‘Unlike Israel, Hungary and Turkey, where resistance to the populist right came from the educated middle class, the Indian case is peculiar’ | Photo credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
In a recent speech, Dushyant Dave, senior advocate at the Supreme Court of India, expressed his anguish at the co-option of independent institutions to the will of a powerful executive. Mr. Dave compared the inaction of India’s civil society and public institutions to the protests that have paralyzed Israel. These protests are widespread demonstrations that have broken out against Israel’s right-wing government over its announced plans aimed at restricting the autonomy of the country’s Supreme Court.
The parallel with Israel (made in the speech) highlights an essential precondition for the healthy functioning of democratic institutions. This precondition is the existence of a civil society base which reinforces the political legitimacy of autonomous institutions in their confrontation with an overbearing executive. In Israel, the civil society base (which has made its presence felt in the streets), in support of the Supreme Court, is made up of professional middle classes who passionately defend their personal liberties. In the absence of a written constitution, it is the social basis that has kept mainland Israel (excluding the military sector of the occupied territories) relatively free and democratic. Meanwhile, right-wing parties such as Benjamin Netanyahu’s populist-nationalist Likud draw their support from economically marginalized and less educated sections of Israeli society.
difference in india
Unlike Israel, Hungary and Turkey, where resistance to the populist right has come from the educated middle classes, the Indian case is peculiar because the middle classes are its most staunch ideological supporters. According to a 2017 Publicity survey, the educated classes displayed the greatest propensity for coercive violence against dissidents (for example, those who refused to eat beef or say ‘Bharat Maa ki Jai’), as well as higher propensity for dictatorship. Showed a level of empathy. And speech suppression was found among the illiterate group.
BR Ambedkar once explained to an American radio broadcaster the importance of a liberal-secular civil society in this way: “The roots of democracy do not lie in the form of government, parliamentary or otherwise… The roots of democracy are to be discovered in [for] In social relations, with reference to the associated life between the people who make up the society.
Has such a civil society base developed in Indian democracy in the last seven decades? In many states of North India, the collective vendetta of “bulldozer justice”, draconian laws on the conspiratorial imagery of “love jihad”, and the constant stream of “police encounters” have certainly shown the hollowness of social and institutional support. Our constitutional system.
In his work, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), political sociologist Barrington Moore identified the liberal bourgeoisie as historical agents of democratization. According to Moore, at least in the Western democratic tradition, these industrial and professional middle classes have been instrumental in constraining state power and ensuring democratic freedoms, partly by advancing their interests through civil society institutions such as the press and trade unions. played the part. The Indian path towards modern democracy confused Moore because, as he wrote in his book, the country had “experienced neither a bourgeois revolution, nor a conservative revolution from above, nor yet a Communist Experience”. Perhaps the case for Indian democracy was best summed up by Sudipta Kaviraj’s memorable phrase of “passive revolution”, the absence of genuine democratic struggle and the co-optation of minor reforms and symbols of opposition to the ruling class. Domination was characterized by intrusion.
The thesis of a passive revolution was particularly useful in understanding the phase of Congress dominance, where the middle class and labor unions were firmly integrated into the statist model of nation-building.
Democratization in UP and TN
The lack of space given to an independent and oppositional civil society has influenced not only the Congress’ vision of democracy but also the post-democratization models that emerged to challenge its hegemonic rule. We can summarize here two such contrasting routes to democratization: the Mandal route in Uttar Pradesh and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) route in Tamil Nadu.
In Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party (SP) relied heavily on the top-down weaving of electoral alliances between backward caste groups, while placing little emphasis on nurturing political space for a democratic civil society. Political scientist Gilles Verniers argued in the paper, Conservatives in Practice: The Transformation of the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh (2018)By the turn of the century, the SP became increasingly socially conservative, moving away from its socialist and progressive roots. The political capital made from the Mandal movement was channeled into building a powerful electoral machine, which relied on local dominant social groups for its electoral mobilization rather than a political program for democratic emancipation. Paper, “Caste and the Power Elite in Allahabad” (2015), by Jean Drèze et al. conclusively demonstrated how the dominant positions in civil society continued to be dominated by the upper castes.
In contrast, the DMK, political scientist R.K. based their political mobilization on a radical reconceptualization of the basis of politics as Sriramachandran et al. As shown in his recent book, Common Man’s Rule: The DMK and the Political Formation in Tamil Nadu, 1949–1967, The book’s thesis revolves around the concept of a counter-hegemonic struggle, theorized by socialist political philosopher Ernesto Laclau.
In this formulation, the DMK rejected the path of liberal reforms in the political system and fought on behalf of the ‘people’ (the backward caste majority) against the political elite represented by the Congress. The Dravidian movement was successful precisely because the concept of ‘political’ was not confined to elections or democratic processes but included the transformation of social and economic relations of power.
However, the DMK, like the Left in Bengal, did not store much in store as a guarantor of genuine democracy by a free civil society. Both parties sought to capture state power and then embed their own civil society into the various ruling party structures.
Indian civil society remains hierarchical and fragmented, inclined to integrate into ruling power structures rather than challenge itself. Therefore, any resistance to majoritarian encroachment on our constitutional order is unlikely to come from civil society structures or independent institutions dependent on their support.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist