As 2024 draws to a close, we must audit our state and society and consider what the next year may mean for us in India.
This year was not remarkably different from the years immediately preceding it, but for a few significant events that may be critical for our future.
One, the Indian parliamentary elections returned the Right-wing populist BJP to power albeit with a curtailed mandate in terms of seats.
Two, the penetration of Hindutva in the nooks and crannies of the Indian state and its claim over Indian identity is no longer in the realm of speculation. None other than a Chief Justice has alluded to it and symbolically exhibited the coming together of the government and judiciary.
Three, this year has also reinforced the apprehension that corruption and venality cannot be a political consideration in a country exposed to such matters daily, and therefore we may have to re-think the role of public ethics in politics.
All of this must be seen in the backdrop of the strengthening of crony capitalism in India and the extreme inequalities of income and wealth. This feature is truly global but in India, we have managed income inequality and crony capitalism better!
Capitalism seeks to glorify the market as an efficient distributor of resources through ‘fair competition’ and crony capitalism subverts this process and seeks to fix prices through manipulation. Michael Sandel, the Harvard University philosopher has argued that we are now a ‘market society’ rather than a society that uses the market for its economic purposes.
Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek economist and politician, has termed this turn in capitalism worldwide as one that has taken capitalist society beyond what we understand by that word and has proposed that it be replaced by ‘techno feudalism’, a historical development of late capitalism which is worse than what capitalism has so far managed to unleash on the world.
Be that as it may, a World Inequality Lab (WIL) report says that inequality in India is worse than what was extant in colonial India. The top 1% of the super-rich hold around 40% of the country’s wealth and the gap between the rich and poor is ever widening.
More critically they contend that inequality in independent India showed a decline post-independence till the 1980s and then it skyrocketed from the early 2000s. The economists behind the WIL report add a significant caveat – economic data management and collection is rather poor in India and therefore their results may err on the lower bound to actual inequality levels.
The Varieties of Democracy Report of 2024 (V Dem) states that autocratisation is the dominant trend worldwide and democratic declines are noticeable across the globe. India is no exception to this trend as the decline is stark in South Asia and Eastern Europe.
The report confirms our worst fears that we are now hurtling down the slippery slope of electoral autocracy or as many scholars have pointed out India’s state has become the haven for majoritarianism, where the freedom to express one's thoughts and express alternative political visions has become severely restricted.
The V Dem report states that freedom of the media has been under severe attack by what it calls ‘aspiring autocrats’ and the Indian state is one of the worst offenders of press freedom, keeping company of countries like El Salvador and Mauritius. The report notes that in India laws have been used to clamp down on the opposition voices, the press, civil society organisations and citizens critical of the political situation with the consequence that provisions of the Indian Constitution guaranteeing rights have been severely compromised.
Human rights consequently have suffered greatly and religious minorities as well as in some cases ethnic minorities have borne the brunt of this decline of democracy and acute inequalities in income and wealth distribution.
The weaponisation of state agencies like the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Enforcement Directorate, the Income Tax authorities and the police have created a situation where the civic space has further shrunk and been left emasculated.
Punitive justice through the rampant use of bulldozers against minorities has effectively pre-empted the judicial process and engendered an atmosphere of fear. The effects are well nigh visible but to those committed to violating all democratic norms, for whom these are small matters, to be relegated to the junkyard of political memory.
A democracy is dependent on a minimum of three essential elements in the polity – discussions, debates and dissent. All these elements require robust constitutional values safeguarded by a state that draws red lines of limits for the government. These are also tremendously important for the deliverance of justice for no system can be just if the environment does not allow for what I call the ‘three Ds”. Democracy as an ideal secures for all and more critically for the vulnerable a space in which justice is delivered.
Justice in all its manifestations is the essential requirement for a country like India, for its economic, moral and social progress. The demand for justice is at its highest from those at the bottom of the hierarchy since those who are at the top can bypass and dictate the agenda of the state. Thus, when democracy falters justice falters as well and when justice fails to deliver what is required of it, democracy is its first victim.
