Is there life after democracy

Indian activist and writer Arundhati RoyArundhati Roy saays:

While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By democracy I don’t mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are. So,is there life after democracy?

Whether democracy should be the utopia that all ‘developing’ societies aspire to be is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn’t meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It’s meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy—too much representation, too little democracy—needs some structural adjustment.

What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly— our nearsightedness? Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do) combined with our inability to see very far into the future makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost.

It would be conceit to pretend that the essays in this book provide answers to any of these questions. They only demonstrate, in some detail, the fact that it looks as though the beacon could be failing and that democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would. All the essays were written as urgent, public interventions at critical moments in India — during the state-backed genocide of Muslims in Gujarat; just before the date set for the hanging of Mohammad Afzal, the accused in the 13 December 2001 Parliament Attack; during US President George BushGeorge Bush’s visit to India; during the mass uprising in Kashmir in the summer of 2008; after the 26 November 2008 Mumbai attacks. Often they were not just responses to events, they were responses to the responses.

Though many of them were written in anger, at moments when keeping quiet became harder than saying something, the essays do have a common thread. They’re not about unfortunate anomalies or aberrations in the democratic process. They’re about the consequences of and the corollaries to democracy; they’re about the fire in the ducts. I should also say that they do not provide a panoramic overview. They’re a detailed underview of specific events that I hoped would reveal some of the ways in which democracy is practised in the world’s largest democracy. (Or the world’s largest ‘demon-crazy’, as a Kashmiri protestor on the streets of Srinagar once put it. His placard said: ‘Democracy without Justice=Demon Crazy.’)

The battle for land lies at the heart of the ‘Development’ debate. Before he became India’s finance minister, P. ChidambaramP. Chidambaram was Enron’s lawyer and member of the Board of Directors of Vedanta, a multinational mining corporation that is currently devastating the Niyamgiri hills in Orissa. Perhaps his career graph informed his world view. Or maybe it’s the other way around. In an interview a year ago, he said that his vision was to get 85 per cent of India’s population to live in cities.[1] Realising this ‘vision’ would require social engineering on an unimaginable scale. It would mean inducing, or forcing, about five hundred million people to migrate from the countryside into cities. That process is well under way and is quickly turning India into a police state in which people who refuse to surrender their land are being made to do so at gunpoint. Perhaps this is what makes it so easy for P. Chidambaram to move so seamlessly from being finance minister to being home minister. The portfolios are separated only by an osmotic membrane. Underlying this nightmare masquerading as ‘vision’ is the plan to free up vast tracts of land and all of India’s natural resources, leaving them ripe for corporate plunder. In effect, to reverse the post-Independence policy of Land Reforms.

Already forests, mountains and water systems are being ravaged by marauding multinational corporations, backed by a State that has lost its moorings and is committing what can only be called ‘ecocide’. In eastern India bauxite and iron ore mining is destroying whole ecosystems, turning fertile land into desert. In the Himalayas hundreds of high dams are being planned, the consequences of which can only be catastrophic. In the plains, embankments built along rivers, ostensibly to control floods, have led to rising river beds, causing even more flooding, more waterlogging, more salinisation of agricultural land and the destruction of livelihoods of millions of people. Most of India’s holy rivers, including the Ganga, have been turned into unholy drains that carry more sewage and industrial effluent than water. Hardly a single river runs its course and meets the ocean.

Based on the absurd notion that a river flowing into the sea is a waste of water, the Supreme Court, in an act of unbelievable hubris, has arbitrarily ordered that India’s rivers be interlinked, like a mechanical water-supply system. Implementing this would mean tunnelling through mountains and forests, altering natural contours and drainage systems of river basins and destroying deltas and estuaries. In other words, wrecking the ecology of the entire subcontinent. (B.N. Kirpal, the judge who passed this order, joined the Environmental Board of Coca-Cola after he retired. Nice touch!)

The regime of Free Market economic policies, administered by people who are blissfully ignorant of the fate of civilizations that grew too dependent on artificial irrigation, has led to a worrying shift in cropping patterns. Sustainable food crops, suitable to local soil conditions and micro-climates, have been replaced by water-guzzling, hybrid and genetically modified ‘cash’ crops which, apart from being wholly dependent on the market, are also heavily dependent on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, canal irrigation and the indiscriminate mining of ground water. As abused farmland, saturated with chemicals, gradually becomes exhausted and infertile, agricultural input costs rise, ensnaring small farmers in a debt trap. Over the last few years, more than 180,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide.[2] While state granaries are bursting with food, that eventually rots, starvation and malnutrition approaching the same levels as in sub-Saharan Africa stalk the land.[3] Truly the 9 per cent growth rate is beginning to look like a downward spiral. The higher the rate of this kind of growth, the worse the prognosis. Any oncologist will tell you that.

