Accepting that the second term (2019-24) of the Narendra Modi regime inaugurated a “second republic” that is roughly the opposite of the first republic established in 1947, the historian, peace advocate, and political commentator Radha Kumar asks: “What form must a third, more anchored, federal republic take to fulfil the promises of independence, made seventy-five years ago?”
We live in difficult times for democracy, and just before the election results of June, even a question as dire as this one would have sounded naively optimistic. It was courageous of the author and publisher to have risked publication just a month or two before the election, when the Modi regime seemed to be on the brink of making its republic irreversible.
Kumar offers five defining features of the second republic, or Modi raj, that will be mostly uncontroversial: a) the claim that the nation is “one” as defined by its Hindu majority and further defined by the RSS’ version of Indian nationalism as the “Hindutva way of life”; b) the dismantling of the country’s asymmetrical federalism, already tilted towards the Centre, and its replacement by a single monolithic politico-legal command structure for the Hindu rashtra; c) what are described as “shock and awe” tactics of governance (demonetisation, lockdown) wherein major decisions are taken by a single leader bypassing usual state mechanisms, deployed especially in the disenfranchising of minorities, particularly Muslims; d) the systematic destruction and marginalisation of the independent media and the building of a huge “fan media” apparatus from print to television to social media; and e) moves towards a police state by weaponising existing legislation against terrorism and using the normal state policing machinery to attack opponents and dissenters.
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The Republic Relearnt: Renewing Indian Democracy 1947-2024
Vintage Books
Pages: 432
Price: Rs.999
The seventh chapter (“Recurrent faults: Language, religion and dissent”) describes what are said to be the main planks of Modi’s second republic: language chauvinism, hard Hindutva, and the strangling of all dissent. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
The period of the first republic between 1947 and 2019 is said to alternate between “waves of democracy renewal” and bouts of democratic backsliding, with the latter occupying more time. Kumar divides the former into three distinct periods: 1977–80 (the Janata government following the Emergency), 1989–98 (the coalition interregnum of non-BJP rule), and 2004–14 (the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance-1 and UPA-2 governments under Manmohan Singh). She says we must study and learn from these waves of renewal to establish a third republic that will continue and complete the work of the first. The first chapter (“Who’s afraid of an index”) demarcates these ups and downs using various international indices of democracy and good governance, including the Varieties of Democracy Institute index (V-Dem) from Sweden. Not surprisingly, such indices show India as significantly worse off post-2019 than in previous decades.
The second chapter (“Citizen and community”) provides an overview of the history of the first republic with an emphasis on critical aspects like citizenship, secessionist movements in Kashmir and north-eastern India, and language and the reorganisation of States. The third chapter (“An instant not a period”) is on the brief period of Janata rule. Among the many disappointing features of this period, Kumar singles out two positives: the setting up of the National Police Commission and the proposal for a Lokpal or ombudsman office to look into public corruption, notwithstanding the fact that the former was short-lived and the latter failed to take off.
Second wave of democracy renewal
The second wave of democracy renewal beginning with the National Front, an uneasy coalition of non-Congress parties including both the BJP and the communist parties, is the subject of chapter four (“Deregulation, devolution and institutional oversight”). This is a useful chapter for it gets into the details of a much-maligned period of governance that the English-language media was consistently hostile to. The National Front and the Congress under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao passed “a slew of acts [that] founded statutory commissions for human rights, women, minorities and other backward classes and safai karamacharis…, prohibited manual scavenging, improved work conditions for construction labour, instituted affirmative action for disabled people, and set up an appellate authority for the environment”. What may be less known is that most of these reforms “were proposed… during the National Front’s tenure, and were legislated… during Rao’s term”.
“The period of the first republic between 1947 and 2019 is said to alternate between ‘waves of democracy renewal’ and bouts of democratic backsliding, with the latter occupying more time.”
The ambitiously titled fifth chapter (“India’s Weimar moment”) covers the more recent, more familiar, and also more written-about period of the two terms of the Manmohan Singh government. Chapter six (“Shock, awe and the banality of evil”) details the various decisive breaks with the first republic that the Modi regime has effected. The seventh chapter (“Recurrent faults: Language, religion and dissent”) describes what are said to be the main planks of Modi’s second republic: language chauvinism, hard Hindutva, and the strangling of all dissent.
The eighth and last chapter (“Waiting for the third republic”) explores the lessons to be learnt from the decay of democracy to sustain hopes of a revival and the birth of a new, third, republic that will fulfil the promises of the first. This chapter outlines three “startling facts”: that periods of “democratic stagnation or decay” outnumbered periods of “democracy renewal” by almost two to one; that none of the three waves of democracy renewal built upon the efforts of their predecessors; and that it was not “institutions or industry” but “civil and political society movements” that were instrumental in revival.
This is, at heart, a historian’s book (nearly one-quarter of its well-researched pages are devoted to end-notes), written from a state-centric, institutionalised civil society point of view. Its main focus is on state institutions and the administrative-legal affordances that citizenship involves, or should involve, in a healthy democracy. These features and its longer frame-of-focus (covering the half-century since the Emergency of 1975) are what distinguish it from other works that share the same broad purpose of documenting India’s precipitous fall from democratic grace in the Modi era, such as K.S. Komireddi’s Malevolent Republic (2019), Aakar Patel’s Price of the Modi Years (2021), or Parakala Prabhakar’s The Crooked Timber of New India (2023).
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Overall, the dichotomous characterisation of periods as those of “renewal” or “decay” seems too simple and is belied by the narrative itself, which faithfully recounts the contradictory aspects of various regimes wherever relevant. An alternative framing might have done more justice to the actual content of the book. For example, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee administration (1998-2004) could have been given a chapter of its own, given the (retrospectively remarkable) contrasts between it and the Modi regime, despite both leaders being from the same party and ideology. A glaring omission for which the publishers must share the blame is an index. For books that aim to provide a documented record, a detailed index is an absolute must; perhaps, the next edition can make amends. Also, more concessions need to be made for the general reader who is more likely to dip-and-sample rather than read from beginning to end.
Contemporary history tends to be undervalued at first because it records events still in living memory. But as Kumar’s valuable work shows, public memory is not only short but easily malleable, and we need voices like hers to bear witness and help us avoid past pitfalls as we build a different future.
Satish Deshpande is a retired teacher based in Bengaluru.
