Just as it’s hard to think of Israel’s independence day without remembering the Nakba, it’s impossible to think of India’s independence day without remembering Partition. Although it took place 75 years ago, the news media have still been able to find survivors who remain traumatized. Soon, there will be no one left to remember.
The bloody founding events of India, Pakistan and Israel took place in the same years, after Britain beat a hasty retreat from its colonial failures and responsibilities. There is yet another reminder of the horrors of British colonialism in the news now, this time from Kenya: Police chief quit after abuse by British colonial troops in Kenya covered up. A new documentary titled A Very British Way of Torture, “pieces together many of the worst abuses committed by British colonial forces through survivor testimony and expert analysis from a team of British and Kenyan historians.”
The events took place in the 1950s, when the Mau Mau movement was fighting against colonial rule. Their revelation arrives in the midst of Kenya’s election, the results of which have just been announced. As in India and elsewhere, the British left behind a working functioning democracy but a harsh legacy from colonial rule, the effects of which linger on.
Al Jazeera today has a story on how India has “little to celebrate”. Just as everyone predicted, the country has been growing increasingly less democratic under Modi and the BJP’s rule.
There are some bad dreams from which one does not awaken. Arundhati Roy and now the French scholar Christophe Jaffrelot believe that these authoritarian trends are irreversible.
Roy:
The systematic indoctrination of people on the scale on which it has taken place over decades is hard to reverse. Every institution that is supposed to make up the system of checks and balances has been hollowed out, repurposed and deployed against people as a weapon of Hindu nationalism. In terms of political opposition, there are political parties that have successfully opposed the BJP at the state level in Tamil Nadu, Bengal, Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, but opposition is virtually non-existent at the national level.
The whole system of elections has been gamed. You can win a huge majority of seats even without anything close to a majority of actual votes. In India, we have a first-past-the-post, multi-party democracy. This means that even if you get say only 20% of the vote in a constituency, as long as its higher than your closest rival, you win. A rich party can put up spurious candidates to split the votes. But that’s just one trick in a whole bag of tricks.
And, anyway, how do you woo an indoctrinated population? By proving that you are a better, prouder Hindu? Nobody can beat the BJP at that game. And right now, that’s the only game in town. As far as mainstream politics goes.
So, no, I don’t believe the damage is reversible. I believe we will be broken and then reborn. Change will only come when and if at all an accepting, gullible, fatalistic people realize what’s being done to them. And then it will come suddenly, and from the street. Not from the system. Until then… God help us.
Jaffrelot:
Democracy, nowadays, is a notion you need to qualify when applied to India. You may say, like some scholars do, that it is an ‘illiberal democracy’.
I prefer to use the concept of ‘ethnic democracy’ that has been first used in the case of Israel. An ‘ethnic democracy’ is a regime where pillars of democracy are still practised, including elections — something populists across the globe need to retain to acquire legitimacy — but where minorities are second class citizens because of all kinds of discrimination.
You may (also) use the word ‘majoritarianism’, which designates the attempt for transforming a cultural majority into a permanent, political majority.
[The] changes under Modi may be permanent if the Hindutva forces have not only captured power, but also society — at least temporarily — and if this hegemonic position allows them to get deeply entrenched in the State apparatus, then a point of no return will be reached.
Just as countries formerly under British rule inherited that country’s flawed democratic system, they also inherited the ways it found to suspend all pretence of democracy. For example, Israel continues to renew and institute the emergency regulations put in place in the closing years of the British mandate. Administrative detention without trial was one of them and, till today, hundreds of Palestinians are incarcerated in this way.