The landslide victory of Prime Minister Modi’s BJP in India’s Uttar Pradesh (UP) state, followed by tentative selection of hard-line Hindu cleric as UP’s chief minister designate, seems to have rattled too many nerves around the region and, indeed, the world. The world’s largest democracy is in peril … secularism is under attack … religious minorities are endangered … and so the gnashing of the teeth goes.
Such doomsday prognosticators need to take a very deep breath.
India’s 80-year-old democracy (dating from the 1937 general elections) has come a long way and has the maturity, institutional rigour, and checks and balances to address the occasional shock to the system that voters in parts of the country throw up from time to time.
The fact that, barring the short bizarreness of the Indira Gandhi “Emergency,” India has had regular free elections at national and provincial levels is a testament to the maturity of an electoral regime that few countries outside of North America and Europe have been able to replicate.
In South Asia, India stands out as having the only unbroken record of such elections.
A landslide victory that returns a horrible chief executive can be, and has often been, easily negated in a subsequent election within five years.
And in the case of India’s Hindi-belt states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh, the dynamic cleavages of clan, class, and caste are so deeply etched that crafting permanent ruling majorities in the legislatures is a fool’s errand at best.
With a national election commission whose autonomy, authority, and decisiveness is legendary, elections in India do actually matter.
But elections and legislatures aren’t the only institutions that give me reassurance about the strength of India’s secular, pluralist, albeit imperfect, democracy.
Like Australia, Canada, and the United States, India’s governance has both vertical and horizontal separation of powers, making it difficult for any one entity to amass too much power.
Horizontally, the existence of responsible governments at the state and national levels -- independent of each other -- diffuses power in areas as disparate as policing, education policy, and health care. And while UP is the most populous state, it is but one of the 29 states of the Indian Union, with many of them ruled by parties other than the one ruling at the national level.
Vertically, of course, there is a separation of powers at the Centre. A bicameral national legislature with an often restive upper chamber, a president elected via a special electoral college who is ceremonial but not without certain reserve powers, and a strong independent judiciary that jealously guards its role as the preeminent sentinel of the constitution, together make it tough for even the most popular prime minister to go “rogue” in the pursuit of power.
It’s not been exactly uncommon to see India’s judges send sitting ministers and chief ministers to jail, in marked contrast to some of her neighboring countries where convicted felons not only stay out of jail but proudly serve as cabinet members of dubiously elected regimes.
If independent India’s history shows her neighbours something to emulate, it is that with certain foundational pillars like free elections, even an imperfect democracy develops mechanisms to counter dangers
Then there is, of course, India’s fourth estate. The often irreverent cacophony of thousands of publications in hundreds of languages -- some of whose pedigree go back over a hundred years -- is by its existence a bulwark against majoritarian tyranny.
That certainly doesn’t mean that censorship of the formal or informal sort does not exist in India; it does in ways subtle and not too subtle.
But that is a far cry from the countries India shares borders with; when was the last time you heard the editor of a major Indian daily hit with a hundred lawsuits engineered by the BJP high command simply as retaliation for admitting the truth from a decade ago?
No ruling politician in India is safe in the pages of newspapers and upstart blogs, no matter what that politician’s genealogy, from robust critique of performance, personality, or policy. Politicians who have arrogated to themselves a cult of being above criticism have often been reminded otherwise either by voters or by an independent judiciary.
None of this is to suggest that India has a perfect liberal democracy; indeed, the facts loudly speak otherwise. Neither her bureaucrats nor her institutions are above corruption. At the same time, it is quite unfair and naïve to sing the swan song for pluralism in the world’s biggest democracy simply because of the results of one election in one state out of the 29 in that country.
If independent India’s history shows her neighbours something to emulate, it is that with certain foundational pillars like free elections, independent judges, and press freedoms, even an imperfect democracy develops mechanisms to structurally counter lurking dangers to that system.
I am the last person someone would accuse of being an Indophile, but I am comfortable saying “Have faith in India’s democracy.”
Esam Sohail is an educational research analyst and college lecturer of social sciences. He writes from Kansas, USA.
