Editor’s Note: Is India heading towards an autocracy?

Can the opposition muster the will to preserve democracy’s essence, as it did during the dark days of the Emergency?

Writing in the 1980s, in post-Emergency India, the American scholar of South Asian studies Ainslie Embree wrote that despite India’s political democracy, its free press, and loud opposition, “an authoritarian regime would not go against India’s historical experience or social values”.

He showed astonishing prescience. In a recent Pew survey, 67 per cent of Indians supported an autocracy. As I write this, the Lok Sabha election is weeks away and a halo of invincibility is being burnished around Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He is being compared to a Putin, voted into office in perpetuity, as if this were a compliment. Modi, we are told, is campaigning for 2029 and a fourth term. This chatter fills the air even as a shocking electoral bonds scandal unravels, revealing, inter alia, just how many corporate entities were on the ED’s radar and then miraculously off it—once they purchased electoral bonds.

Despite the appalling experience of the Emergency, if so many Indians are still in thrall of a single figure concentrating power within his office, should we look to the national character for an explanation? Let’s do a thought experiment: Chanakya and Machiavelli are often invoked in tandem, but while “Machiavellian” in politics is invariably a pejorative, “Chanakyavadi” in post-2014 India is high praise. Despotism, thus, might not fall foul of prevailing public ethicality.

Is India then heading towards an autocracy? And is this being hawked as inevitable? The BJP has not really made a secret of its ambitions: from promoting a Congress-mukt Bharat to now seeking an opposition-mukt Bharat. Since Gujarat is the pin-up poster, let us look no further. With a vote share of 63 per cent and winning all 26 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the BJP sits smug in this State. Yet, it has not stopped enlisting members from opposition parties. As Mahesh Langa wrote in The Hindu, those who cannot be defeated electorally are being co-opted with incentives, threats, or both.

This plunder of opposition parties is happening countrywide, made possible with the enormous money and clout at the party’s fingertips. But such flexing cannot simply be greeted with naïve fandom. Marauding monsters also have insatiable appetites, and democracy will be high on this particular monster’s appetiser menu.

With such a behemoth on the prowl, how can an opposition organise itself? Should it seek another Great Leader? Should the various opposition parties in the INDIA bloc erase their differences and become a monolith? Is the idea of a “coalition” at the Centre really the nightmare it is made out to be? At an even more basic level, what is the big idea behind which such parties can unite?

Governments in a democracy are regulated by checks and balances in the form of judiciary, media, election commission, universities, trade unions, what Embree called India’s “ancillary institutions”. It is a fact that these have been corroded systematically, that the government has a stranglehold on media and social media, that it has weaponised state arms such as the ED. In this India, what shape can an opposition take?

Perhaps the question must be framed differently. Perhaps it must no longer be about the opposition’s shape or imperfections, its multiple leaders or merry-go-round persona. Perhaps it must now be about the will to prevail. During the Emergency, the opposition was a ragtag force, with leaders jailed, publications gagged, public meetings banned. But it was this opposition that defeated Indira Gandhi.

As Satish Deshpande writes of his Emergency years: “We would have campaigned for a lamp post if it was anti-Congress.”