This year has also witnessed the continuance of the demonisation of the Palestinians and the demolition of their home and hearth by the Israeli apartheid state, whose militant disregard for international laws, UN resolutions and humanitarian appeals have the blessings of the states which proclaim themselves to be the epitome of democracy.
Right-wingers in India have been extremely emboldened and enthused by Israel’s continued war-mongering and demonisation of the Palestinians, transferring the shadow of evil from West Asia to our shores with the hope that the impunity that Israel enjoys despite the genocidal actions would envelop them as well, even as they demonise India’s minorities.
The wounds of Palestine encourage the Right-wing all over the globe as the taste of blood does for the tiger. The easy permeability of images, messages and propaganda from the right wing, both nationally and internationally across cartographical divides in real-time poses one of the most important challenges to world peace and a humane order. Palestine in short, casts a long shadow on Indian politics, more than we think and more pernicious than ever.
The evil that men do live after them. In our neighbouring country Bangladesh, the regime that ran on a sham electoral mandate for decades and by physical oppression and suppression of the opposition, politically exploded. The Prime Minister had to flee and for a while, an acephalous political dispensation seemed to be filling in the vacuum. But as time passed it became clear that the baton was passing onto the communal sections of the population, which cleverly used the democracy deficit to push their sectarian agenda.
This then completes the circle of communalised encirclement in 2024, which is a scary proposition, since it takes us right back to the partition and the subsequent horror that the religion-based divide unleashed on a sub-continent eluding many more pressing concerns on the economic and social fronts.
Therefore, the question that is uppermost in most minds is this – where are we going in 2025? Like every other New Year routine wishes for a happy and better year would make the rounds soon. But politics has this inertia that is difficult to brush off. So, the most likely outcome would be that the coalition that has been forged in India between religion-based politics, the executive, the courts and the crony capitalists would continue to have a field day.
The proto-fascist tendencies that are on display would persist and the propaganda industry, which has replaced the independent media sector, would be working overtime to keep people in this very unequal economy away from the fundamental issues of livelihood by stoking the flames of communal passions.
We live in an era where shouting has replaced debates, the shallowness of the mind is celebrated as entertainment, critical and deep thinkers are a rarity in the corridors of the university replaced by imposters holding academic leadership positions and people adept at speaking the untruth strutting the world stage.
These traits are difficult to change and no matter how strongly we wish to see the demise of these traits in 2025, the chances of that happening is remote. Toxicity has been injected over the past two decades and a half daily and those tasked with safeguarding and upholding the constitutional obligations have failed spectacularly.
The pathologies hoisted on us by the combination of crony capitalism and political majoritarianism are first and foremost a clear and present danger to any semblance of democracy and justice. But more importantly, these dangers have been normalised through the glitz and glamour of consumerism and crony capitalism by creating a seductive politics where the binary of us and them overcomes the cries for hunger and decent living.
All this is of course the early signs of the breakdown of democracy as we knew it and a warning that the first victims of not recognising the signs would be the poor and the marginals. We must also not forget that a large part of the media and academia are partners in this new structure that has been erected – hence the silence of the compliant agents masquerading as good law-abiding citizens.
The task ahead is etched on the wall. We must read the writing on it if we are to save ourselves from the collapse of anything that is remotely civil and civilisational. Back to basics with a questioning mind, asking tough questions of ourselves and strengthening critical reading and learning so that we can be contrarian to the narcissistic smugness that we have developed in the wake of the neo-liberal regime is what we must wish to achieve in 2025.
For this, we must unlearn what we have learnt and re-learn that which we want to accomplish so that each of us becomes reflexive agents and self-critical human beings. We also must remember that Descartes's oft-repeated quote – cogito, ergo sum or ‘I think therefore I am’ is partial. Descartes's assertion was more nuanced and is apt for our times – ‘dubito, ergo, cogito, ergo sum’, - ‘I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.’ That is to my mind the best wish we can wish for 2025.
Professor Surajit C Mukhopadhyay is Dean of the School of Social Sciences, Sister Nivedita University, Kolkata. The views expressed here are the writer's own.