It’s as though an ancient society, decaying under the weight of feudalism and caste, was churned in a great machine. The churning has ripped through the mesh of old inequalities, recalibrating some of them but reinforcing most. Now the old society has curdled and separated into a thin layer of thick cream—and a lot of water. The cream is India’s ‘market’ of many million consumers (of cars, cell phones, computers, Valentine’s Day greeting cards), the envy of international business. The water is of little consequence. It can be sloshed around, stored in holding ponds, and eventually drained away.

Or so they think, the men in suits. They didn’t bargain for the violent civil war that has broken out in India’s heartland: Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, and West Bengal.
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Coming back to 1989. As if to illustrate the connection between ‘Union’ and ‘Progress’, at exactly the same time that the Congress government was opening up India’s markets to international finance, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), then in the opposition, began its virulent campaign of Hindu nationalism (popularly known as ‘Hindutva’). In 1990, its leader, L.K. Advani, travelled across the country whipping up hatred against Muslims and demanding that the Babri Masjid, an old sixteenth-century mosque that stood on a disputed site in Ayodhya, be demolished and a Ram Temple built in its place. In 1992, a mob, egged on by Advani, demolished the mosque. In early 1993, a mob rampaged through Mumbai attacking Muslims, killing almost one thousand people. As revenge, a series of bomb blasts ripped through the city, killing about two hundred and fifty people.[4] Feeding off the communal frenzy it had generated, the BJP, which had only two seats in Parliament in 1984, defeated the Congress in 1998 and came to power at the Centre.

It’s not a coincidence that the rise of Hindutva corresponded with the historical moment when America substituted Communism with Islam as it’s great enemy. The radical Islamist Mujahideen — whom President Reagan once entertained in the White House and compared to America’s Founding Fathers — suddenly began to be called terrorists. CNN’s live broadcast of the 1990–91 Gulf War — Operation Desert Storm —made it to elite drawing rooms in Indian cities, bringing with it the early thrills of satellite TV. Almost simultaneously, the Indian Government, once a staunch friend of the Palestinians, turned into Israel’s ‘natural ally’. Now India and Israel do joint military exercises, share intelligence and probably exchange notes on how best to administer occupied territories.

By 1998, when the BJP took office, the ‘Progress’ project of Privatisation and Liberalisation was about eight years old. Though it had campaigned vigorously against the economic reforms, saying they were a process of ‘looting through liberalization’, once it came to power the BJP embraced the Free Market enthusiastically and threw its weight behind huge corporations like Enron. (In representative democracies, once they’re elected, the peoples’ representatives are free to break their promises and change their minds.)

Within weeks of taking office, the BJP conducted a series of thermonuclear tests. Though India had thrown its hat into the nuclear ring in 1975, politically, the 1998 nuclear tests were of a different order altogether. The orgy of triumphant nationalism with which the tests were greeted introduced a chilling new language of aggression and hatred into mainstream public discourse. None of what was being said was new, only that what was once considered unacceptable was suddenly being celebrated. Since then, Hindu communalism and nuclear nationalism, like corporate globalization, have vaulted over the stated ideologies of political parties. The venom has been injected straight into our bloodstream. It’s there now—in all its violence and banality—for us to deal with in our daily lives, regardless of whether the government at the centre calls itself ‘secular’ or not. The Muslim community has seen a sharp decline in its fortunes and is now at the bottom of the social pyramid, along with Dalits and Adivasis.[5]

Certain events that occur in the life of a nation have the effect of parting the curtains and giving ordinary people a glimpse into the future. The 1998 nuclear tests were one such. You didn’t need the gift of prophecy to tell in which direction India was heading. This is an excerpt from ‘The End of Imagination’, an essay (not in this collection) that I wrote after the nuclear tests:

‘Explosion of Self-esteem’, ‘Road to Resurgence’, ‘A Moment of Pride’, these were headlines in the papers in the days following the nuclear tests . . . .

‘These are not just nuclear tests, they are nationalism tests,’ we were repeatedly told.

