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withdrawn — is a reminder of the peculiar nature of the crisis of liberal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
