Even as campaigning gathers pace for the 2024 general election, distant seem the days when the world hailed our elections as a wondrous and clamorous affair that reaffirmed our greatest achievement: being the world’s largest democracy. But the past decade has diminished us in the eyes of the world, and to some extent our own, to an “electoral autocracy”. There is a palpable sense that in this election, we are fighting to save our democracy itself.
It is impossible to escape the widespread perception that our elections increasingly sustain only the bare bones of democracy, even as its sinews — the legislature, judiciary, media, “autonomous” watchdogs such as the Election Commission of India and the Reserve Bank of India, and agencies such as the Enforcement Directorate and the Central Bureau of Investigation — are either hollowed out or hijacked.
More pernicious still is the politics of hate, vigilantism in the name of religion, and the demonisation of minorities that the Bharatiya Janata Party government and its fellow travellers have promoted. Together with the intimidation of large sections of the media, the purchasing of Opposition Members of Parliament and Members of the Legislative Assembly and the villainisation of dissidence as “anti-national”, democracy is gasping for air in the suffocating embrace of its self-proclaimed “Mother”.