This has been hammered home, over and over again. The bomb is India, India is the bomb. Not just India, Hindu India. Therefore, be warned, any criticism of it is not just anti-national, but anti-Hindu . . . . This is one of the unexpected perks of having a nuclear bomb. Not only can the government use it to threaten the enemy, it can use it to declare war on its own people. Us . . . .

Why does it all seem so familiar? Is it because, even as you watch, reality dissolves and seamlessly rushes forward into the silent, black-and-white images from old films—scenes of people being hounded out of their lives, rounded up and herded into camps? Of massacre, of mayhem, of endless columns of broken people making their way to nowhere? Why is there no soundtrack? Why is the hall so quiet? Have I been seeing too many films? Am I mad? Or am I right? Could those images be the inescapable culmination of what we have set into motion? Could our future be rushing forward into our past? [6]

The Us I referred to were those of us who do not belong to — or identify ourselves with — the ‘Hindu’ majority. By past, I was referring to the Partition of India in 1947, when more than one million Hindus and Muslims killed each other, and eight million became refugees.
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In February 2002, following the burning of a train coach in which fifty-eight Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya were burned alive, the BJP government in Gujarat, led by Chief Minister Narendra ModiNarendra Modi, presided over a carefully planned genocide of Muslims in the state. The Islamophobia generated all over the world by the 11 September 2001 attacks put the wind in their sails. The machinery of the state of Gujarat stood by and watched while more than two thousand people [7] were massacred. Women were gang-raped and burned alive. One hundred and fifty thousand Muslims were driven from their homes. The community was, and continues to be, ghettoised, socially and economically ostracized. Gujarat has always been a communally tense state. There had been riots before. But this was not a riot. It was a genocidal massacre, and though the number of victims was insignificant compared to the horror of say Rwanda, Sudan or the Congo, the Gujarat carnage was designed as a public spectacle whose aims were unmistakable. It was a public warning to Muslim citizens from the government of the world’s favourite democracy.

After the carnage, Narendra Modi pressed for early elections. He was returned to power with a mandate from the people of Gujarat. Five years later he repeated his success: he is now serving a third term as chief minister, widely appreciated by business houses for his faith in the Free Market. To be fair to the people of Gujarat, the only alternative they had to Narendra Modi’s brand of Hindutva (Nuclear), was the Congress Party’s candidate, Shankarsinh Vaghela, a disgruntled former BJP chief minister. All he had to offer was his own brand of Hindutva (Lite & Muddled). Not surprisingly, it didn’t make the cut.

The Gujarat genocide is the subject of the first essay in this collection, ‘Democracy: Who’s She When She’s at Home?’, written in May 2002 when murderous mobs still roamed the streets, killing and intimidating Muslims. I have deliberately not updated the text of any of the essays, because I thought it would be interesting to see how a hard look at the systemic nature of what is going on often contains within it a forecast of events that are still to come. So instead of updating the essays, I’ve added new endnotes. For example, a paragraph in the essay on the Gujarat genocide says:

Can we expect an anniversary celebration next year? Or will there be someone else to hate by then? Alphabetically: Adivasis, Buddhists, Christians, Dalits, Parsis, Sikhs? Those who wear jeans or speak English or those who have thick lips or curly hair? We won’t have to wait long.

Mobs led by Congress Party leaders had already slaughtered thousands of Sikhs on the streets of Delhi in 1984, as revenge for the assassination of Indira GandhiIndira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. Goons belonging to the Bajrang Dal, a Hindu militia, had attacked an Australian missionary, Graham Staines, and his two young sons, and burned them alive in January 1999.8 By December 2007, attacks on Christians by Hindu militias moved beyond stray incidents. In several states — Gujarat, Karnataka, Orissa — Christians were attacked, churches gutted. In Kandhamal, Orissa, at least sixteen Dalit and Adivasi Christians were killed by ‘Hindu’ Dalits and Adivasis. [9] Tens of thousands of Christians now live in refugee camps or hide in the surrounding forests, afraid to venture out to tend their fields and crops. Right now, ‘Hinduising’ Dalits and Adivasis, pitting them against each other, as well as against Muslims and Maoists, is the most important part of the Hindutva project. (Once again, it’s not a coincidence that these communities live in forests and on mineral rich lands which corporations have their eyes on and governments want vacated. So the Hindutva ‘shivirs’ [camps], under the pretext of bringing them into the ‘Hindu fold’, are a means of controlling people.)

