There is no Democracy
“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins…to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone”
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
“We are a democracy.” A form of truth we have come to accept, internalize and evangelize in India. An assertion that draws its validation from that supposed veritable celebration of us; elections. Free and fair elections. Where you’re free to vote and not free to nominate who should be on the ballot. Where it’s fair to choose ‘none of the above’, but that means nothing. Because it doesn’t influence the outcome of the election. That vote itself, is invalid. The invalidity of protest against a system you can’t change. The dismemberment of your contempt, because even that has to express itself from within the choices imposed upon you, in order to be valid.
While we celebrate our democracy through its festivals, holidays and other events, by paying a visit to the nearest mall to redeem our paid holidays; the decaying carcass of what was once our democracy rots. And we’ve closed our eyes and stuffed our noses with the perfume of propaganda enough to stop noticing.
We gladly celebrate the undignified existence of having to stand in queues to access our own hard-earned money. We hyperventilate when someone questions the soldier-civilian binary, we snap when one of our ‘leaders’ is questioned, we love images and despise doubt. We call those who question our devotion parasites. We belittle knowledge and celebrate information. Information that is shoved down our conscience that itself is lubricated by our greed.
We are the embodiment of the death of democracy. And we need to celebrate it. We need to celebrate it every day by glorifying the indignities imposed on us by those we choose from among the few on the ballot. We need to celebrate it by coercing more sheep to join the access card/lanyard wearing herd that has an existence but no ‘life.’ We need to celebrate it because we are the new slaves. Free to choose, from among the options we cannot choose.
We must celebrate the slow asphyxiation of what was once an ideal. Because there are no ideals in our conception of the world and of our place in it.
Democracy does not exist anymore. And we are strangling even the illusion of its existence.
Democracy as a Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that refers, for rhetorical effect, to one thing by mentioning another thing. In India, our political discourse is filled with Metaphors. The Metaphor of the strong leader, a reference to hawkish national security position that requires increased spending on security at the cost of social programs. The Metaphor of ‘good governance’, good related to what? Why not ‘excellent governance’? Because excellent leaves no room for errors. But good does, because you can cherry-pick only the faults of previous administrations to highlight you are ‘good’. Why governance? Why not Administration? The word administration will evoke associated responses and expectations of bureaucratic reforms. And no party worth its name wants to undertake it. Why? Because most ministers have no professional or technical background in the ministries they administer. Challenging a bureaucracy that they are heavily reliant on to even make sense of their roles will eventually mean exposing the fact that without a bureaucracy; no matter how dishonest it is, the ministers are impotent and incompetent.
The American political scientist Murray Edelman, in his book ‘The symbolic uses of politics’ pointed out that the goal of political discourse is to use simple metaphors that are then repeated continuously. The repetition of such metaphors results in “dulling the critical faculties rather than awakening them. Chronic repetition of cliché’s and stale phrases that serve simply to evoke a conditioned, uncritical response is a time-honored tradition among politicians and a mentally restful one for their audiences.”
In India, the very word ‘democracy’ is now a metaphor for political and ideological obscenity. Democracy means that we allow sexism, misogyny and bigotry to thrive. Democracy means that we allow retired generals to invoke the glorification of war as a means of justifying our civilizational identity. A kind of self-love that needs a sacrificial goat to justify itself. ‘Democracy’ has become a metaphor to challenge the idea of democracy itself.
Democracy as a Metonym:
A Metonym is a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is called not by its own name but rather by a metonym, the name of something associated in meaning with that thing or concept. For example, North Block is a metonym used to represent the finance ministry and/or the Home Ministry in India. When the current Prime Minister, in 2014 said that he was an outsider to Delhi ; what he meant was that he was an outsider to the existing political and administrative establishment structure. Delhi, therefore was used as a metonym.Our current media discourse liberally uses metonym’s like ‘Delhi’ and ‘Lutyens Delhi’ to represent conceptions of a socio-administrative class.
What we often ignore is how democracy itself is used as a metonym to represent what its not supposed to represent at all. It’s no longer a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system. It’s a form of sanitized oligarchy where natural resources, the media, land and government licenses are a monopoly of the few. And these few, through their sometimes blatant and sometimes stealth funding of electoral campaigns have ensured that the the exorbitant cost of electoral campaigns eventually requires the political party to forego democratic responsibilities to stay in, or to come to power. Thus begins the never ending quid-pro-quo that renders the very concept of democracy meaningless. The political parties in the parliament and assemblies are no longer representatives of the people, they are hired guns for the oligarchs. And the oligarchs decide what interpretations of the socioeconomic reality are going to even be considered as facts, in any debate.
