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It is said that the singular achievement of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)-led Gen Z movement is to overcome the fear psychosis that has been afflicting the people at large due to the “governance by fear” model being pursued by the Union government and some state governments for the last several years.

At the dawn of the last millennium, Rabindranath Tagore, that great son of India, wrote these captivating lines: “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high … Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.” But in the last five decades or so, India has moved far away from this clarion call.

It all started with the era of the Emergency (1975-77), when a government hijacked the whole edifice of the state, a ruling party and leader who in effect treated the state as their personal estate. It was the imposition of a highly concentrated apparatus of power on a fundamentally federal society and the turning over of this centralised apparatus to inflict fear and anxiety.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

What has happened over the last few years is no different. Though the character and contents are different, there is a common thread between the Emergency and now – ‘governance by fear’. The only difference is that the method adopted then was a single, swift blow, and now it is akin to death by a thousand cuts. The effect on freedom and liberty is the same, probably much worse now!

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR), the monstrous tool of mass disenfranchisement let loose by a constitutional body called the Election Commission and endorsed by the Supreme Court, is the typical example. The present state can be called a neo-Emergency!

What is happening under this neo-Emergency is almost exactly what Steven Levitsky described in his seminal Book How Democracies Die:

“This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy – packing and “weaponising” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy – gradually, subtly and even legally – to kill it.“How do elected authoritarians shatter the democratic institutions that are supposed to constrain them? Some do it in one fell swoop. But more often the assault on democracy begins slowly. For many citizens, it may, at first, be imperceptible. After all, elections continue to be held. Opposition politicians still sit in congress. Independent newspapers still circulate. Each individual step seems minor – none appears to truly threaten democracy. Indeed, government moves to subvert democracy frequently enjoy a veneer of legality: They are approved by parliament or ruled constitutional by the supreme court. Many of them are adopted under the guise of pursuing some legitimate – even laudable – public objective, such as combating corruption, ‘cleaning up’ elections, improving the quality of democracy or enhancing national security.”

“This is how elected........

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