Views may differ but let’s still not call it an election in a banana republic, where the man who calls the shots tries to ensure that his opponents are effectively put out of the race before it begins. However, if to the leader’s frustration the best laid plans fail, and the game does indeed manage to begin, then a peaceful transfer of power – should the situation surprisingly arise – is brought into question.
In less benign cases, of course, opponents vanish or are done away with, in a seeming accident or are openly attacked by armed men, who are mercenaries one way or another. In the end, the leader gets nearly all the votes, since a dummy contender typically also runs to foster the claim of a democracy.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
In perfectly benign cases, the leader wins handsomely anyway. Everything needed to produce such a result is programmed. Voters are conditioned to accept their fate. The authority that conducts the polls is in the government’s confidence.
India’s Lok Sabha elections underway may be said to be a variant of the second case – but in a way that makes it not quite a poll in a banana republic. Evidently, the desired outcome was carefully fleshed out. The poll authority was neatly rigged. The law was changed just months before the election process was to begin to ensure that those conducting the polls behave, stay within limits, and not offer even a hint that they were an independent constitutional authority, as they used to be.
The bank accounts of the main national opposition, the Congress, were frozen so that it may be prevented from doing any work at all, leave alone election work. Two opposition chief ministers were thrown into jail without trial, on accusations that raise questions about the government’s motives.
And, India’s version of the dreaded secret police of some countries – created here by the regime through the simple expedient of converting legitimate investigative authorities into praetorian guards of a corrupt autocracy through an inter-locking process that has subverted established institutions of governance of every kind, and made them bow to the wishes of a coterie who have the gumption to declare that they will be in power for 50 years.
This is a sterling performance by the standards of a dictatorship, but the protagonists did not contend with the people. India is composed of peoples of many languages, religions, cultures, customs and mores, social systems, and indeed social, cultural and political histories.
It is the struggle for independence from colonial rule that brought this diverse land mass together into a coherent system of political thought and action through the freedom movement, and then wove it into a cogent governance system through a sincerely – at times hotly – debated constitution which emphasises the importance of regions and states, and grasps the intrinsic value that attaches to religions, cultures and languages, and empowers them, while melding them in a federal structure.
Such a complex web has features that will resist the dictatorial tendencies of a party or leader as many kinds of parts make up the whole here, and these parts will not tolerate an imposed oneness.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ideological mentors understand this only too well, hence Modi’s frequent calls that, cleverly and hypocritically, and in the name of the country’s functional and emotional unity and strength, underline oneness of everything that falls within India’s boundaries – such as one nation-one election, one nation-one ration card, one nation-one supreme religion, in order to bring about a non-federal Hindu Rashtra as an initial step to more sweeping changes.
This has been lampooned as ‘one nation-one leader’– which indeed appears to be the unspoken ambition of the current leadership – and people are catching on. Such a belief and desire, when paired with untrammeled political power, can pave the way for a full-blown dictatorship – which is exactly what seems to be on the minds of the duo, trio, or quartet, which are at present riding high.
The likely shape and direction of such a regime, in which absolute power is made a plaything in the service of the richer classes, more specifically big business, will be that of a single party-single leader dictatorship.
Even the devout Hindu will then be forgotten, much to their chagrin as they would have expected Hindu Rashtra to be something else, a land of the Hindu pure of their imagination, much as Pakistan was advertised as a land of the Muslim pure by the big propertied classes of Muslims in order to attract the attention and support of the ordinary Muslim in undivided India.
(They were, incidentally, not fooled. Scholarly writing shows that the most enthusiastic participants and subscribers to the new country were a spectrum of the middle and upper classes, rather than the humbler folk. Ironically, something similar seems to be happening in the context of the call for a Hindu State being given by the Modi afficionado. )
The fascinating diversity of the Indian people is becoming an obstacle in Modi’s dream project. Various parts of the country have demonstrated their allegiance to their dominant regional parties. The more significant of these have agreed to be a part of a broad opposition umbrella, the INDIA grouping, conceived and operationalised at the behest of the Congress party with a specific aim – to push back and oust the Modi regime in order to turn the country away from the dangerous economic, social, cultural and political direction being imparted by Modi.
Congress leader and the party’s former president Rahul Gandhi, in his re-incarnated emergence, is widely seen to be the vigorous provider of the impetus that’s brought about this change, until very recently thought so unlikely an event that a third time Modi victory was being seen, across the country, as an inevitability – with few recognising the distinct possibility of such an event tilting the country in the direction of a dictatorship, and possibly even a fascist push, in the not distant future.
With wide sections of the people coming together, and broad sections of the political opposition coordinating its effort to challenge Modi’s policies across-the-board, and in light of the enthusiastic public response that has followed, as gauged from the political look of things with some two thirds of the polling done for the Lok Sabha election under way, serious doubts have surfaced even in the senior echelons of the ruling party, and the ruling establishment as a whole, to say nothing of the movers and shakers of the market and the economy itself.
The question then suggests itself: In such a sliding situation, can someone with the political makeup, pugilist outlook, and self-aggrandising tendencies of Modi, who has accumulated vast resources, some of it through means called “unconstitutional” by the Supreme Court, be tempted to come in the way of the peaceful transfer of power, if the poll outcome proves an undue setback?
For now, the answers may only be speculated, but one thing seems certain. It is not only Modi’s political opponents who will be doing the arithmetic, and the political sums, based on the poll outcome and the various scenarios and possibilities that may be thrown up, but also some of the leading lights of his own party or clique who may be eager to step into his shoes, forestalling the political opposition. Observers in India and around the world are likely to be setting up a watch.
Anand K. Sahay is a journalist and political commentator based in New Delhi.
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