Democracy therefore, is only a metonym, a placeholder that denotes that a power structure exists, but not the power structure that reflects the values of our constitution. It’s the power structure of oligarchy.
Democracy as Anthropomorphism:
Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, and intentions to non-human entities. In the Indian context, our concept of government has become increasingly anthropomorphic. We increasingly see the government and the state embodied by and concentrated in the all-powerful, benevolent ‘strong leader’. The institutions reflect the marketed virtues of the leader in their decisions. The decisions in turn, are legitimized and their details obfuscated through the reflective charisma of the leader.
In addition to anthropomorphising institutions, there is also the process of dehumanizing humans. The process of dehumanizing is specifically carried out to dehumanize specific categories and social classes which do not form the core support base or the ideological ballast of a specific power structure.
The Sensuous force
During India’s freedom struggle, people from all walks of life, all ideologies participated with great passion to vanquish what was a brutal, repressive regime. The freedom movement became a veritable democracy in itself. The sensuousness of its spirit, catalyzed by the righteousness of its cause. Many of the leaders of the movement had deep ideological differences. Yet, they understood that the movement itself, largely decentralized and sometimes splintered had to allow all denominations of perspectives to exist. From the atheist Bhagat Singh to the deeply religious Gandhi to the clinically critical Ambedkar, all had a place and all had a role. And though some of them disagreed vehemently with each other on a range of issues, they at least recognized the importance of diversity of approaches towards the great objective.
The sensuousness of that spirit is long gone now. What we have is the sensuousness of wealth. The vulgarity of an impertinent, perpetually insulting inequality where all we have is gluttonous consumption of the pride of have-nots by the haves. We not only have significant wealth inequality,but we also have the inequality of recognition; where you are only recognized as a human if you are a quantifiable economic unit of some variety.
The Inequality of Recognition
Our Media, our administrative structures and our civil society now prides itself in perpetuating continuous derecognition of certain sections of our society. Take the case of housewives. The most diligent, hard working and committed unit of our democracy. While we have numerous schemes subsidizing religious pilgrimage, we have none that grant any economic compensation to housewives for the amount of labor they do. It is they who support the men in looking after the household, in feeding and clothing the children, in nursing them during times of sickness but we happily ignore them. We refuse to even recognize the socioeconomic impact they have on our economy. The refusal to recognize and compensate them is a conscious act. An act in which patriarchy and neoliberal economics feed off of each other in implicit partnership to further their own agendas.
Patriarchal structures feel threatened by the possibility of economic freedom of women especially; when it is recognized and legitimized in the form of special entitlements by the state. Neoliberal economics feels threatened, because they will have to recognize that the invisible hand is meaningless without the enterprise of the homemaker. The ignored hand behind the invisible hand.
Lying with the herd
The perennial need for a ‘leader’, the sudden burst of democratic pride when we vote in the elections, the smugness of the inked-finger selfies; and the ubiquitous Facebook and Whats App status updates masqueraded as national interest which are in reality, hymns of our assertive servitude.
The sudden disappearance of our attention deficit, when our leaders spin yarns of diabolical propaganda in their televised speeches. The ‘zindabad’ of our devotion, the ‘murdabad’ of our pride.
All of these lies play out in herds. The herds of people, wilting under the searing heat of the summer, waiting to hear their leader speak. His arrogance, fanned by the sycophancy of his cronies on stage. His presence, cooled and magnified by the fans in the background and; by the close-up shots from the party cameras, relaying the event to ‘news’ channels. The herd of the prime-time news viewers, divided by geography and united by that ubiquitous tomb of our civilization; the television. The herd of the social media ‘admirers’, the believers of the cult of image, the addicts of a personality cult.
Our democracy is a lie played out everyday among herds of human-sheep. A herd unique in its ability to cannibalize reason at every given opportunity. And the opportunities it is not given, it knows how snatch those away through the rabidity of its organized trolling.
Democracy and Truth
Nietzsche could very well have said about democracy in India what he said about truth. The democracy we have, is a consensual hallucination of rule by the people.And we are addicted to the drugs we ourselves invented, to get away from our own paradoxes of pretending to be citizens and actually behaving like feudal lords in service to an empire. Masters to the unfortunate and slaves to the blessed.
Can we cure ourselves of this disease? The disease of voluntary philistinism?
The answer is No.
We can’t cure what we are because the person doing the curing isn’t cured of the disease in the first place.
So fellow Indians, stay as you are, your sleepy selves. For as Nietzsche once said, “blessed are the sleepy ones; for they shall soon fall off.”
We will fall off soon, and with us; we will bury whatever is left of our democracy or the illusion of it.
