Bodysnatching democracy: It's the creepiest feeling

The good old duck test tells us that if it looks like a democracy, swims like a democracy, and quacks like a democracy, then it probably is a democracy. But something about ours is off, unheimlich—the German expression for weird or uncanny. It's like watching your mother walk around the house doing her usual thing, but feeling all the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up long before you realise that that’s just her shell and she has, in fact, been taken over by bodysnatchers. (Don't pretend this has never happened.) Our democracy and institutions have taken on the same creepy wrongness.

We're witnessing The Great Bodysnatch of Indian democracy. There are lots of other metaphors for this—the occult metaphor in which it’s has been possessed by an evil spirit; the cyber tech metaphor in which it has been hacked by a nasty virus; the health metaphor in which it has developed a personality disorder. Every area of public life seems off-kilter, from daily life to daily discourse. Apologists for this central government are in denial that anything is wrong; and when something is too brazenly wrong to ignore, they like to view it in isolation, as a stray incident. It’s like dismissing one zit at a time, instead of admitting that you’ve got chickenpox. Worse, they like to say it’s not happening at all.

Almost the instant the BJP government came to power, arts and education began to suffer. From the Film and Television Institute of India to the Central Board for Film Certification to the Indian Council for Historical Research, institutions have been seeded with agents of the RSS. School textbooks are being rewritten to amplify pseudo-nationalist and Brahminical propaganda about the glories of Veer Savarkar and the dangers of meat-eating. Women students are being smacked down for their dress and put under curfew. The 'anti-national’ tag is used to attack freedom of thought, and when thought remains free, the thuggish ABVP and Hindu Yuva Vahini break out the muscle. 

It is infuriating to think of all the young Indians being cheated out of their full intellectual potential, being told what to think instead of taught how to think for themselves. This is not from incompetence and apathy—it’s a strategic war on rationality and self-empowerment. Orderly sheep are just much easier to manipulate than an empowered, self-determining population.

The media, especially the broadcast media, has been so thoroughly turned that it hardly bears repeating. I will only say that I hope that one day those journalists, television anchors, and writers who have spread rumour and innuendo and lies, and incited hate, violence, and sectarian conflict will find immortality in a hall of shame where they can be held up forever as a cautionary tale. Meanwhile, social media has been weaponised to divide, distort, and lie.

The election commission is looking pretty strange after a Right To Information request revealed discrepancies in the procurement numbers of electronic voting machines and security holes in their transportation. The high court had to reverse an EC decision to disqualify Aam Aadmi Party MLAs in Delhi. It looked very odd that BJP IT Cell head Amit Malviya was tweeting the dates for the Karnataka polls before the Chief Election Commissioner had even announced them.

But the most deadly bodysnatching of all is what we’re witnessing in the Supreme Court. Because, o people of India, when hellfire breaks out and the hounds are at your heels, the Supreme Court is the last institutional recourse. I think it’s safe to say that something is deeply wrong in the Supreme Court under the present Chief Justice. It’s wrong that the Collegium has not reiterated Justice KM Joseph’s name for elevation; it is wrong that the CJI is assigning politically sensitive cases in a most particular manner; and the court’s judgment on PILs seeking an investigation into Judge Loya’s death is, in the words of Justice AP Shah: “(U)tterly wrong and jurisprudentially incorrect…(T)he Supreme Court acted as a court of appeal, and granted a sort of an acquittal, without the benefit of the judgment of a trial court. 
 

As the constitutional scholar Gautam Bhatia describes it, ‘it reads like a trial court judgment that has been delivered without a trial.’”

All our pieces are in place. We look like a democracy, swim like a democracy, and quack like a democracy—but we are now informed by a truly malign influence. We can only hope that the 2019 general elections will exorcise it, and return us to ourselves. 

To put that more rationally, please don’t imagine that this is somebody else’s problem. Every concerned citizen has to push back, hard, in whatever sphere of influence they inhabit, else we’re going to be stuck with a democracy that, creepily, isn’t a democracy at all.