Listen to this article:

“Resistance works. Wherever we resist, it works,” Rahul Gandhi said this at the INDIA bloc’s conclave in Delhi on June 8. His argument was historical as much as political. The Congress, he said, turned from a political formation into a resistance movement on the day Mahatma Gandhi set the goal of freedom from British rule.

Unlike many other parties, it was never built on the infrastructure and protection of the Indian state. Its work, therefore, does not depend on the neutrality of that state. The more the institutions of the state are throttled, he declared, the harder the Congress will fight to defend the constitution.

That speech is the right place to begin a debate now gathering force. As anger mounts over the conduct of the Election Commission of India (ECI), some voices have begun to suggest that the Congress and other opposition parties should stop contesting elections altogether. If the referee is compromised, they ask, why play the match? Contesting, they argue, only lends legitimacy to a rigged process.

The anger is honest. The conclusion is wrong. A boycott is desertion, and desertion is not resistance. Walking away from elections will not defend Indian democracy. It will surrender it, and for a very long time.

A democracy earned through resistance

Indian democracy did not arrive overnight, and it did not arrive as a gift. It grew out of a democratic consciousness built over decades of struggle and awakening. Innumerable people paid for it. During the Quit India movement alone, the British government’s own figures admitted 1,028 deaths in police and military firing.

Nationalist estimates put the toll as high as 10,000. More than 90,000 people were jailed. The entire Congress leadership was locked up. Gandhi spent nearly two years in the Aga Khan Palace. Nehru, over his lifetime, spent close to nine years in British prisons. From Sardar Patel to Maulana Azad and almost every top leader of Congress spent years in jail.

This is the Congress that Rahul Gandhi was describing. It did not win India’s freedom by stepping aside when the odds were stacked against it. It won by resisting, year after year, jail term after jail term.

When the Republic came, it did something no Western democracy had done at birth. It gave every adult the vote on the very first day. From the first general election of 1951-52, the poor, the unlettered, women and Dalits stood in the same queue as the rich. That was not a concession from the powerful. It was the dividend of a freedom movement.

Today that inheritance is challenged by those in power. Having come to power through democratic means, they now appear to want to hold it permanently by dismantling the very edifice of free and fair elections.

Democracy lives in people, not in buildings

Here lies the first thing the boycott argument misunderstands. Democracy is not a product of institutions, or even of the Constitution. They sustain democracy. They do not create it. Democracy is established when people want it, and it survives only as long as people want it to survive.

Also read: Questions May Be About Gyanesh, But the Question Mark Is on Modi’s Democratic Legitimacy

B.R. Ambedkar understood this. In his last speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, he warned that even a good constitution turns bad if those who work it are a bad lot. No political party or institution alone can guarantee democracy. They can nurture it and help it flourish.

So the need of the hour is not to walk away from the people’s arena. It is to raise the consciousness of the people. To tell them their democracy is in peril. To give them proof that someone is stealing their mandate. And to fight for it inch by inch.

What desertion hands over

History is unkind to oppositions........

© The Wire