India now yearns for a strong Opposition

It is now three weeks since the results of the last round of Assembly elections were announced. If there is one emotion that grabs you in every conversation, it is fear. There is a sense of foreboding that we are heading towards becoming a one-party state. You can smell the apprehension, you can feel the anxiety and you can breathe the trepidation.

Let me give you three vignettes from three different conversations. At an event in Gurgaon, I came across a young lady who was beside herself with anger. Wagging an accusing finger almost into my face, she hissed — “how could you allow this government to walk all over you...? This country requires a strong Opposition” — followed by a long diatribe of how bad we were, but why we were also most needed at the moment.

The second was at a dinner the next day hosted by an influential promoter of an infrastructure company in Mumbai. As soon as I walked in, a high-profile media mogul from the entertainment industry exclaimed: “Where are you guys, you cannot allow this country to degenerate into a one-party state? It would be a disaster for India. This country requires a strong Opposition. Get your act together.”

The third was on a train journey back from Chandigarh. A retired general who was sitting next to me said: “I have advised my children not to come back to India as this country is turning into a totalitarian state.”. He then added: “Why are you chaps rolling over and playing dead? This country needs a balance in its polity, and that can only happen if the Opposition is robust.”

What do these three stray conversations tell you? In less than three years, a country that was yearning for a strong government is now desperate for a strong Opposition.

It is not the minorities alone who are feeling petrified. They are possibly resigned to their fate as second-class citizens in today’s India. Many prominent members of the minority communities, who have served India with distinction, have articulated their anguish publicly.

Oxymoronically, it is the great Indian middle class that is now feeling insecure with the electoral choices they have made. Remember that the middle class in any society is a very vocal opinion-maker. The UPA lost the middle class in 2010, and even all the work that it did for the poor, the downtrodden and the marginalised could not resuscitate it politically in 2014, including and not limited to lifting 190 million people out of poverty irrespective of the benchmark that you use.

This triumphant vigilantism is not the only problem. “Hubris” is a word in English that has many meanings, but in the current context it translates into arrogance of power. It emanates out of delusions of grandeur and manifests itself in the relationship that the ruler wants to have with the other institutional stakeholders in the power dynamic.

For the past 34 months, the standoff between the executive and the judiciary has been the most telling example of this hubris — a relationship that has become more tenuous after the Supreme Court struck down the National Judicial Appointments Commission Bill.

Another example is the relationship the Prime Minister wants to have with the fourth estate. There he finds a soulmate in US President Donald Trump, who has refused to attend the White House correspondents’ dinner as he was cut up with the pushback from the media over some of his more idiosyncratic utterances, and his minions have also chosen to boycott it in solidarity.

In November 2013, at the International Film Festival of India in Goa, I had prophesised that a great evil may soon stalk our land and that evil would come in the form of illiberalism and a constriction of India’s creative spaces. I had cautioned the assembled practitioners of the “arts” that an extremely bruising battle for the very soul of India would soon unfold. There is only a limited amount that writers, thinkers and artistes can do.

The real heavy lifting has to be done by the political class. The starting point is to rededicate themselves to the foundational values of the Indian republic. For over the next 26-odd months, the fight for the founding vision of India will be fought again. In 1947, there were two philosophical postulates that confronted India — either to be a Hindu Pakistan or a modern and a pluralistic nation. The latter construct triumphed, much to the disappointment of the right fundamentalists, for whom a religious partition was synonymous with the total exchange of populations.

In their moment of triumph, they now want to unravel the manner in which the Indian nation-state has been constructed over the past seven decades. The names doing the rounds for the post of President of India, despite the denials, are symptomatic of that effort.

However, this has made large sections of India very uneasy, used as they are to a very amorphous form of governance of their private spaces. Herein lies the opportunity for the Opposition.

Rather than being ashamed or diffident, it needs to squarely fight the battle for India’s constitutional underpinnings, articulated in the Preamble. For that, they need to shed diffidence and, most important, the fear of saying the right thing, even though there may be perceived electoral implications for doing so. They need to smell the coffee — no longer is this nation yearning for a strong government, but is crying out for an effective Opposition.