• Valson Thambu

In a democracy, the will of the people is assumed to be sovereign. The shift of sovereignty from the monarch to the people is the hallmark of democracy’s genealogy. But historical patterns die hard. Monarchy is indeed formally dismantled; but its spirit is roaming free all over the world. History teaches us that when democracy is animated by the unfettered will of the Executive, we have the curious phenomenon of dictatorial democracy. The head of the Executive becomes the ‘monarch’ of all he surveys.
Limiting the abuses of the Power has been the prime challenge in the science of governance. When Modi began his national innings as the Prime Minister, he promised the Thoreauesque ideal of ‘minimum government and maximum governance’. No one bothered to ask what it entailed. So, the growing dissonance between what the slogan promised and what actually played out went unnoticed since then.
We witnessed a steady expansion of State power, gradually neutralizing the checks and balances that had traditionally been in place. So, behind the façade of minimum government, the ambit of the State expanded and engulfed the life of citizens as never before. Maximum governance should have implied decentralization of power and minimization of the every-where-ness of the coercive presence of the State. This would require that the people are mature and responsible enough to assume responsibilities for their welfare and the health of their society. The decisive factor is the development and empowerment of the people, in sync with the democratic doctrine of the sovereignty of the people.
In the past, the power of the monarch was kept in check by the aristocracy, the clergy, and the Parliament in that sequence. Of these we have direct experience only of the Parliament. Parliament is the repository, in theory, of people’s power exercised via representation. In practice, though, this is hardly the case. Soon after they are elected, people’s representatives become de facto aliens to those who chose them. They walk entirely as ‘whipped’ by their parties. We have come to accept this anomaly as the given. A people’s representative can ignore the will of the people who elected him; but he cannot neglect the whip of his party. The interstice of the will of the people and the whip of the party comprises the measure of people’s sovereignty in our kind of democracy. When the democratic culture declines, the will of the people become a chimaera.
This need not be worrisome so long as the Legislature and the Judiciary serve as checks and balances to how the Executive wields its power. That is why the independence of the Legislature and the Judiciary from the dictates of the Executive needs to be protected at all costs. This can be done only if respect for the rule of law is obtained. Resentment of the Constitution is, hence, a serious symptom of democratic ill-health.
The autonomy of the Parliament and the Judiciary is imperiled when the balanced distribution of people’s endorsement is upset and a single party garners brutal majority. The more a political party of national footprint enlarges itself, the more its leader feels encouraged to concentrate power in his own person. This endangers the doctrine of separation of powers. The legislature becomes, de facto, and extension of the Executive. The Parliament comes to be seen as a preserve of a party. Other major democratic institutions, including the Election Commission, likewise. Perhaps the most worrisome thing for citizens is that the Judiciary gets sucked into this welter.
This leaves us only with one seed of hope: the people. But, in the changed, and changing, situation, people power, exercised through elected representatives, cannot serve as a limiting force to the delusions driving the absolute and centralizing State power. So, what are we left with?
Well, the comforting thing is that all is not lost. All cannot be lost. That is the irreducible core of the justice of God in the affairs of humankind. The way forward does not lie via ‘people’s power’; for all power is taken away from them by the Almighty System, or the Supreme Imperium. What, then, is still left to them?
Their worth, dignity and enormous potential! That’s it. That is the Gandhian way forward. Gandhi confronted the muscular-materialistic might of the British Raj with the ‘soft and subtle power’ of ‘character and soul-force’. He tempered politics with spirituality. ‘My experiments in politics’, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘are nothing as compared to my experiments in spirituality’. The British could manage Subhash Chandra Bose’s muscular opposition. They were bamboozled by the ‘naked fair of India’.
The good news for a tyrant is that the people are worthless and servile. A collective recognition, consolidation and affirmation of human dignity and worth is the best bulwark against executive abuse of power which citizens must always anticipate. It was as an inoculation against such inhuman eventualities that Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and emphasized that the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve. Dictatorship masquerading itself as democracy is the polar opposite of this. The ultimate safeguard of a democracy is that the people as a whole attain the sort of worth that makes ‘feet-washing’ a symbolic and sacramental marker of the disposition of the executive towards the people, whose servant the State is meant, and pretends, to be.