Delhi continues to be the battleground between protestors and the police. The government seems determined that there cannot be a Jantar Mantar 2.0. That has produced a closure — literally. But let us not forget where it all began. After months of persistent complaints over the exclusionary character of the SIR, the opposition parties, and now the CJP, are demanding the removal of the Chief Election Commissioner. This demand follows the insensitive response to complaints about the SIR and an equally unresponsive Supreme Court judgment on the issue. The judiciary and the ECI have, thus, produced a key closure over the issue of disenfranchisement. More closures stare us in the face.
Election outcomes become suspect; parties lose and elected representatives of the party are easily exported elsewhere. A closure. Maharashtra has witnessed that a party gets split and the party symbol easily goes to the breakaway faction. A closure. You challenge a law about the appointment of Election Commissioners and that faces many a curious closure.
If you are a woman protester or a woman journalist, you will be physically abused in public. Closure. You may be an MP; you will still be manhandled. You may be the leader of the Opposition; you will be denied permission to protest. You may be a group of opposition MPs — the President may give you an audience — the CEC will shoo you away. Closure.
It is in the backdrop of this barricading of practically all opposing views, ideas and actions that the closure at Jantar Mantar 2.0 has been unfolding. What has happened over the last weekend, therefore, symbolically represents the nature of the politics India is experiencing today. No space for opposing voices, no remedy for disenfranchisement, no permission to express independent views.
Isn’t this a serious and clear instance of non-democracy, a case of authoritarianism, an example of miscarriage of the electoral process and an abuse of state power? Terms like electoral autocracy or competitive authoritarianism are employed to capture the moment. Both these terms assume an element of competition and a possible electoral majority. But when protests are banned, popular mobilisations are made impossible, voters are removed from electoral rolls, reported instances of mala fide applications for voter deletions go unpunished and unchecked — all accompanied by repeated judicial abdication, complicit civil services and a compliant media — the vestige of competition vanishes.
Systemic suppression drowns the democratic urge, diminishes people’s easy access to democracy and generally disincentivises fair competition. This is where the strength of closures matters. But it is doubtful whether such suppression actually destroys citizens’ urge for a free political order. That is where the limits of closures may get exposed.
As more and more closures are introduced by the regime, India finds itself at the crossroads — public opinion caving in to the closures or the public craving for fresh political air. The farmers’ agitation, the quiet electoral setback of 2024, and the more recent explosion of youth energy in the Jantar Mantar protests have exemplified this tug of war between the regime-imposed closures and the more-than-a-century-old habit of being a democracy.
The modern state and modern authoritarian regimes keep finding new weapons for stabilising the closures and turning them into citizen habits. A lifestyle of a docile, obedient but conveniently aroused “national citizen” is continuously injected through the loud political discourse of artificial divisions and false unity; of imagined enemies and mythical glory. The system-imposed closures and the politics-imposed rhetoric of the obedient citizen pose a peculiar challenge for pro-democracy forces in India. While the formal frameworks of competition (elections) and institutional remedies (approaching the judiciary) will continue to be explored, moments of acute closures may also produce moments of re-democratisation.
The former — within-system push-backs — refer to democratic resilience while the latter is an unexplored territory left to the creativity of political actors. This creativity is not merely a matter of catchy slogans and flashy wars on social media. Jantar Mantar in July was an important rupture in the midst of closures because it tapped the energies born out of frustration. A few years before that, the Bharat Jodo Yatra was an early rupture because it sought to go beyond electoral appeals. These two moments, different in their composition and drivers, have had one thing in common —they sought to bypass the closures and yet irritate the architects of those closures.
Two factors constitute the glorious moment of modern India’s democratisation: The long and tortuous awakening over questions of rights (originally argued by Jyotirao Phule in late 19th century) and the institutionalisation of elections and the politics of hope (through the Constitution). If today’s closures push us toward re-democratisation, we can borrow from India’s first moment of democratisation.
Various dimensions of that early democratisation, such as the combination of individual dignity and equality, the determination to annihilate caste, the formal establishment of political equality and the innate hope of fraternity — all need to be reenergised. At the same time, more urgent and more contemporary concerns about social harmony and better livelihoods will need to be integrated into the project of re-democratisation. For the moment, the two central themes in this project are bound to be citizen inclusion and citizen assertion — both of which speak about the culture of democracy vis-à-vis today’s unresponsive institutions.
But even as this project remains hazy today, it must handle a central paradox: Jantar Mantar has created great hopes from civil society actors, but modern authoritarian regimes depend on election victories and once they lose, their institutional collaborators are only too willing to cower. Therefore, it will be critical for re-democratisation that the mainstream opposition manifests the imagination to conceptualise re-democratisation and the maturity to work together. Today’s closures, thus, throw up a challenge: Is India willing to explore the path of re-democratisation?
The writer, based in Pune, taught political science
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