Power to the people: India’s democracy needs a subaltern revival

For democracy to function, the masses must feel invested in it. A subaltern strategy thus could be a potent tool to counter the BJP’s hegemony.

Daily wage labourers wait for work on a Mumbai street on June 11, 2021. India’s precariat was wrecked, while the upper middle class prospered, through the COVID-fuelled recession. | Photo Credit: RAFIQ MAQBOOL/ AP

At a rally in Bhubaneshwar in January, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge urged the audience to recognise the stakes of the coming election. “This will be the last opportunity for the people to save democracy in India. If Narendra Modi wins another election, there will be dictatorship in the country. The BJP will rule India like Putin in Russia.”

The Congress party leadership is not alone here. The bulk of the opposition, from the Samajwadi Party (SP) to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), has framed the election as “democracy’s last stand”. In fact, this constitutes the “big-picture” political message of the INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) bloc as well as its very rationale. The message, however, has faltered at two levels.

The first obstacle has been receptivity at the popular level. Among the demos (masses) of India, such messaging registers only a tepid response. In a recent Pew survey, India once again emerged as the global leader in terms of popular support for autocracy. A shocking 67 per cent of Indian respondents favoured the idea of a strongman rule sans Parliament and courts, according to the survey (the corresponding figure for 2017 was 55 per cent).

The second obstacle has been the behaviour of the political elites of the opposition itself. The INDIA bloc, even at this late stage, exhibits wide gaps in terms of unity—of leadership, purpose, or programme. Unlike in 1977 or 1989, the two previous occasions when a broad opposition coalition came together on a “save democracy” platform, there have been few joint rallies and press conferences this time. The stitching together of State-level coalitions was deferred until the last minute. And we still have not seen a clear and coherent political agenda on which the INDIA bloc will challenge the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) incumbent (as distinct from the agendas of the individual alliance partners). Compounding this chaos has been the desertion of several key alliance partners, like the Janata Dal (United), or JD(U), and the Rashtriya Lok Dal, or RLD.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi with a labourer carrying around 200 kilograms of coal on a bicycle for sale. During the Congress’ Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in Jharkhand on February 5, 2024. | Photo Credit: ANI

Regardless of popular apathy or opposition bungling, the threat faced by democracy is no joke. In 2018, the prestigious Swedish Institute V-Dem, which studies the health of global democracies, relegated India to the status of an “electoral autocracy”. The country has stayed there since, wedged among a gaggle of despotic African, Central Asian, and West Asian states. In fact, the latest V-Dem annual report shows a further slide. On the index of liberal democracy (rule of law, individual rights), India now ranks 104 out of 179 countries, while on electoral democracy (free and fair elections), India has slipped to 110.

How did we reach there

Let us divide the remainder of the essay into two parts: first, how did we reach here, and second, what can the political opposition do to avert a possible disaster. Without a satisfactory diagnosis, all prescriptions for fortifying democracy will only skirt the domain of tactical manoeuvres instead of providing a strategic long-term road map.

The political analysts Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz explained how the global route towards authoritarianism now runs through a gradual erosion of democracy from within and not through military coups or violent insurgencies from without. In an essay for Foreign Affairs, titled “How Democracies Fall Apart” (December 2016), Kendall-Taylor and Frantz emphasised how elected leaders, once sufficiently entrenched, are increasingly able to manipulate institutions such as the mass media to choke off the normal channels of democracy. “From 1946 to 1999, 64 per cent of democracies failed because of (violent) insurgencies. In the last decade, however, populist-fuelled authoritarianization has been on the rise, accounting for 40 per cent of all democratic failures between 2000 and 2010 and matching coups in frequency,” they wrote.

The opposition’s concern about an implosion of the democratic framework is therefore not unwarranted. The dissonance between the actual threat and the popular response to it becomes clear once we understand the real nature and purpose of democracy.

As Charles Taylor, one of the leading contemporary theorists of democracy, has argued, the demos in democracy does not simply translate to people. A long line of thinkers from the ancient Greeks to the French revolutionaries has interpreted demos as the “non-elite” or the “plebs”. In this sense, the telos (normative end goal or essential purpose) of democracy is the rule of the ordinary masses, which displaces the rule of the preceding oligarchy. Thus, the essential condition for a functioning democracy is that the demos feel they have a stake in its continuity.

Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan offers prayers at the Ram Temple in Ayodhya on February 9, 2024. The elite at the apex of the social order now forms the heart of the Hindutva hegemony. | Photo Credit: PTI

This is especially true of a country such as India, where elite support for democracy has tended to be uneven and conditional. We might note here that the formal suspension of democracy during the Emergency was indeed received with quiet relief by many among the elite. In their illuminating book on the Emergency, the academics Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil have shown how “the middle class, industrialists, and the ruling elite” were “convinced that strong decisions were needed to contain labour agitations and to restore law and order”.

