Taking democracy for granted is a fatal flaw

I am not sure that many in the Modi Government would be familiar with the name of David Runciman, professor of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University.

But this week’s crackdown on civil rights activists and dissidents is the biggest endorsement of his new book, “How Democracy Ends”, in which he lists India as among the countries where democracy is being upended in the name of protecting it from supposedly undemocratic forces. India, according to him, illustrates the threat that democracy is facing from “executive aggrandisement” and “strongmen chipping away at it while paying lip service to it”.

It represents the new emerging face of democracy where it all appears tickety-boo on the surface, but is haemorrhaging from inside. Indians might find it embarrassing that he lumps their country with such authoritarian democracies as Hungary, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines where too “strongmen” are “chipping away” at democratic institutions while paying lip service to them.

Runciman sees Narendra Modi as part of a growing cast of “ever more characterful performers” alongside Donald Trump, Recep Erdogan, and Lech Kazcynski, among others, who have converted democracy into an “elaborate performance” to engage public attention while quietly wrecking it from inside. Like them, he has developed a “personality cult” operating through networks of private interests and hardline followers .

“The more democracy is taken for granted, the more chance there is to subvert it without having to overthrow it,” Runciman writes. This does not mean that democracy in India is about to be snuffed out, but there’s a real danger that gradually it will mutate into a “zombie democracy” simply going through the motions.

A “tamasha”, as a left-wing Pakistani pro-democracy activist put it when I asked him about the post-election situation in his country. Loudly laughing down a crackling telephone line from Karachi he said in Urdu: ”Democracy ke naam par tamasha ho raha ha, janaab (a farce is going on in the name of democracy)”.

He was in the middle of quoting a line from Ghalib when we got cut off. Runciman’s thesis is part of a wider debate in the West over the future of liberal democracy. It’s said to be in the throes of a deep existential crisis even in countries where it appears to be safe. Edward Luce believes that it’s “closer to collapse than we may wish to believe” (FT) echoing a view expressed in varying degrees in a spate of books that have come out recently.

Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in her new book (“Fascism: A Warning”), has raised the spectre of return to fascism. American democracy has already been downgraded from “full democracy” to “flawed democracy” by the Economist Intelligence Unit. It was not long ago that the fall of the Soviet - style Communism was hailed as the “end of history” leaving western liberal democracy as the only game in town.

And here we are, barely two decades later discussing the “end of democracy”! The point often missed is that liberal democracy was never supposed to be subversion-proof. Indeed, there’s a view that in fact it was always destined to end in tears. Historically, liberals have had strong misgivings about the very idea of democracy warning that masses were “easy prey for demagogues and would-be dictators catering to their lowest instincts”, according to American historian Helena Rosenblatt.

For all this, however, Runciman’s own prognosis is that democracy is not about to die; what will die is democracy in its liberal avatar leaving behind a shell democracy. And the chances are that few might even notice the change. As many in India haven’t.

(The writer is a UK-based commentator)