The roads to authoritarianism

By Neera Chandhoke

WE IN India proudly brandish our credentials to be the world's largest democracy. And it is true that except for the two years of the emergency, we have held regular elections that ensure a smooth transfer of power. This gives us cause to preen. The dividing line between democracy and authoritarianism, however, can prove rather thin. For, as recent events have shown us, within our set- up as a formal democracy, authoritarianism is sliding insidiously but surely into the interstices of everyday life, pulverising freedom of expression, particularly the right to dissent and protest, and destroying all institutions that allow for the circulation of ideas. What else can we call the resuscitation of an old regulation that foreign scholars, particularly scholars hailing from our neighbouring countries, have to be cleared by the Government before they are invited to seminars or conferences, or even when they come to India to pursue their own research projects. The reasons given for the resurrection of this openly authoritarian regulation are that of national security: and what constitutes either national or security can be the theme of a series of monographs in itself. But here let us focus on the larger dimensions of the issue at hand.

First, is it not one of the major ironies of history that India closes its doors to foreign scholars at precisely the very time that it has opened its gates to what is euphemistically called the free flow of international capital? The astonishing rate at which the Government is selling off national assets - Balco is a case in point - to private capitalists, and the way it has been inviting foreign capital to enter domains that were formerly regarded as hallowed for national security is truly obscene. It is after all this very Government that is thinking of privatising not only our national airline but also the sector of defence production. As any student of political economy knows, the line between national and international capital is rather thin, therefore, at which point foreign capital will intrude in areas crucial for our national security remains an open question.

But whereas the free flow of capital is seen as permissible, whereas capitalism has been emancipated from all constraints of space and become spaceless, the free flow of ideas and scholarship is to be space bound, subjected as it is to censorship. And where there is censorship a horrendous institution called the `thought police' is not far behind. The latter has already made its appearance in the form of condemnable attempts to block out art and cinema and books, it is now extending itself into the domains of academia.

There is a fine irony here, we live in a world where the internet, cable television, and direct home telecasts inescapably involve the circulation of information. When every child, theoretically speaking, can access any information on any country, including his own, with relative ease and facility, we are being told that the production, dissemination and contestation of knowledge have to be constrained by national borders. Will the next step be the censorship of internet browsers, the e-mail, and teleconferencing? The idea is truly laughable if it were not so tragic.

And it is tragic because these regulations smack of rank paranoia. The present regime has shown a complete inability to handle criticism. This has been evident in every attempt to replace academics who are critical of the ideology of the party leading the coalition in power, in government-sponsored institutions of academia, and their replacement by people who are presumably conformist. The paranoia is evident in the way textbooks are sought to be rewritten. But now it has taken the form of censoring research and scholarship by foreign academics on grounds of national security. Tomorrow, will national seminars that deal with the communalisation, the nuclearisation and the creeping intolerance of India require clearance from some babu sitting somewhere in the Union Government because they ostensibly affect national security? These are not the actions of a self- confident Government wedded to democracy and thus to freedom of expression. These are the actions of an insecure and anxious Government, which is terrified of any kind of criticism.

Actually scholars should be flattered that what they say in seminar rooms affects the country's security irrevocably. For long we had believed that we had freedom of expression because our critical academic outpourings did not affect the Government one whit. Now we know it was freedom by default. More importantly, the measure to restrict the entry of foreign scholars is disastrously shortsighted. We do not have to go far to look for precedents. Otherwise powerful states in East Europe had collapsed dramatically precisely because they had closed their doors to flows of information. Once civil societies stood up and demanded the right that accrues to every human being by virtue of being human - the right to freedom of expression and the right to information; a revolution, albeit a `velvet revolution', was on the cards. In 1989 we were to witness the awesome spectacle of so many states toppling like the proverbial houses of cards before angry and agitated crowds assembled in the streets of Prague and Warsaw. The Italian theorist, Gramsci, had warned us of precisely such an event when he had suggested that states can resist revolutions only when they have civil societies that permit the expression of dissent and the right to protest. Once that goes, the state is revealed as not only a coercive but a deeply fragile institution which can disintegrate at the first hint of disapproval. In their own interests, the holders of power in India should know that it is safer for them to allow criticism from wherever it comes for, that is the best way to prevent what can be termed the `pressure cooker' effect. But that insight needs foresight and vision, which the present regime seems to lack in large doses.

The other issue has to do with the nature of knowledge. Arguably the production of knowledge is a normative venture for, the very processes that generate knowledge on the human condition also generate norms by which we evaluate states and their institutions - norms such as justice, human rights, equality, freedom, and democracy. The generation of intellectual thought through seminars and books, classroom lectures, and public discussions is simultaneously the construction of political norms. These norms allow us, as people who are concerned with the dignity of every human being, to criticise regimes and states wherever they are located spatially, if they have violated the basic right of any individual to self-respect. These time-tested norms allow us to censure and protest against violations of human rights and genocide whether it is in Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Rwanda or Afghanistan, irrespective of the fact that we are not of those societies. For, knowledge and the norms it produces are by their very nature universal and applicable across national borders. Incidentally, why is it that we Indians armed with moral superiority feel we have the right to condemn Pakistan for being undemocratic when we will not allow a Pakistani intellectual to criticise what is happening in India? This is outright hypocrisy. Anyone should be able to condemn violations of democracy anywhere in the world simply because as in John Donne's immemorable words ``the death of any man diminishes me for I am involved in mankind''.

Finally all regimes try to control two sites simply because these express the contradictions of society. The first site is that of material production, the second is that of mental production. The present regime has with some success controlled the first site through disempowering trade unions. It is now trying to control and regulate the site of the production of knowledge by subjecting the process to bureaucratic regulations such as clearing, censoring, and policing. But recollect that it is precisely when these two sites are colonised that we witness the onset of authoritarianism. We may have to now sadly accept the idea that this great Indian democracy we pride ourselves on is degenerating into some form of authoritarianism.

We preen no longer.

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