#dnaEdit: Testing times - 2015

As we take a look back at the era of the Emergency, we find ourselves confronting a sense of a foreboding about the contemporary. At the heart of that darkness called the Emergency was the ruthless desire of Indira Gandhi and her coterie to steamroll the nation into a machine of obedience. Today, as we criticise that unbridled autocratic rule by fiat, we are aware of other potential crises of democracy that seem to be building up, both surreptitiously and more out in the open. It is perhaps not surprising that Bharatiya Janata Party veteran LK Advani, who has admitted his lack of faith in the present leadership at the helm, recently warned about India’s vulnerability to yet another Emergency. The protagonists of the 1975 Emergency are no more, but the political DNA that facilitates and nurtured the praxis of that event is still strong.

Today we find renewed anxiety and restlessness around us. The steadily increasing attempts by the government of the day to homogenise politics, culture, society, are producing a culture of apprehension. Increasingly, schools, universities, government offices and institutions are being asked to fall in line in with what the Narendra Modi government deems fit for the “nation.” Fiats are issued under the guise of national wellbeing. Sermons are routinely delivered on what to wear, how to behave, who to marry, how to live, which religion and faith to profess. Virtually every aspect of our lives is under the scanner of the state.

Only recently we witnessed the public display of such overt tactics of control when the government and the ruling party “suggested” that the entire nation participate in mass yoga celebrations on the international yoga day. What was till now in the personal domain — yoga was popular at home and abroad long before the Modi’s government’s ascendance to power — became a state-sponsored official exercise. Similarly, consider the Gujarat BJP government’s latest move to legislate voting into a compulsory act and penalise the non-voters. Or consider, for instance, the present government’s relentless drive against non-governmental organisations and even universities that are questioning its model of development, expressing dissent over a host of subjects in different spheres of life, ranging from the economic to the political and cultural.

Perhaps more alarming than the imposition of Emergency at one stroke is the possibility of insidious normalisation of homogeneity that takes place over a period of time, perhaps in the name of cultural nationalism. One may argue that a 1975 type Emergency is no longer possible in 2015. That may well be true. But if we understand Emergency in a broader context — as a process that punishes and weeds out dissent and enforces a culture of national uniformity, then anxieties do appear to carry some weight: especially when the multiple institutions that are supposed to be bulwarks against such practices of coercion or majoritarianism, are compromised in more ways than one. Today, a whole range of institutions that are supposed to safeguard the cardinal principles of democracy and justice, stand weakened due to a coalescing of powerful interests that operate as a nexus.

In a nutshell, it is not enough simply to employ the rhetoric of India’s resilient democracy to keep the Emergency-like processes at bay. Times have changed. The technological revolution today makes it possible to present authoritarianism as fashionable, tech-friendly. Dictatorial tendencies come in many forms — often as a wolf in sheep’s clothing