The Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, had ascended the office of the British prime minister as a rare popular hero in the era of insular, aristocratic politicians. The personal charisma of the former military general emanated from his commanding role in the battle of Waterloo, where a British-led coalition defeated Napoleon and put an end to French domination over Europe. Thus, the duke came to office expecting some imperial leeway from his ministerial colleagues. Those delusions of grandeur were promptly cut to size. “An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them,” an exasperated Wellesley is supposed to have remarked after his first cabinet meeting.
Britain, after all, took pride in its parliamentary democracy where decision-making was vested with the cabinet. The prime minister merely represented the primus inter pares (first among equals) in Walter Bagehot’s memorable phrase. India has the same framework of governance, but political practice now appears almost completely untethered from the normative theory of parliamentary democracy.
There is a glut of supporting evidence to choose from, but let’s just confine ourselves to two examples from the past week: the (non) discussion of l’affaire Adani in Parliament and the tax survey/raid on the BBC.
Whatever view one takes on the Adani issue, a story of alleged corporate fraud that is generating global headlines and has roiled the country’s financial markets is as fit a matter as any to be discussed among its elected representatives. Yet the ruling party simply steamrolled any demands for accountability. Far from conceding to the Opposition’s demand for an enquiry by a Joint Parliamentary Committee, the treasury benches refused to speak one word on the matter. Instead, the prime minister peacocked around like a wronged, heroic figure, summoned his popular approval, and peppered his monologue with aggressive ‘dialogues’ such as: “Desh dekh raha hai, ek akela kitno ko bhari padh raha hai (the country is watching how one person outweighs so many).” The parliamentarians of the ruling party clapped like ecstatic schoolchildren, chanting the name of the prime minister. The spectacle and atmospherics seemed fit for a soapbox screed of an election rally; yet the incongruous Rajya Sabha logo reminded the audience that this was a prime ministerial speech in the legislative chamber that is supposed to hold him to account.
In 2021, two of the most prestigious watchdogs of global democratic health, the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute and the US-based Freedom House, downgraded the level accorded to Indian democracy. According to Freedom House, India had slipped from a ‘free democracy’ to a ‘partially free democracy’. The V-Dem estimation was gloomier still, relegating the country from ‘electoral democracy’ to ‘electoral autocracy’. The next year brought little change to the rankings, indicating a relatively stable consensus.
It is true that no democratic index will ever fully surmount the problem of arbitrariness. Nevertheless, think tanks such as Freedom House shape and reflect the views of their respective foreign policy establishments. Therefore, it is in India’s foreign policy interest to take steps to assuage concerns about its declining democracy even as it formally adopts an unperturbed visage. The G20 presidency provided the Narendra Modi government with a unique opportunity to turn a corner in terms of its perception among the global elite. Indeed, the geopolitical climate allows Indian foreign policy to leverage its presidency into an outsized global leadership role: the G20 group is hopelessly divided amidst an overheated strategic competition between the United States of America and China, escalating tensions between China and Japan, and a full-blown military confrontation in Ukraine that has paralysed Russia and disturbed much of eastern Europe.
A little more than a decade back, a G20 meeting taking place in a similarly turbulent atmosphere formed the venue where Barack Obama had hailed Manmohan Singh’s leadership. “I can tell you that here at G20, when the prime minister speaks, people listen,” Obama had remarked. The reason provided by Obama was not only the country’s rising strength but also the value other leaders placed on Singh’s deep knowledge of economics in the context of reviving the international economy in the aftermath of a global recession.
Since democracy promotion and political polarisation have emerged as major international faultlines, the Indian political leadership might have been expected to showcase a rational, fairer, problem-solving orientation towards the world. Instead, India starts the year of its G20 presidency with a raid (or ‘tax survey’ in the euphemistic official description) on BBC offices after the news channel broadcast a documentary questioning the role of Modi as the former chief minister in the Gujarat riots. The raid came within days of a scathing assessment of the diminishing freedom of speech under the Modi regime provided by The New York Times, which warned that “India’s proud tradition of a free press is at risk.”
The BBC raid, if it is indeed what it is suspected to be, lends a stark insight into the corroded architecture of India’s democratic governance. Modi is beyond any challenge in party and government, having no party colleagues or ministers who can caution against the overzealous dictates coming from his office. As they say in cricket, the BBC documentary was a delivery well left alone. Yet, the sympathisers of the prime minister continue to attack not just the BBC for the documentary but also the individuals featured in it, such as the then British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, who has been painted as a discredited architect of the Iraq war. Even if one takes this argument seriously, the real lesson British historians take from the entanglement in Iraq is not about the individual folly of politicians like Straw but the foibles of a top-down and unchecked decision-making apparatus. Tony Blair’s chief of staff had famously proclaimed a change in Westminster from a “feudal system of barons to a Napoleonic system” where departmental processes counted little in front of the Bonapartist, ‘system-shaking’ leadership of Prime Minister Blair. As security experts have written, the decision-making on the Iraq war was concentrated around a pre-determined No 10(the office of the prime minister) bypassing the expertise of the foreign department, facilitating the strategic blunder.
There are, of course, structural reasons for the centralised leadership we see across the political sphere, including within state governments (weakening party-society linkages, influence of television and digital media, frequent single-party majority mandates and so on). There are also benefits of a strong leader at the executive apex as governance becomes more complex and requires a higher degree of inter-sectoral policy co-ordination.
Yet, there is a difference between an occasional stamping of authority and placing it beyond legal or institutional checks. As the political scientist, Stanley Kochanek, described in his influential book, The Congress Party of India: The Dynamics of One Party Democracy, the then prime minister was alive to the difference between those two approaches. The challenges facing the new-born nation required a leadership that was both coherent and accommodative. Thus, Nehru assumed the Congress presidency and re-organised the Congress Working Committee in an effort to minimise conflicts between party and government. However, Nehru never quite packed the CWC, the apex decision-making of the party, with supporters, keeping in place regional heavyweights while inducting more parliamentary leaders who were broadly in line with his modernising vision. Further, as Kochanek describes, Nehru offset this limited centralising thrust with a comprehensive process of deliberation and interaction. The CWC more frequently discussed policy matters during Nehru’spresidency then after he had ceded the post. Moreover, decision-making was largely based on consensus, which was painstakingly evolved through extensive discussions involving the cabinet, the CWC, AICC and Parliament (Kochanek 1968).
The prime minister is within his right to remind the country that Nehru often failed his democratic obligations, as he did when he gave the green signal to the overthrowing of the legitimately elected communist government in Kerala. But Nehru was hardly a proponent of the dangerous personalisation or centralisation of decision-making where personal vision (or vindictiveness) supersedes the imperative of national interest. Neither the BBC raid nor the institutional degradation of Parliament can be said to constitute any reasonable conception of national interest.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist
