said yes. I would have asked them a second question: ‘Would you support a military rule where someone knocks on your door at two in the night and whisks you and your father away and locks you up in a dungeon for ten years without recourse to any lawyer or defence?’ Would the same respondents have answered yes to that question? I don’t think so.
And what name would they have given had they been asked who should lead that military regime? Would they have named a democratically elected leader? Would they have named the former Army chief who is now a minister? That would have been logical, after all.
Just how muddled are we on the subject of democracy and the leader? Why are we so confused? Our confusion arises from the fact that the daily practice of democracy that happened in our institutions, be it in the media or any other institution, has become a thing of the past. Those daily ‘practice matches’ of analysis and interrogation are long gone. If we think the blame for this decline can be laid only at the door of the present government, we would be mistaken. It would mean we haven’t quite understood the age we are in. This deterioration has taken place over the last twenty-five to thirty years, as hyper capitalism and its technologies have taken over our lives, as inequality has grown dramatically and demagogues have risen, and as institutions have been systematically dismantled or hollowed out. We may feel it more now only because the proportion of those who are alert to institutional erosion is greater today because it is happening at great speed.
The Pew survey also had 55 per cent of the respondents saying they wanted a ‘strong leader’, one who could ‘make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts’. The survey report noted that ‘support for autocratic rule is higher in India than in any other nation surveyed.’
Why is a strong leader required? Is the framework of Constitutional laws and powers given to a leader or chief minister so inadequate that a muscleman is needed in that position? Does the supreme leader have to wrestle with the cabinet secretary, administer some well-placed blows? Why this yearning for a strong leader, then? It would be understandable if the desire was for a leader who represents the strong will of the people. Perhaps it was. But do the kind of questions that are asked in these surveys allow for nuance? Do those who celebrate the results of such surveys have any time for nuance?
On the one hand there is a mythical narrative of a strong elected leader being created, and running parallel to it is a script for military rule. There might be a reason.
Until now our democratic institutions, even when functioning at their best, have roundly failed to fulfil the aspirations of the people. On the contrary, through these institutions, the control of vested interests on public resources and systems has become near complete. It is true not only of India but of countries the world over that one or two per cent of the population controls ninety to ninety-five per cent of the nation’s wealth. This information has not emerged from some communist party office; it is based on surveys by economists who believe in the capitalist system. For instance, the figure of one or two per cent controlling almost the entire wealth of some nations is from a report by OXFAM.
And this is what is making the political class nervous. Of the ninety per cent or more of the population who are hard put to feed themselves, some are committing suicide for now. But the day they tire of taking their lives, they will rise in revolt.
There are limits to dying, and there are limits to killing too. History is replete with the names of murderous tyrants; even so, in the end it was they who perished, not humanity.
This is the politician’s biggest anxiety. Whoever holds the reins of power is haunted by this fear. Tomorrow if some among us happen to be in power, the same fear will plague us. It is a legitimate fear, for politicians have nothing to show other than the same old formula of propaganda and event management. Democracy can be difficult to manage. This explains the dramatics of creating a halo around the idea of autocratic or military rule through strategic questions in regular surveys, because it is the easiest way to trample on the expectations and aspirations of the people, by co-opting them into the project of their own disenfranchisement. When we relinquish our standing as citizens, one day we will wake up to find a gunman standing outside our door and for the next ten or twenty years we will lapse into silence, losing our power of speech and our language.
It is to this end that both the narratives of the strong leader and of military rule are being lovingly nurtured, even though both of them are among the most clichéd narratives, or formulae, of history. Those who have not delved into history will also grasp it. Those who have studied history will grasp it better. And even those who go around tearing posters will understand this formula if they stop to think.
If it is a strong leader we desire, how would we describe Gandhi, Mandela, Lincoln, Martin Luther King and Vinoba Bhave? Strong leaders, wouldn’t you say? The man with the frail frame who wore nothing but a dhoti and challenged the might of the British Empire—was he a weak or a strong leader? A strong leader does not necessarily have to be dressed to the hilt and thunder from a high stage; a half-naked, soft-spoken fakir can also be a strong leader. There shouldn’t be an iota of confusion in our minds about this. A half-naked fakir too can be a strong leader who, armed with a sense of purpose, set out with his lathi and in thirty years removed the fear of the Cellular Jail, Kaala Paani, embedded deep in the minds of the people, inspiring them to stand up to British might. It speaks of his courage and the strength of his conviction that a Bhagat Singh, a Chandrashekhar Azad and a Bose emerged from the same stream. That is why I say a strong leader does not always come in colourful bandis. A strong leader does not emerge when you fight over God one week and start building temples to Gandhi’s assassin, Godse, the next.
From 1940 to 1945, during the Second World War, the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, was incredibly popular—he continues to be quoted to this day—and people believed everything he said. He seemed to be the world’s biggest leader of the time; people were hanging on his every word in the belief that anything he said went a long way. He commanded blind faith. After the war, when elections were held, the same Churchill suffered a defeat at the hands of Clement Attlee. A strong leader also suffers defeat.
Living in a democracy, if we dilute our understanding of what it means to be the people, we will be betraying our freedom struggle. We give pensions to our freedom fighters, but how many of them do we know, those unnamed lovers of freedom who spent years in prison? Their children and their children’s children faced ruin across generations; relying solely on those meagre pensions they inexorably slid into penury. Those freedom fighters staked the futures of several generations of their families to win the right to be citizens of an independent nation. In honour of their memory, at least, we must not lose the essence of our great democracy and the right to be its people.
