Pavan K. Varma | India’s Democracy No Match To Nepalese Fragile Governance

Recently, while participating in a TV debate during the Gen Z protests in Nepal, I was surprised that the anchor, instead of analysing the reasons why this happened in Nepal, was more concerned that “anarchists” in India are looking to turn India into Nepal. Frankly, I was appalled, because India is not Nepal. Nepal’s political turmoil, especially during the Maoist insurgency and later the street protests by youth against monarchy and governance failure, stemmed from a different historical context — one where democratic institutions had not matured and the state oscillated between authoritarian monarchy and fragile democracy. India, on the other hand, has been a functioning — albeit imperfect — democracy for over 75 years. To compare Indian dissent to Nepalese anarchy is to ignore the very foundations of our constitutional republic.

In recent years, Indian public discourse has been increasingly hijacked by a troubling binary: Either one is an uncritical nationalist, unquestioningly loyal to the government, or one is accused of harbouring anarchic intent, trying to dismantle the state itself. This reductionist narrative is particularly insidious in a democracy as vast, plural, and complex as India. The conflation of protest or criticism with anarchy is not only intellectually dishonest but also historically inaccurate and politically dangerous.

In any functioning democracy, dissent is not a luxury, it is a necessity. The Indian Constitution enshrines the right to free speech, peaceful assembly and protest. To now suggest that protests by students, farmers, workers or civil society are tantamount to sedition or anarchy, like we saw in Nepal, is to trivialise legitimate grievances by conveniently branding them as destabilising, rather than addressing their root causes. If criticism becomes indistinguishable from subversion, then the only permissible citizen is a silent one. And a democracy of silent citizens is a democracy in name only.

The fact is that along with achievements to be proud of, there are many grievances that concern citizens. On the one hand, the rhetoric of “Amrit Kaal” — a golden age of development — dominates public speeches and media soundbites. On the other hand, there is also verifiable frustration, particularly among the youth, on grounds of unemployment, growing inequality, draconian laws, authoritarianism, corruption, regional imbalances and persistent poverty. In recent times, two large protests are repeatedly cited by those who see dissent as anarchy. The first was the protest against the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAA) hyphenated with the National Register of Citizens (NRC). To my mind, there were valid reasons for the protest. The CAA-NRC scheme would have been, in a country like ours, grossly unfair and discriminatory for the vast number of the poor — many of whom are illiterate — and for the minorities and could have led to endemic social and political instability. Furthermore, the protests were largely peaceful. The second was the farmer’s protests. For over a year farmers sat in a dharna outside New Delhi, by and large peacefully. According to reports, hundreds perished in the biting winter cold. There were unfortunately some incidents of violence, which is condemnable, but that was an aberration. Finally, the government had to succumb to the farmer’s demands, and the CAA-NRC ill-conceived initiative has also been put in cold storage.

Even if we don’t go into the merits of the issues agitating the protestors, their opposition to government policies was entirely within the remit of a democracy. Our democratic history post 1947 is replete with examples where dissent, protests and organised opposition to the government have served a legitimate purpose. On many occasions, the cadres and supporters of the ruling party — the BJP — have themselves been a part of such protests. Were they promoting anarchy then?

Now however, those in power seem to find it convenient to construct a spectre of anarchy every time there are protests, or even verbal dissent. The protesters are dubbed as “urban Naxals” “anti-national” or “unpatriotic”. The idea that dissent is inevitably noxious or will unravel the nation because it must be motivated by some nefarious extraneous reason, is so undemocratically simplistic as to be laughable. In fact, to my mind, this is plain and simple fear mongering. But many people in the establishment actually posit it with self-righteous seriousness. In truth they do so to justify authoritarian impulses, and suppress any opposition to their sycophantic notion of loyalty. But the Indian state is not so fragile that a few student protests can bring it down. If it is, then the fault lies not with the protesters, but with the weakness of the institutions that have been hollowed out.

To mislabel protest as anarchy is also to insult the intelligence of the Indian people. The average citizen is not a pawn in some grand conspiracy. People are capable of discerning right from wrong, and their anger is often born out of lived reality, not ideological manipulation. Responsible governments should take note of their concerns, not dismiss them disdainfully, or worse, treat those who voice them as antithetical to the state.

A key driver of this false equivalence between protest and anarchy is a pliant section of the media that parrots the government line. Instead of interrogating power, many news channels amplify propaganda, creating hysteria around dissent and turning every critic into a villain. Intellectuals, too, have been complicit — either through their silence or their selective outrage. Patriotism cannot be redefined as loyalty to a political party. It must be loyalty to the idea of India.

India does not need less protest; it needs more informed, constructive and inclusive dissent. Only a confident nation allows its citizens to speak freely, criticise openly, and protest peacefully, and only a responsive government takes note of the grievances behind the dissent and finds ways to address them. The road to a better India is not through silence, but through dialogue. It is not through repression, but reform.

To conflate the right to protest in our own country with the anarchy we saw in Nepal, appears to be a deliberate ploy to stifle democracy. It is to mistake noise for disorder, and questioning for rebellion. Let us not fear dissent; let us fear its absence.