In December 2008, protected by the first-ever BJP government to come to power in a southern state, Hindu vigilante mobs in Bangalore and Mangalore—the hub of India’s IT industry—began to attack women who wear jeans and Western clothes. [10] The threat is ongoing. Hindu militias have vowed to turn Karnataka into another Gujarat. That the BJP has struck roots in states like Karnataka and Gujarat, both frontrunners in the globalization project, once again illustrates the organic relationship between ‘Union’ and ‘Progress’. Or, if you like, between Fascism and the Free Market.

In January 2009 that relationship was sealed with a kiss at a public function. The CEOs of two of India’s biggest corporations, Ratan TataRatan Tata (of the Tata Group) and Mukesh AmbaniMukesh Ambani (of Reliance Industries), while accepting the Gujarat Garima—Pride of Gujarat—award, celebrated the development policies of Narendra Modi, architect of the Gujarat genocide, and warmly endorsed him as a future candidate for prime minister.
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As this book goes to press, the nearly two billion dollar 2009 General Election has just been concluded. [11] That’s a lot more than the budget of the US elections. According to some media reports the actual amount that was spent is closer to ten billion dollars. [12] Where, might one ask, does that kind of money come from?

The Congress and its Allies, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), have won a comfortable majority. Interestingly, more than 90 per cent of the independent candidates who stood for elections lost. Clearly, without sponsorship it’s hard to win an election. And independent candidates cannot promise subsidised rice, free TVs and cash-for-votes, those demeaning acts of vulgar charity that elections have been reduced to. [13]

When you take a closer look at the calculus that underlies election results, words like ‘comfortable’ and ‘majority’ turn out to be deceptive, if not outright inaccurate. For instance, the actual share of votes polled by the UPA in these elections works out to only 10.3 per cent of the country’s population! It’s interesting how the cleverly layered mathematics of electoral democracy can turn a tiny minority into a thumping mandate. [14] Anyway, be that as it may, the point is that it will not be L.K. Advani, hate-monger incarnate, but secular Dr Manmohan SinghManmohan Singh, gentle architect of the market reforms, a man who has never won an election in his life, who will be prime minister of the world’s largest democracy for a second term.

In the run-up to the polls, there was absolute consensus across party lines about the economic ‘reforms’. Govindacharya, formerly the chief ideologue of the BJP, progenitor of the Ram Janamabhoomi movement, sarcastically suggested that the Congress and BJP form a coalition. [15] In some states they already have. In Chhattisgarh, for example, the BJP runs the government and Congress politicians run the Salwa Judum, a vicious government-backed ‘people’s’ militia. The Judum and the government have formed a joint front against the Maoists in the forests who are engaged in a deadly and often brutal armed struggle against displacement and against land acquisition by corporations waiting to set up steel factories and to begin mining iron ore, tin and all the other wealth stashed below the forest floor. So, in Chhattisgarh, we have the remarkable spectacle of the two biggest political parties of India in an alliance against the Adivasis of Dantewara, India’s poorest, most vulnerable people. Already 644 villages have been emptied. Fifty thousand people have moved into Salwa Judum camps. Three hundred thousand are hiding in the forests and are being called Maoist terrorists or sympathizers. The battle is raging, and the corporations are waiting.

It is significant that India is one of the countries that blocked a European move in the UN asking for an international probe into war crimes that may have been committed by the government of Sri Lanka in its recent offensive against the Tamil Tigers. [16] Governments in this part of the world have taken note of Israel’s Gaza blueprint as a good way of dealing with ‘terrorism’: keep the media out and close in for the kill. That way they don’t have to worry too much about who’s a ‘terrorist’ and who isn’t. There may be a little flurry of international outrage, but it goes away pretty quickly.

Things do not augur well for the forest-dwelling people of Chhattisgarh.

Reassured by the sort of ‘constructive’ collaboration, the consensus between political parties, few were more enthusiastic about the recent general elections than some major corporate houses. They seem to have realized that a democratic mandate can legitimize their pillaging in a way that nothing else can. Several corporations ran extravagant advertising campaigns on TV, some featuring Bollywood film stars urging people, young and old, rich and poor, to go out and vote. Shops and restaurants in Khan market, Delhi’s most tony market, offered discounts to those whose index (voting) fingers were marked with indelible ink. Democracy suddenly became the cool new way to be. You know how it is: the Chinese do Sport, so they had the Olympics; India does Democracy, so we had an election. Both are heavily sponsored, TV friendly spectator sports.

The BBC commissioned a coach on a train — the India Election Special — that took journalists from all over the world on a sightseeing...