- Valson Thampu
We are used to thinking of democracy as a peaceful, ethical way of governing. This is contrary to the evidence of history and of experience. Man has been a hunter. The hunting instinct lurks still in him. He may suppress it; but never quite succeed in eliminating the hunter from within. The repressed hunter surfaces and enjoys a field day in diverse ways and forms in the jungle-garden of democracy.
Not convinced? Well, consider this. Everyone knows, and agrees, that war is an agony, a futile enterprise. It is hugely harmful to human welfare; in particular, to the welfare of the people. Peace is far more conducive to progress, security, and people’s welfare. Yet, why do we elect men of violence and idolize pedlars of communal poison, and reject men of peace? Proclivity to crime and violence is a familiar ingredient in the profile of political leadership everywhere in the world. But for his penchant for war-mongering Netanyahu would have been a pretty ordinary fellow in Israel. What is a Napoleon, an Alexander, a Peter the Great of Russia, without the wars they stirred up? Even a Marcus Aurelius, acknowledged as the wisest among kings, had to cause his share of blood-letting. The Jews imagined God as a Mighty Warrior, not unlike Mars in the Roman context.
Wars, as basic to politics, are of two kinds. (a) Wars against external enemies. (b) Civil wars. The former, being unaffordable, can only be a rare luxury. Controlled civil confrontations are affordable by far. This is what’s native to democracy: a chronic state of controlled civil war. The human condition see-saws between the two: when external war rages, civil conflicts subside, and vice versa.
Our politicians rival their counterparts elsewhere in schooling us in the war-mongering-by-other-means of democracy. BJP in particular has unrivalled expertise and resourcefulness in this regard. Modi and Shah practise democratic elections as conquests with the end-result, if possible, of overpowering all opposition parties so as to realize the end-goal of one-party rule: one nation, one election, one party, one culture, one narration, and so on.
A new jarring note has emerged, though: the Gen Z power. The Gen Zs scorn this pattern. They want to have nothing to do with the skirmishes that our generation is inured to. They want to live and to make sense of life. Our generation has made living a war for survival for them. They experience life in the raw, and won’t be swayed by the impulses of andh bhakti (blind faith) and the animosities spun by specious narratives. They won’t swallow slogans, and refuse resolutely to believe that withering away in unemployment and hopelessness amounts to accha din (good days). They are gutsy enough to say, “No, my boss, these may be good days for you; but these are insufferably bad days for us. Cut the crap, and deliver!”
Let us return to democracy as war by other means. Hitler, we know, used perfectly legitimate democratic means to murder democracy. Historically, democracy is the only mode of government that birthed fascism. Hitler’s mistake lay in imagining democracy as un-regulated war, all-round war. To that end, he activated the meanest instincts in the Germans. Commenting on this Carl Jung writes in Essays on Contemporary Events –
Like the rest of the world, the Germans did not understand wherein Hitler’s significance lay, that he symbolized something in every individual. He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, un-adapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him. (p 4)
If you have to use unfair means to defeat your adversary, why not? So, we have the sewer-rush of communal fulminations in the run-up to elections. The Election Commission chooses to be deaf and blind to this because they too, like the rest of us, have internalised that elections are controlled civil wars. ‘God,’ Napoleon said, ‘is on the side of the larger battalion’. Is it realistic to expect the Election Commission of India to do better than God?
Given the above, I am not surprised when the BJP declares de facto war on opposition parties with the battle-cry, ‘Congress-mukt Bharat!’. It is naïve to cry hoarse against the weaponisation and misuse of State agencies like ED, IT, CBI and the pillars of democracy. Operation Lotus is the Atom Bomb of money-power in Indian democracy.
In his autobiography, Mein Kampf, Hitler writes that the Western powers taught him, via World War I, the importance of propaganda. So, he became a disciple of Gustav Le Bon and adopted his work, The Crowd, as his political Bible. The various strategies that Hitler used in order to weaponize public opinion and secure total narrative-dominance in Germany need not be detailed here. It suffices to say, they are paralleled in our midst to deadly effect. The Germans of his days did not realize that their secular redeemer was a pathological war-monger. Predictably, war was declared as much on dissenters within as on enemies without.
A democracy can remain sane, civilized and wholesome only to the extent that its citizens keep the hunter-instinct in their nature under well-bridled. Democracy as a state of controlled civil war stands always at peril of degenerating into dictatorship. That ideologies of violence will conjure up an earthly paradise of good governance is a blatant lie unfit even for the raving inmates of a madhouse.
