Mirages of Democracy

Posted by: Vinoth Ramachandra on: April 6, 2024

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In 2024, around 70 countries are heading for  either presidential or parliamentary elections.

Some of these elections are farcical, as in Putin’s Russia last month or in Bangladesh in January where Sheikh Hasina won her fourth consecutive term in office after the opposition boycotted elections in protest. In Pakistan, Imran Khan was jailed and his party banned from contesting; but despite his supporters emerging with the largest collective vote, the military-backed dynastic oligarchs regained their control of the country.

It is striking how pronounced is the tendency in many other countries to embrace what are called “strongmen”- figures who project authority that promises to assuage the anger and frustrations of many. Any time we see a widespread politics of backlash and grievance, there is reason to worry. And especially when a government wins with an overwhelming majority and uses that to change the basic constitutional framework in ways that undermine the rights and liberties of individuals and minorities. That constitutes an erosion of democracy.

India, long respected as a bastion of democracy in Asia, is rapidly turning into a police state. Civil society activists and organizations are being suppressed. The foreign exchange licences of international NGOs (including Oxfam, Amnesty, Greenpeace and World Vision) have been revoked, forcing them to lay off many employees and restrict their activities. Anti-conversion laws in some states are being enforced, making a mockery of the much-vaunted “Hindu tolerance”. TV and print media are controlled by super-rich tycoons hand-in-glove with Narendra Modi’s ruling BJP party.

India goes to the polls later this month in what will be the most crucial elections in its history. Its future as a rights-respecting democracy is at stake. The BJP is using state resources to intimidate or bribe potential rivals. The arrest of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal by India’s financial crime investigation agency two weeks ago follows on the heels of similar arrests of opposition leaders and raids on their properties by law enforcement agencies. India’s biggest opposition party, the Congress, is struggling to continue campaigning because all its bank accounts had been frozen in connection with an ongoing tax dispute.

The election campaign is also being manipulated by AI disinformation, much of it created by Hindutva-oriented Indian IT specialists in Western countries. While India has the world’s largest number of Internet users next to China, digital literacy as well as conventional literacy levels are low. In February 2020, Manoj Tiwari, a BJP member of parliament, became among the world’s first to use deepfakes for campaigning. In three videos, Tiwari addressed voters in Delhi ahead of the capital’s legislative assembly elections in Hindi, Haryanvi and English – reaching three distinct audiences in the multicultural city. Only the Hindi video was authentic: The other two were deepfakes, where AI was used to generate his voice and words and alter his expressions and lip movement to make it almost impossible to detect, just on viewing, that they were not genuine.

Since then there has been a flood of AI-generated, or manipulated, media that marred a series of elections in India’s states in recent months, and that’s now threatening to fundamentally shape the country’s future general elections. Apart from AI, there are several dubious YouTube “news channels” being created to boost Modi’s election chances. Factchecker.in, India’s fact-checking site, found out that there were 43 claims made by Narendra Modi between 2014 and 2019 that were untrue. (Gaurav Sood, Fake News, Penguin, p.224)

India recently purchased USD 4 billion worth of armed drones from the US. This is roughly the current foreign currency reserves of Sri Lanka. At the same time as this news was released, India was ranked shamefully high in a study calculating the prevalence of children aged 6-23 months who have not eaten anything over a 24-hour period, across 92 low- and middle-income countries. Farmers protesting in Delhi over the manipulation of food prices by a government- backed retail giant are being tear-gassed.

Some European countries are shamelessly courting Modi, seeking market access to the country’s large and affluent middle-class. The latter are obsessed with boosting India’s global image. Sophisticated probes to Mars and cutting-edge medical research float above a sea of urban squalor and crumbling infrastructure. India aspires to become the third largest economy in the world before 2030 while ranking among the bottom fifty countries on every indicator of health and environmental well-being, not to mention religious liberty and the welfare of women and children.

Democracy, advancing hand-in-hand with the national self-determination, was one of the great achievements of the twentieth century. But it has been a more ambiguous achievement than most of its admirers today realize. The warnings of Tocqueville, Constant, Mill and others from an earlier generation of Western liberal thinkers have not lost their force. While it may be true that once a democratic nation has attained a certain level of economic development it will not revert to autocracy, illiberal forms of democracy always loom on the horizon. Just witness Europe and the USA today. Where the love of freedom, justice and tolerance are absent or eroded in the dominant culture, mirages of democracy set in.

The Habsburg Empire protected civilized values more effectively during its last sixty years than did most of the nation-states by which it was replaced during the nearly one hundred years that followed the empire’s collapse in the aftermath of World War I.

Gandhi famously remarked, when told that an independent India would also produce oppressors, “But they will be our oppressors.” I cannot agree less. I prefer, any day, good governance by foreigners to bad governance by natives.