Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Opposition's 'democracy in danger' pitch cut due to low turnout

The election rhetoric of “democracy is in danger” or “the Constitution is in danger” does not work in both India and the US. Elections are contests of comparative credibility. The results are always the result of a number of factors, from macro narrative building to micro strategy management. Sometimes a plausible message has ineffective messengers. So, the mandate can be difficult to read. But democracy’s concern is not to cut ice with voters. Even the brief use of the “constitution is in danger” discourse in India was about preserving reservations, not democracy. “Democracy” is not an election slogan. This fact is reflected.

There are several possibilities here. The first is simply the paradoxical situation where voters are exercising their electoral franchise, and they are told that democracy is in danger. Voters trust that whatever our concerns about democracy, the electoral system, even if it is not perfect, will work adequately when it needs reform. There are no classical features of dictatorships like military rule. In terms of vote share, the electoral landscape is still competitive. Voters are still sophisticated enough to vote for Congress for the Lok Sabha in Nanded and all BJP MLAs for the assembly in the same constituency. There is no deep concern about electoral competitiveness.

What about the other constitutional elements of liberal democracy, rights like freedom of expression, checks and balances, respect for procedures, etc.? This is where the dangers of an authoritarian turn in democracy are most evident. Yet these concerns are muted. It is very difficult for the Congress in India or the Democratic Party in the US to position themselves as the undisputed champions of free speech. The right has, with some justification, managed to convince voters that if there are differences on these constitutional rights, they are differences of degree at best. Second, in forms of social control there is what you might call space for “statistical innocence.” You still don’t have mass repression. Control works effectively through exemplary targeting. And the paradox of modern censorship is that it draws attention to what is being censored. So, in practical terms, the world doesn’t come across as a censored world so much as a censored world, even though forms of social control are at work and some individuals may pay a heavy price.

The rhetoric of checks and balances and “institutions in danger” has a similar effect. The Right has convinced significant parts of the electorate that these checks and balances were not actually protectors of liberty or people’s interests. Instead, they were structures devised by old elites to thwart the power of the people; old, often corrupt, oligarchies or undemocratic intellectual vanguards used them to exercise power over the people. These checks and balances and procedures were not protecting democracy, they were subverting it. So, in fact, giving them short shrift is empowering real democracy.

That this critique is half plausible tells you something about both the old elites and about modern democracy. Modern democracy relies on constitutional protections like individual rights. But modern democracy also promises representation and agency. The promise of representation is not the division of power based on some pre-existing ethnic or social cleavage. It is, rather, the ability to produce identification with a leader or a party, that strange alchemy by which a leader becomes ours or the government becomes mine. Democracy is a field in which this identification is produced, and those who do it most successfully are indeed speaking for the people. Electorally dominant leaders like Trump or Modi produce this identification.

The second elemen is agency. A successful people does things together. They come together in a form where they can be said to exercise collective agency as a people. Socially, the people are plural. Every society has all kinds of groups in it. But for the people to be able to act to some purpose, they must have a modicum of unity, they must acquire a will. They must be more than the sum of their parts. So called populist authoritarians promise this sense of agency. They do away with checks and balances in the name of empowering the agency of the people. It is also in part why centrist and Left politics, which takes social division to be central, is failing. It is not that the Right will not do social engineering: The BJP has been masterful at caste coalitions. But unlike the Centre and Left, it has not let go of the idea that India is more than a collection of castes or regions. Somehow the kind of politics of distribution that Congress is playing with the caste census, or on race that the Democrats were seen to play, is identified as disaggregative. It is seen as disempowering the people, dissolving their will into lots of little parts. The Right is walking away with the identification and agency dimensions of democracy.