India story gone awry | Book review | To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism

By Amitabh Ranjan

Aishwarya Reddy, 19, daughter of a tailor mother and a motor mechanic father, broke through formidable social barriers to get a seat for a major in mathematics at Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi. In November last year, this bright one from Telangana hanged herself at home. The reason: Lockdown meant loss of livelihood, a promised government scholarship did not materialise and she could not afford a laptop to attend online classes. The resulting despair got the better of the urge to live and excel.

When HR executive Amarpreet Kaur’s father wasn’t provided a bed in June 2020 at any of the private hospitals during the first wave of the pandemic, he was taken to LNJP Hospital in Delhi. As she and her husband prayed at the feet of a doctor to attend to him, it was too late. Her father breathed his last, unattended on a gurney.

In August 2017, in Uttar Pradesh, which is building the world’s biggest statue of Lord Ram costing $420 million, 63 children died in a government-run hospital in Gorakhpur, the chief minister’s hometown, because the oxygen supplier refused to replenish the stocks as his dues were not paid despite repeated reminders.

In a country which produces far more than the 225 million tonne of food it needs to feed its population every year, Budhini Brijiyan, around 50, in Mahuadanr village in Jharkhand, died on the eve of the New Year in 2018, five years after the Right to Food Act came into force, because she had had nothing to eat for the past four days.

These snapshots are from a supposed democracy we inhabit. The reader will find many such episodes in To Kill a Democracy, jointly written by Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane, the first by a journalist based in Hong Kong, and the other a professor of politics at the University of Sydney and the WZB (Berlin).

Picking up on India’s constitutional obligations, its democratic ideals and juxtaposing them with real-life stories, the two weave an incisive narrative of independent India’s ideological odyssey over three quarters of a century that has gone awry.

An apology of a democracy has for all these years subjected its people to murderous inequity by not provisioning for basic universal healthcare, quality education, bare minimum food, work and wages and, above all, basic human dignity. It has celebrated the equality of its people and their votes, even while treating their bodies as unequal.

The narrative is built through extensive data with attribution, intense analysis and looking into almost every aspect of the human life.

The book takes you through many instances of democracy failures with ruinous social consequences. From the vast hinterland to the glittering façade of urban ecosystem, it is the plunder by colluding oligarchs that has scripted a sordid story of the demise of democracy, be it the ownership of land, choice of crops or access to water. The India Story, the one told by champions of democracy citing Western validation of our democracy, its institutional evolution and surviving Emergency, today is in disarray.

Institutions expected to hold the democratic super-structure—opposition, judiciary, media, civil society—have all caved in before the executive juggernaut. The most worrisome is judiciary’s capitulation. The apex court, which is supposed to be a great bulwark standing for liberties and rights of the people, has abdicated its responsibility over issues of constitutional importance like the Kashmir issue, electoral bonds, habeas corpus petitions and the Citizenship Amendment Act.

The efforts of elected governments to stymie institutions have been there since independence. What has happened in the present regime is that they have been legitimised. Anxieties about India’s current democratic decline are stoked by the open violations of conventions by the present dispensation riding on popular support and a monochromatic Hindu nationalism.

The book makes a disturbing read. There are recurring themes of inequality, injustice, an unequal application of law and prejudice. It delves into the dark heart that beats below the idealism of democracy just like Harper Lee explored the one below the quiet surface of Maycomb in her celebrated work whose title is alluded to in that of the book.

So, is Indian democracy nearing its end? The authors sign off with a ray of hope lest you should resign to such a fate. They see a silver lining in India’s inherent plurality of languages, ethnicities, caste and class divisions; in the empowerment of its womenfolk evident through intolerance towards domestic violence, rise in school enrollment of girls, participation in business and economic life; and in the vibrant legacy of non-violent mass mobilisation as shown by anti-CAA and farmers’ protests.

One of the enduring strengths of democracy is whenever it gets sick a search for cure is a natural corollary. The cure requires a diagnosis. The book provides one.

A former journalist, Amitabh Ranjan teaches at Patna Women’s College.

To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism
Debasish Roy Chowdhury & John Keane
Pan Macmillan
Pp 336, Rs 599