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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

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More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

CJP impact — BJP’s narrative hegemony dented, the pall of fear lifted

Citizen protest can be a check on democratic backsliding. But whether democratic vigour fully returns will depend more on how the non-electoral gains are leveraged in electoral politics.

In The Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru made an observation about MK Gandhi, capturing a feeling that was experienced widely but never articulated as sharply. To slightly paraphrase Nehru: “The dominant impulse in India under British rule was that of fear; pervasive, oppressive, strangling fear; fear of… the police; fear of the official class; fear of the laws meant to suppress and of prison… And then Gandhi came… Suddenly, as it were, the black pall of fear was lifted from the people’s shoulders.”

I start this way not to equate the BJP’s rule with British colonialism. The British rulers, after all, were not elected by Indians. Nor do I wish to draw any equivalence between Gandhi and Sonam Wangchuk. I use Nehru’s description as a political metaphor. It is well known that elected governments can also create a pervasive climate of fear by suppressing dissent, threatening dissenters, unleashing ubiquitous surveillance, and seeking hegemony at all costs. The BJP’s rule over the last decade or so has had these features. Electoral victories have been projected as securing legitimacy for total domination over society and non-elected institutions. 

The student protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar and elsewhere in India has lifted “the pall of fear”. Though the protest was initially about educational reform, it eventually became a stinging critique of the Narendra Modi government’s methods. The rulers saw the nature of the threat and used force to nip it in the bud. But even the pellet guns and lathis fitted with nails could not cower the students into silence. The number of protesters kept swelling, and........

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