Opinion | 2019 will offer little for the health of India’s democracy

Other flags, bunting or any other objects should not be placed on or above the flag mast (Image: Reuters)

Shiv Visvanathan

To map a future year, one has to summarise the highlights of the previous year. Five events marked 2018, each having a deep impact on the times to come.

The first was the election results which proved that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was no longer invincible. The second was the agitation around the proposed Ram Mandir, which seemed to be a scenario for the future. The third was the enormous protest against drought and the fate of agriculture which produced little response. The fourth was the violence against strangers creating the primacy of the mob. The fifth was the agitation around the Rohingya crisis and the making of the citizenship Bill.

The only redeeming force was the spate of Supreme Court rulings; but if 2018 was the year of the court, 2019 will be the year of its silences, a sudden lethargy after the creativity of 2018. The next year has to be looked at as a response to these events and this, in turn, maps the prospect for democracy in the following year.

The sadness of 2019 will begin when it becomes an act of repetition. The first example one can think of is the fact of stubble burning and the blame game that followed. The year 2019 will repeat the same ritual of indifference. The pollution reports will intensify the sense of indifference and politics of monotony and children’s lives will continue to be devalued, India will continue to be the casualty capital of children below six. Politicians will savour it as a Guinness Book statistic and life will go on.

The year 2019 will continue to be the year of indifference, not just about children but also about agriculture. The decline and disaffection in agriculture will continue and MNCs will hang around like vultures waiting to introduce Bt agriculture as a panacea. It is almost as if the fate of farming has little to do with the prospects of democracy today.

Violence too will proceed in an unprecedented way because the new agent of majoritarian democracy is the digital mob. The slaughter of strangers, migrants, Muslims for the slightest of suspicions will continue. Sadly, in the India of 2019, like in 2018, violence will be seen as an act of catharsis, even redemption. The year ahead will continue to celebrate the year of digital violence. As the election becomes immediate, violence will become the mode of rehearsal for electoral politics. The year 2019 will be a bad year for migrants, margins and minorities as the emerging middle class exorcises itself through violence.

The violence that we have talked about so far is the violence of development. To this, we must add the violence of communalism. For the BJP, Ram Mandir is the electoral plank and the creation myth that renews the party. After the defeats of 2018, Uttar Pradesh and its Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath are likely to form the epicentre of violence in 2019. Communal violence will reach a new peak in 2019. In fact, death and dying will be one great refrain of democracy in 2019.

The other crisis of democracy created by its self-definition as majoritarian will be the crisis of citizenship. Democracy today has become a narrowing of citizenship and 2019 will increase the harassment of the ‘other’. India will take the first steps to a Gulag-like existence for the Northeast. These areas, which have lived in a state of internal war, will seek to institutionalize the violence that drives them.

Yet, democracy will continue its Pollyanna-like existence. Congress President Rahul Gandhi will be in the forefront in 2019, but the Congress will tumble until a miracle happens. Gandhi has little sense of the violence that encodes the era and the coming election promises to be one of the most ironic in Indian democracy.

Life, as commentators would say, will go on with the usual quota of death and disasters. Electoral democracy will look even more superficial as politicians remain indifferent to drought, unemployment and violence. The alchemical year will be 2020. By then, India, tired of violence, and the rot of the cities, might be ready for a regime that thinks of the future. Sadly, the future looks as if it will bypass 2018, while corporations and development agencies celebrate the year.

The year 2019 will be a nonsensical year for Indian democracy.

Shiv Visvanathan is professor, Jindal Global Law School and director, Centre for Study of Knowledge Systems, OP Jindal Global University. Views are personal

For more Opinion pieces, click here.