Of course, the larger political context of the Emergency was the failure of Indira Gandhi’s government to fulfil the promise of rescuing India from the blight of widespread poverty and enormous socio-economic inequality. Neither did the ruling Congress implement land reforms that would have benefited the rural poor, nor did it co-opt the ascendant farming castes from the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) into governing power structures. The result was “years of discontent and demonstrations” that “made it [the Emergency] more acceptable to sections of society eager for a return to ‘normalcy’”, write Jaffrelot and Anil.

Yet, even during the Emergency, the demos of the country withstood the challenge by voting the Congress out instead of apathetically accepting the high-handed rule. This was because the then oppositional coalition held out hope for a better future. Fighting on the plank of rural-centric “Gandhian socialism”, with which they countered the urban-centric socialism of the elite bureaucracy, the Janata coalition was particularly able to mobilise middle-caste farmers and subaltern sections, as well as the minorities and Dalits who had suffered the brunt of the Emergency’s depredations.

However, neither the rise of Mandal coalitions and Dalit politics nor the upsurge of regional parties has been able to stem the tide of growing inequality, certainly not economic inequality. Moreover, the increased participation of these newly mobilised subaltern groups has tended to remain at the descriptive level (such as share of MPs and MLAs), not at the substantive level (share in decision-making power at the top).

Highlights

• The foundation of a functional democracy rests on the belief that the people have a vested interest in its perpetuation, particularly in nations like India where elite support for democracy wavers.
• The pervasive adoption of a top-down neoliberal approach has eroded the essence of democracy. However, the erosion of opportunities for upward mobility resonates with ordinary citizens, compelling the opposition to harness this discontent.
• Recognising its own stake in survival, the opposition must advocate for radical democracy, as evidenced by its call for a nationwide caste census, marking a belated but crucial acknowledgment of the need for a bold stance.

Widening divide

The full embrace of a top-down neoliberal model (free markets, depoliticisation of economic issues, reduction of welfare rights, cash handouts) has insidiously hollowed out the core of the democratic process. Parties that used to profess socialism and backward caste rights have long abandoned their roots and embraced big capital. For instance, the post-2000s entrenchment of the SP within the milieu of local elites and big business effectively turned it “conservative in practice”, in the political scientist Gilles Verniers’ phrase.

JD(U) workers and supporters celebrate in Patna after the announcement of Bihar’s caste-based census report on October 4, 2023. The survey revealed that OBCs and EBCs (Economically Backward Classes) constitute a whopping 63 per cent of the State’s total population. | Photo Credit: PTI

The consequent cynicism was reflected in a 2019 survey of popular attitudes by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. The survey found that political parties were the only institution that attracted more distrust than trust (negative effective trust of 9 per cent). Taylor emphasised that democracies degenerate under conditions of long-standing inequality, when “citizens can feel disempowered” and “communities can lose capacity to organize collective life”.

The “New Gilded Age” is how James Crabtree, a former Mumbai correspondent of Financial Times, described the Indian condition of “wealthy oligarchs” in his 2018 book, The Billionaire Raj. He compared the top 1 per cent that now controls half the country’s wealth, according to Oxfam, to America’s 19th century robber barons, fattened in a similar way by the state through bank bailouts and policy manipulation.

Documenting the deepening “extreme inequality” of India, the economists Ishan Anand and Anjana Thampi wrote in a 2021 paper: “The real wages of regular workers improved marginally in rural areas and declined by 0.9% per annum in urban areas between 2011–2012 and 2018–2019, reversing the gains between 2004–2005 and 2011–2012.” Similarly, the “share of wages in gross value added declined from around 17% in 1993–1994 to 13% in 2017–2018” as the “manifold increase” in “worker productivity” was “largely absorbed” by the “rising profit share”.

Meanwhile, the sale of SUVs has been breaching records every year, doubling from 7 lakh in 2018 to 14 lakh in 2023—India’s upper middle class prospered through the COVID-fuelled recession in which the precariat was wrecked (an estimated 75 million people slipped back into poverty, as per a Pew calculation).

It is not as if the prevailing dissolution of pathways towards upward mobility does not register among ordinary citizens. In the latest India Today Mood of the Nation survey, for instance, 52 per cent of the respondents said big business had benefited most from the Modi government’s policies, compared with 9 per cent picking farmers and 6 per cent daily wage earners. Similarly, a majority believes that the Centre’s economic policies have “widened the divide between rich and poor”.

According to Taylor, the degeneration of democracy follows the “decline in actual citizen efficacy”, which in turn represents both the “cause” and the “fruit” of “growing inequality”. Thus, democracy implodes in a series of “spiralling effects”, he says. Once people feel “their fate is being decided elsewhere”, when concerns such as “employment” and “affordable education” are effectively depoliticised, they become more receptive to autocratic demagoguery. It is noteworthy here that the country’s worst performance on the V-Dem report is reserved for the egalitarian index. This index “measures to what extent all social groups enjoy equal capabilities to participate in the political arena”. Here, India ranks 137, worse than countries where democracy is barely alive (Iraq, Libya, Cameroon, Thailand, etc.).

Strategies for the opposition

That was a brief survey of “how we got here”. Now, we will try to address the possible strategies the opposition can adopt to reverse this democratic degeneration.

Employees sew clothes at a garment factory in New Delhi.  “The real wages of regular workers improved marginally in rural areas and declined by 0.9% per annum in urban areas between 2011–2012 and 2018–2019, reversing the gains between 2004–2005 and 2011–2012.” | Photo Credit: ADNAN ABIDI/ Reuters

If the political context we have charted is indeed accurate, then India stands at a decisive juncture. Either the country takes the path of a radical democracy, or it takes the path of a progressively entrenched autocracy. Since the opposition presumably has a stake in its own survival, its constituents must opt for the path of a radical democracy. In other words, a democracy in which the power of the demos extends, first, to determining how and what decisions are made, not just to mechanically electing decision-makers and, second, to determining the shape of institutions of power that control them and determine their life outcomes, such as in the economic and social sphere, and not just those institutions that directly fall under the state’s domain.

That was precisely the intention of many of those who drafted the Constitution, including of B.R. Ambedkar, who presciently noted how “political democracy” will inevitably wither away in the absence of “social democracy” and “economic democracy”.

The opposition’s demand for a nationwide caste census reflects its belated recognition of the need to take a radical stand. The caste census is often mischaracterised as a re-enaction of the old Mandal politics of narrow caste-based patronage. As Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly said, the caste census only represents a prelude to a more egalitarian paradigm of apportioning political participation and economic resources. The Congress has borrowed an old slogan of Kanshi Ram, Bahujan Samaj Party founder : Jitni abadi utna haq (rights proportionate to share in population). The party has promised a nationwide caste census among its first actions if elected to office.

As the political scientist Ashutosh Varshney has written, the onset of ethnic politics (caste and religion based) has helped deepen the neoliberal structure by taking the spotlight off the issue of economic reforms. The Congress attempt to stake a spot in the Mandal and Bahujan space (movements that evolved in opposition to Congress rule) might thus represent the first stirrings of a national politics based on the subordinate classes.

In all of India, caste politics has clearly sustained legitimacy as an instrument of popular mobilisation: “vernacularising the norms” (Lucia Michelutti) and “democratising the social base” of politics (Yogendra Yadav). The restructuring of the Indian political economy in favour of the marginalised also carries a broad political consensus among political parties, at least at the formal level. The parties supporting the caste census (at least formally) command a combined vote share in national elections that exceeds the vote share of the ruling BJP, which awkwardly holds on to an ambiguous stand on the issue. These parties include not just the Congress and other INDIA bloc constituents but also the bulk of unaligned parties and even junior NDA partners.

The OBC political elites who broke the Congress hegemony half a century ago were inspired by Lohiaite socialist politics: a backward caste-class alliance against the dominant-caste and middle-class formulated hegemony of “vested socialism” (in Lohia’s words) of the Nehruvian and Indira Gandhi era. The difference today is that Nehruvian “vested socialism” or Indira Gandhi’s personalistic “left-populism” has given way to Hindu nationalist “crony capitalism”.

Yet, what persists, blissfully undisturbed, is the presence of the same elite at the apex, now forming the heart of the Hindutva hegemony. Thus, a similar subaltern strategy can become a powerful weapon against the NDA’s coalition, as indeed has been demonstrated in a number of elections, from Bihar in 2015 to the more recent elections in Karnataka and Telangana.

Defeating the saffron hegemony

The “Hindu” lens of politics works by providing what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described as the “symbolic capital” of hegemonic politics (“shaping the perception of social reality”). The “caste” lens is merely another source of symbolic capital, allowing people to draw on their experiences of caste-based marginalisation and historical memories of struggle. Thus, a radical caste-class politics contains the eminent possibility of politicising those domains of the political economy (employment, education, healthcare, agrarian distress, labour workforce migration) that have been depoliticised through the numbing effects of neoliberal economic structures and the commodification of social welfare through cash handouts.

The NDA hegemony, therefore, depends on preventing the coalescing of this programmatic coalition of marginalised castes and rural sectors. Pointedly, the parties co-opted by the NDA tend to be these very backward-caste and agrarian-based formations: the RLD, the JD(U), the Nationalist Congress Party.

The saffron hegemony is built on the coming together of a synergistic historical bloc, centred around the upper middle classes and big businesses but including a large popular sector mobilised through the politics of religious polarisation. The opposition bloc too must embody a unified force.

In Antonio Gramsci’s phraseology, the “orchestra” of political forces should “come to life as a single instrument”—the opposition must appear to represent a coherent, counter-political vision. And that vision can only be one of a radical democracy, where the demos finally wrest power from the protracted rule of a shape-shifting oligarchy. In other words, India can only save its democracy by becoming, in a real sense, a democracy.

Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist based in Delhi.