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THE speeches by both BJP President Amit Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the recently concluded meeting of their party’s national executive leave little doubt about their intentions.

The pugnacious, arrogant, hubris laden statement by Shah: ‘If we win 2019, we are going to be in power for the next 50 years. Nobody can remove us’ is chilling in its political implications. More than a clarion call to enthuse the party cadre to be prepared for the forthcoming elections, it signals a resolve to ensure victory, if not the elimination of any electoral/political challenge in the foreseeable future, by whatever means necessary. Even those somewhat skeptical of Arun Shourie’s rhetorical flourish, calling upon all opposition politicians and parties to come together to defeat the Modi regime and ‘save democracy’, forecasting otherwise an end to our liberal multiparty system, cannot but be alarmed by the growing signs of authoritarianism.

In a sense, none of this should come as a surprise. The Modi-Shah duo has over time acquired a formidable reputation as politicians who do not believe in taking any prisoners. Treating political opponents as ‘enemies’, they have never masked their ‘project’ of creating a Congress (read opposition) mukt Bharat, a far cry from what in retrospect appears a relatively benign political style of the earlier BJP under the leadership of Vajpayee and Advani. Both by temperament and skill, they seem unsuited to handle the demands of accommodative and conciliatory politics, coalition dharma, or indeed, the need to honour institutional restraints. No wonder that the last four plus years of the current regime has seen a marked assault on the autonomy and impartiality of all regulatory institutions, either by stacking them with ideological favourites or else leaving positions vacant and starving them of resources. The targeting of universities and other educational and cultural institutions as also the media to purge them of ‘undesirable elements and tendencies’ to force compliance, has created a climate of fear, particularly amongst those holding contrary views. These and other actions and inactions of the Modi regime have resulted in a discernible rise in societal conflict, some deliberately engineered.

The recent book, How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (Penguin, 2018), though focused on the United States under Donald Trump, has lessons for us as well. The authors remind us that democracies die not only with a coup d’etat – they can equally die slowly. This happens most deceptively when in piecemeal fashion, most often following the election of an authoritarian leader, there is recurrent abuse of governmental power and repression of opposition. Some key indicators of an authoritarian personality are – rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game; denying the legitimacy of political opposition; tacit toleration or encouragement of violence and, readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media.

Particularly insightful is the assessment that regular elections and constitutional safeguards are, by themselves, insufficient to secure a democracy. Not merely because they by definition are incomplete, marked by unanticipated gaps and open to multiple interpretations, but because they need the continuous nurturing of unwritten rules and norms to make them meaningful. More than the personal disposition of leaders, norms reflect shared codes of conduct – accepted, respected and enforced by members. Central to a healthy democracy is a culture of mutual tolerance, self-restraint and civility, institutional forbearance and underutilization of institutional prerogatives and the treatment of rivals as legitimate. Together they help create and sustain a democratic ethos – lessons that our contemporary political leaders seem to have forgotten.

For far too long, too many of us have believed that India is too large, diverse, raucous and argumentative to ever be straitjacketed, at least for any length of time. Routinely we extol the overthrow of the Emergency and point out how, unlike our neighbours, we have never experienced (even the threat of) martial law and that the legitimacy of elections have never been seriously challenged by the losers. This may no longer be true.

Recent experience at home and elsewhere demands that we revisit our complacent conclusions regarding the robustness of our democratic arrangements. The steady coarsening of political discourse and the increasing tendency across the party spectrum – though differentially exercised – to stretch institutional restraints to actualize preferred objectives has created a culture of ‘the winner takes all’, further adding to resentment.

Whether or not future victories for the current dispensation will end democracy as we have so far experienced, there is little doubt that recent developments have left us weaker, more willing to reconcile with, if not seek out, authoritarian solutions. None of this augurs well.

Harsh Sethi