Majoritarianism - The solution to Democracy!

From an article by Gopalkrishna Gandhi:

"The question takes us back to Nicholas I and Indira Gandhi. Like those two historical figures, Prime Minister Modi has a sense of ‘order’. He backs that up with an attentiveness to his own fitness, punctuality, ‘turnout’. By personally leading, like an adept instructor, the phalanx gathered on the Rajpath lawns, he has choreographed yoga into an opera of mass power. But not just of power as in wholesome personal strength. Rather, power as in a collective mission, a mass drill that goes beyond personal well-being into a national nostrum, a national mission that bears an unmistakable family resemblance to the drills by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. And what is the mission’s message?

Quite simply, this: ‘We have been a weak nation, a nation of do-gooders and pacifists, of men who are afraid of the noise of crackers, the smell of smoke. Men of withered wills and sunken chests. It is time we built up our sinews, physical and mental, time we toned up our tissues, tightened our tendons. We must retrieve Bharat from the shambles that our so-called liberal leaders of the last six decades have left us…They were not leaders but mis-leaders who tell us that being muscled-up is mean, being belligerent is bullying. In fact such peacemakers and liberals are dangerous anarchists. Let us march, not saunter, stand and sit in neat rows, not haphazardly, observe mauna rather than chatter away and if we have to speak, let us speak on the glory of Bharat Mata…’

Forty years ago, the Emergency spoke the same script. There were no Yoga Day type drills organised at the time but ‘spontaneous’ rallies were called to hail the proclamation, hail the Emancipator. Even as mass leaders were jailed, sections of the middle class welcomed a sudden improvement in the punctuality of train movements, attendance in government offices, the check on profiteering that followed. ‘Honesty’ at shopfloors and workplaces became visible. But all ‘for the present’, because it was imposed by fiat, monitored by fiat, by fear, by bhayayoga.

A person who has recovered from a stroke values the faculties of motor ability, mental comprehension and speech more than one who never lost it.

The Constitution as amended in 1978 has made a proclamation of the 1975 type National Emergency impossible. What we have to be wary of is something as bad — the robotisation of our minds into a ‘yogic’ acceptance of one drill — majoritarianism — and its masterful drill-master.