As for the narrative of the strong leader, it is a kind of time-pass, nothing more. He who takes everybody along is a leader, not one with a trail of people walking behind him. There were many tall leaders around Gandhi—Rajendra Prasad, Ambedkar, Nehru, Bose, Sardar Patel and many more. It is that which creates conditions for a true democracy. Where one leader dwarfs the landscape, there will be no lok, only tantra, no people, only a hollowed-out system, and the only thing left standing will be a temple of falsehood. We owe it to ourselves to rebuild our democratic consciousness and reclaim our right to be the people.
The Babas of India Are Here to Stay
Frequently, at the beginning of women’s periods, a situation arises in which bleeding starts when they are in their houses’ most pure and sacred locations. Generally those areas which are forbidden—like the kitchen while cooking, or the puja room while cleaning it, or some other similar pure place where women are not meant to be at that time of the month. In the first days of the bleeding one doesn’t lay a hand on anything in the kitchen at all but this is a cycle which happens every month, and it isn’t in your hands at all. So if any such incident has happened to you during the entire year, there is one day to deliver you from your ‘paap bodh’, your sense of sin, the day of the Rishi Panchami...
The video in which I heard this statement being made by a baba was featured on one of the top three Hindi news channels on television. I watched the video and others featuring the baba on YouTube. The name of the news channel isn’t important here because all news channels on television and websites in all languages, with the exception of NDTV India, feature programmes like these—from horoscopes to ‘instructional’ videos like the one I watched. My intention is to examine what is said on these programmes, what has changed in them over time, and the vexations of our age which they reflect. I am trying to understand the scriptural knowledge quoted and recommended by Baba—the sage in the YouTube video—through the eyes of those women who are trying to break the many pre-conceived notions about periods and menstruation.
On the surface, it is easy to see how the colourful babas who feature on these news channels are digging out old superstitions and re-establishing them in modern contexts. Yet they are shrewd and intelligent too. They aren’t among us to foment revolution, to go back into the past and reclaim the ‘golden age of yoga or ayurved’; rather, these babas are master salesmen who are peddling a single cure for the one hundred and eight ills which afflict human beings—and, in the process, building their personal financial empires. Thus, single-minded devotion to tradition will not serve their purpose, and so these babas give as generous a space to modernity as they do to those nonsensical ideas within modernity which masquerade as tradition. More on this later.
The critics of television have focused all their energies on the ills which affect prime-time news programmes that are broadcast in the evening. A major strand in these programmes is the question of women’s ‘security’ and what can be done to ‘liberate’ women within our city-spaces. What has escaped most of these critics is the crowd of these influential astrologer-anchors who populate the morning prime-time segments, in their clothes and demeanour that are customized for the occasion, and come together to reinforce and exploit the insecurities of such a large section of society, especially women.
The question of whether astrology is itself valid or invalid is now past debate. Barring one or two people, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t consult an astrologer as routinely as they would a doctor. It clearly has an iron grip.
In comparison to babas who broadcast in Hindi, those who do so in English are a class apart. In place of daily horoscopes, they peddle life-management pills to harried customers. Interviews with English-speaking babas are conducted very respectfully and the English-speaking babas look upon Hindi-speaking ones with contempt. When a poor person takes refuge with a baba for the sake of spiritualism, it becomes superstition; when the rich take refuge with their babas for the sake of spiritualism, it becomes a stress-management course.
After Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan, the head of the Dera Sacha Sauda of Sirsa, Haryana, was sent to jail after being convicted on two counts of rape, it was written in many places that it is only poor people who come under the influence of babas. That’s nonsense. Rich people and the middle class have thrown up babas like Gurmeet too. The only difference is that they speak in English and peddle aloe vera juice.
In contemporary India, political leaders and ministers conduct secret pujas which cost lakhs of rupees. No one tal
ks about this expenditure which remains unrecorded either by PAN cards or Aadhaar numbers. Our political class is the biggest guardian of superstition. From cricketers to distinguished members of society, everyone is a guardian of blind belief. So no one should call the supporters of Ram Rahim’s Dera in Sirsa an army of ignorants.
It is nonsense, too, to say that news channels are responsible for the birth and proliferation of babas. It would be more correct to say that babas have their own channels via which they communicate with the public. There are many other information channels too on which newer varieties of babas keep rising. Babas have their own websites and social media teams. And all babas are astrologers, and vice versa, which gives them many other platforms. There is fierce competition among the astrology programmes on Hindi channels. Each programme is a brand in its own right.
But to come back to the YouTube video and Baba who dispensed advice to menstruating women. Many of the episodes of that particular programme which Baba hosts carry the tagline: ‘Find out how to get money that will last seven lifetimes.’ Crores of Indians live their entire lives below the poverty line. Those above the line too struggle as hard. To tell them that they will receive money that will last seven lifetimes is not rocket science—who will not be tempted to watch?
On his show, Baba claimed that if one keeps a regular fast of sixteen days over sixteen years for the goddess Mahalakshmi, one will gain an uninterrupted supply of wealth. This was a fast he too kept during his hard times, he said. What I couldn’t understand was whether uninterrupted wealth came into his life after the coming of television or because he kept the fast. He described rich people, saying that they behave in this way, or that way, and still they are prosperous. Then, deftly avoiding calling rich people corrupt, he said that they must have kept the fast for Mahalakshmi in one of their births because of which they had become prosperous in their present life. It was obvious that Baba knew how most of the rich and the prosperous become so in this country and, after all, everyone has an eye on the benefits which can accrue from such people.
