Unlock Indian ‘Democracy’: Sanitising will not work and people will not allow an indefinite lockdown  

As the lockdown-unlock continuum completes nearly five months, there is a lot of discussion on the economic cost of the lockdown. The economy was already slowing down, the lockdown is now causing an outright contraction. For people living on the margin, this straightaway translates into a crisis of survival.

Add to this the health crisis, fear, anxiety and social stigma spreading along with the escalation of COVID-19 and we have a major social and humanitarian disaster on hand. But there is another crisis deepening rather quietly but alarmingly – the crisis of Indian democracy.

Like the economy, democracy too has been facing relentless assaults in recent years, with the executive increasingly making a mockery of the constitutional foundation and framework of democracy, and the legislative and judicial powers proving unwilling or unable to provide any countervailing check. The repressive apparatus of the state is persecuting dissent in a way that would have made our colonial rulers proud.

Democracy is now in the lockdown mode. In Kashmir, this has long been the permanent mode, and for the last one year it has been openly declared as such. Now we can see this mode at work across the length and breadth of the country. The lockdown mode is threatening to render parliament increasingly superfluous and symbolic with the cabinet, or more specifically the Prime Minister’s Office, announcing major decisions and policies without any parliamentary deliberation or scrutiny.

The lockdown mode has also taken away the normal avenues available to the people to lodge protests and air grievances. And while the people are effectively debarred from exercising their democratic rights, the state is treating it as an opportunity to cage citizens and silence and punish dissent.

The government has announced an aggressive privatisation campaign and opening up of the economy to corporates, camouflaged as ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’, state governments have suspended crucial rights of workers, the environment ministry is threatening to do away with any say to the affected people in matters of environmental impact assessment, ordinances have been promulgated to institute total corporate control over agricultural production and marketing, and a new education policy has been announced that facilitates exit and exclusion of students rather than their entry and access.

While religious and political gatherings are prohibited under COVID-19 preventive protocol, the government has gone ahead with the Bhoomi Poojan at Ayodhya, turning it into an official event where for the first time a Prime Minister sworn to uphold a secular constitution has gone on to lay the foundation of a temple.

Instead of releasing senior citizen prisoners with serious health issues (Varavara Rao, GN Saibaba, Shoma Sen, Sudha Bharadwaj, to just name four), three more academics and writers (Anand Teltumbde, Gautam Navlakha, Hany Babu) have been arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case and more are being interrogated even as the real planners and perpetrators have been left scot-free.

Similarly, the entire investigation of the communal violence in NE Delhi has been turned into a witch-hunt against the anti-CAA movement. While BJP leaders who openly instigated violence have been left out of the ambit of investigation, students, academics, and well known political and civil society activists are being arrested and interrogated.

There have been plenty of occasions in this period when the Supreme Court should have taken suo moto cognizance of the grave injustice being inflicted on common people. The cruel treatment meted out to India’s migrant workers, police brutalities on helpless people during the lockdown, the fake encounter fiction dished out by the UP Police are some of the most explosive examples.

But while the Supreme Court remained indifferent to the cause of justice in all these cases, it was just two tweets by eminent public interest lawyer Prashant Bhushan that made the Supreme Court sit up and find him guilty of contempt of court. The Supreme Court ceasing to make the distinction between criticism and contempt is a big blow to the right to dissent, without which democracy loses all meaning.

When normal public activities are mostly suspended, political gatherings are ruled out, and people are fighting hard to survive the triple blows of the pandemic, floods and lockdown, is it possible or advisable to go ahead with Assembly elections in a state like Bihar? The Election Commission thinks the pandemic is not enough of a disaster to merit any deferment of elections and so Bihar is all set to have a digitally dominated polling exercise right in the middle of a raging epidemic.

A despotic regime spearheading a policy offensive bypassing Parliament, a police machinery acting at the behest of the ruling party without any checks, a judiciary that takes offence at a lawyer’s tweets but looks away from actual injustice and constitutional violation and an Election Commission bent upon holding elections without caring for the people’s health or participation – such then are the contours of the emerging lockdown mode of Indian democracy.

The government is of course only too happy to let this lockdown mode linger as indefinitely as possible. And the media would like us to believe that the Indian people are also enjoying this state of affairs with a prominent media house giving us an opinion poll that shows the PM enjoying his highest ever approval rating (78%).

But away from the media limelight, dissent and democracy are still very much alive among the people. To the ‘stay at home’ order of the state and the ‘work from home’ formula of capital, the people of India have added their own innovation: ‘protest from home’.

The government announcement to commercial coal mining by private companies has been greeted with a three-day strike of coal workers. The ordinances have given rise to powerful protests among farmers. ASHA workers, who are a key frontline contingent of Corona warriors in India and have to work without PPE kits and basic facilities and rights, struck work along with other scheme workers for two days.

Women harassed by microfinance usury are rallying across the country demanding freedom from debt. And on August 9 and August 15, workers, peasants and students joined hands to salute the real legacy of India’s freedom movement and take a vow to save the Constitution, and save India.

The mask and the sanitiser may be the most ubiquitous COVID-19 insignia but the people of India will not allow Indian democracy to be locked down indefinitely, sanitised of dissent with a gag on free speech.

Democracy must and shall be unlocked.

(The author is geneal secretary of the CPI(ML). Views expressed are personal)