Lessons from the US

American institutions show how to speak truth to power

Contrasting recent developments in the United States, the world’s most powerful democracy, and India, the world’s most populous democracy, highlight the robustness or otherwise of public institutional structures. The ability to speak truth to power is one of the most compelling tests of the health of democratic traditions. In India, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) launches raids on questionable pretexts against the owners of a TV channel that has been restrained in its support for the ruling dispensation. In the US, a thin-skinned President condemns critics from the liberal press as “fake news” and unabashedly favours friendly media. In India, displeasure of criticism expressed by a majoritarian government has encouraged some media houses to metamorphose into cheerleaders. In the US, media houses, sustained by gushing leaks inside the Beltway, have called out the chief executive of the world’s sole superpower for serial acts of commission and omission. Apart from incoherent tweets from the West Wing, the world’s most powerful man has not been able to unleash raids or court cases on any of these institutions, not from lack of inclination but because of the systemic checks and balances in the American system.

Four years ago, Supreme Court Chief Justice R M Lodha immortalised the CBI, India’s premier investigative agency, as a “caged parrot” that spoke in “its master’s voice”. In the US, the premier domestic investigative agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), is so independent that it can initiate an investigation into the president’s campaign for collusion with Russia during the 2016 election. When the president sacked the FBI Director on this account, the latter could suggest that the president of the United States was a liar during a televised hearing called by a bipartisan Senate committee investigating the issue. Now, a special counsel appointed by the president to investigate the Russian interference in the 2016 elections appears to have extended the inquiry to Mr Trump himself.  

In the US, legislation to pass a controversial healthcare Bill was withdrawn for lack of support within even the ruling party. In India, a tweaking of Parliamentary rules on the definition of a money Bill enabled the government to pass a contentious law on Aadhaar. In India, a student who intervened in a dust-up at a university against a students’ association affiliated to the ruling party was arrested. In the US, students at University of California’s Berkeley campus protested against a journalist from the far-right, pro-Trump Breitbart. The president threatened to withdraw funding, only to be advised that federal law would disallow it. In India, police stand by as lynch mobs go on a rampage. In the US, administrations in sanctuary cities have the legal wherewithal to thwart the president’s strictures against undocumented immigrants.

India does not lack institutional structures but the 21-month Emergency certainly demonstrated their limits. Those guaranteed by the Constitution – such as the Election Commission, the Comptroller and Auditor General and even the judiciary (though the record here is patchy) – have largely fulfilled their role. Parliament and bodies under its purview – the Reserve Bank of India and other sector regulators – still struggle to establish their independence. It could be argued that the modern Indian nation is only 70 years old, so respect for public institutions is yet to develop. The US, by contrast, is 230 years old and the almost daily political dramas around Washington DC provide an invaluable lesson to emerging democracies such as India on the value of institutional bulwarks against authoritarianism.