Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Serial authoritarianism picks out targets one by one, and tires out challenges

The government engages in... serial authoritarianism, picking out targets one by one. The advantage of this strategy is not just that others are complacent that they will not be the victims of civic oppression. It tires out protest, by making each transgression require a separate and discrete form of protest. So we don’t yet have a contest between democracy and authoritarianism. What we have are protests against individual transgressions - sedition, lynching, NRC, Kashmir. These are still seen as individual transgressions in a system that is still, overall, legitimate.

But even as we prepare our legal challenges, write in public, organise protests, mobilise and look for slivers of social resistance that can be harnessed in the service of civic freedom, we should be prepared that things will have to get worse before they get better. After all, if we still have the luxury of acting as if the system is legitimate, the system will hoist us with our own petard of legitimacy. This is not a counsel of despair, only an analytic judgement, that the crisis will have to be projected as deep, systemic and wide-ranging, before resistance finds a focal point.

The noose is tightening around all independent institutions in India. The episode featuring sedition charges against eminent writers and directors — now belatedly withdrawn — is a reminder of the peculiar nature of the crisis of liberal institutionalism in India. The true register of the crisis is not that liberal ideas might be losing, or that elites identified with liberalism might be discredited. Both those phenomena have occurred in the past. What is new is the choking up of the channels of protest in the time of civic oppression. Where does a politics of resistance to civic oppression go?

We cannot rely on the law. A liberal polity relies on unglamorous institutions and processes to keep open the windows of light against the darkness of untrammelled power. We have often relied on some putative motivating power of the law to deliver a modicum of protection, if not justice. The law has often disappointed deeply; and it often protects elites more than others. But the cowardly, almost impeachable, abdication of the judiciary in the face of threats to civil liberties has now made an appeal to the law akin to an appeal to the majestic benevolence of an odd judge at best, and a laughing joke at worst.

We cannot rely on discussion. The liberal faith in discussion is not so much that liberal ideas might win, as it is a faith that there is something addictive about the commitment to discussion itself; it is the habit itself that is the triumph of a liberal sensibility. This is why authoritarian politics disdains discussion. Again, this space will privilege some more than others, but its availability is a form of insurance against worse evils. So long as there is a commitment to “politics through speech,” some basic norms of reciprocity will be preserved. But the idea of public discussion is itself under severe threat. There is direct intimidation using law and violence. The main channels of public debate — the media — are now, for the most part, supply-side driven propaganda. Social media can accelerate tribalisation even faster than it accelerates democratisation....read more
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/sedition-charge-against-celebrities-mob-lynching-narendra-modi-6061361/

see also

The Abolition of truth सत्य की हत्या



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