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Terms of Trade | Why Jantar Mantar matters for India
In democratic India, the Jantar Mantar area has mostly been the observatory for (democratically) lost causes content with performing a ritual protest of sorts
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This author happened to be in Bangkok while writing this column. While having a meal at a street-side restaurant, I watched TV streaming visuals of the Thai royal family, and for a moment, I thought about what it would be like to live in a country with a king instead of a democracy. India is truly an exception on this count among the countries that gained independence from colonial rule. Readers who remember the previous edition of this column will notice the irony. I ended last week by arguing that democracy, including in India, is increasingly failing to do justice to its popular mandates, thanks to changing political economy and technological fault lines.
Does democracy really matter for India? What exactly is the end-game of democracy? Freedom to raise your voice? Organise a protest within a stone’s throw of the Indian state’s seat of power (Jantar Mantar)? Ability to form a party and contest elections? The impunity to use brute majority and state power to ride roughshod over what would otherwise be the law of the land? Equal opportunity rather than a monopoly to violate such rules? These are not esoteric or hypothetical questions. In my opinion, these questions form the crux of the ongoing political drama in the country.
Also Read: Jantar Mantar’s changing place in Delhi’s protest map
Earlier this week, the Union government decided to “de-notify” Jantar Mantar as a protest site in the national capital. The immediate connection is not very difficult to make. Only a few months ago, a popular agitation with Jantar Mantar as its base camp forced a Union minister to resign, something which has never happened to the Narendra Modi-led government since it assumed office in 2014.
The more recent wave of protests, targeted at the Chief Election Commissioner, questions not a procedural lapse like leaked examination papers, but the very legitimacy of the current government through accusations that elections were not fair. To be sure, there are far too many logical inconsistencies in the Opposition’s narrative on this count – this is notwithstanding the problems associated with the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) – but politics isn’t exactly a game tied to the rules of rationality.
Why does Jantar Mantar matter for India’s democracy, if at all?
In his previous life, this author was a leftist student activist at Jawaharlal Nehru University, perhaps the most radical centre of student activism while also being among the best universities in the country. Activism involved attending and organising hundreds of demonstrations at Jantar Mantar over roughly a decade. Not all demonstrations made front-page news. Most were just poorly attended rituals. Our poorly attended, token demonstrations and protests weren’t the sorriest things at Jantar Mantar. There used to be many protestors who had pretty much set up permanent plebeian camps at the site.
Jantar Mantar, the monument, was built by King Sawai Jai Singh in the 18th century as an astronomical observatory. In democratic India, the area has mostly been the observatory for (democratically) lost causes content with performing a ritual protest of sorts despite realising that realpolitik was least interested in their demands. In a way, it was tantamount to being at the base camp of the proverbial Mount Everest that is Indian politics. Thousands of protestors and political causes could reach the base camp, but not everyone succeeded in reaching the summit of political power or even forming a radical large movement which would garner attention.
When a government takes away such a space from protestors, it is not just making a pre-emptive move against a force it thinks can hurt it in the short run. It is also striking at the key democratic breathing space available to those otherwise politically orphaned in realpolitik. For the latter cohort, the contradiction, historically speaking, has not been about failing to become politically successful in the larger power play of politics. It has also been a belief that they cannot win the game because it is structurally rigged.
This belief, even if it contains an element of truth, as far as things such as political finance, etc. and the appeal of a particular cause not being large enough are concerned, is not something that is widely shared by a large number of Indians. They might be critical of the government, even angry with it, but hitting the streets is not really an idea the majority has ever entertained except on rare occasions in this country. This goes well with the empirical observation that despite entrenched precarity, Indians have not faced sustained periods of downward mobility since independence.
In fact, one could actually argue on opposite lines. A large number of Indians, as seen in surveys conducted by organisations such as Pew Research and CSDS-Lokniti, have often expressed a longing for a more authoritarian leader. The political rise of Narendra Modi was preceded by a rise in such sentiments in India.
It is only when “mainstream” democracy fails to assuage the majority’s concerns that the street becomes a significant factor in Indian politics. When this moment comes, Jantar Mantar serves as the moment of proverbial solar eclipse of the government rather than an observatory of lost political causes.
It is this intermittent but necessary primacy of popular protests which has ensured that the threshold of authoritarian takeover has always been high in Indian politics.
A government that suffers a politically equivalent solar eclipse will feel extremely tempted to stall democratic protests to prevent another such adversity. However, what it needs to remember while succumbing to such temptation is that the costs of doing so are not just bad press but also an unlikely alliance between the stakeholders in mainstream and fringe politics. Such alliances, when backed by large-scale street protests, if they persist for a long time, can often reshape political beliefs about whether Indian democracy is an inefficient enterprise or a rigged or repressed one.
India has lived peacefully with the former belief for a long time. It would do better not to tempt fate by choosing the latter, as such a decision might trade short-term stability for long-term instability. Indian democracy’s beauty and stability draw from the fact that its base camp has always been open to everyone, but the summit requires far more political heft than just being a protestor on the street. The government might be worried that Jantar Mantar and the parliament are too close to allow it as a protest site. In reality, they will only come close if the Jantar Mantar were shut down rather than left open to the common Indian.
(Roshan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa)
