“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”; the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens are probably true for all of human existence. This year, 2024, marks a particularly definitive moment for the mood of our times as some 4 billion people — roughly half the human population — will have had the opportunity to vote. This number includes many of us; so in the context of our global community, nation, and immediate campus, this moment affirms our agency. This is taken forward by the election results in many countries that prove a general sense of anti-incumbency or resistance to the status quo. But this sounds nothing like many of the dystopic narratives shoved down our throats (and into our guts) in the lead up to the elections. I make the case that we need to re-evaluate our positions as agentic members of a system that is designed to be receptive and foster change. Our approach to the latest elections minimized this capacity, so how can we think better as citizens?
Let us look through India’s election results to understand this. While no one quite predicted the scale of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s loss, I think it proves that ideology and maxims cannot fuel a campaign. Voters need to be reminded of tangible, real results. ‘'Abki Baar, 400 Paar” manifested both the ignorance of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters and the gutting irrational fear of “democratic backsliding”. This approach objectifies success, creating a sense of mystique and the foregone in the election. Such a fallacy both undermines the power of the Indian people and is simply not true. There was no intangible NaMo power, superseding rationality or interest. Complacency, on either side of the spectrum, frames doomsday or nirvana, neither of which exists. What we have is imperfect yet quite ideal: a coalition government undercut by the BJP’s efficiency yet checked by shared power coupled with a relatively empowered opposition.
Challenges to the status quo are not just localized to our elections. Keir Starmer's Labour Party achieved a historic victory in the United Kingdom (UK), ending 14 years of Conservative rule with a landslide win. This drastic shift represents the people’s dissatisfaction with a long term marked by “a world-beating housing crisis, increased levels of child poverty, record levels of food bank usage, (and) wage stagnation” among other issues. Perhaps a more jarring example of this was seen in South Africa in May with the ruling African National Congress (ANC) falling short of majority for the first time since apartheid. A stubbornly high unemployment rate, persistent economic inequalities; rampant corruption, and a lack of public service delivery all contributed to this dethroning. My point is that democracy is a self-healing mechanism. It listens and responds, but demands the same for us. Depersonalizing politics and value differences is an underrepresentation of what it means to be a citizen of this glorious system.
This idea is explored in Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’ as he pushes us to think of a higher order of freedom: not the absence of all restraint or absolute opposition to all institutions, but rather as the combination of autos (the self) and nomos (law) that is autonomy or self-legislation. This is to say that when we follow rules, norms, and laws that we enact via established instruments like a constitution, then we are effectively only obeying ourselves and are hence, free. Therefore, freedom and self-restraint are not opposed to each other but are actually two sides of the same coin. When we attack people we disagree with without any restraint, we are hardly behaving as autonomous or free agents.
The need to self-regulate goes hand in hand with our responsibility to seek nuance. We live in complicated societies, fragmented by intersectional and weaving identities. Too often than not we seek the blissful comfort of labels or characterizations to take stances. We often hear phrases like this election will be “non-secular” or we are now an ‘elections-only democracy’. I do not necessarily disagree with either statement, but our vernacular needs depth, not repetition. How can we define secularism, and use it scientifically? What does an elections-only democracy even mean? What distinguishes this election from the last?
An argument that has helped me reconcile some of these fissures comes from Bernard Crick’s ‘In Defense of Politics’. He emphasizes the consideration of politics as a cyclical and brash defence of democracy. It is necessary and in a country as diverse as ours is necessarily flawed. Our civic duty is to reconcile this with specific contexts and trend cycles. India’s development is a tricky, wicked problem but our politics self-corrects to prove neither of these to be defects. We inherit the world’s largest democracy on the infertile soil of the world’s most hierarchical society. So, I think the best and worst of times are fallacies of limited thinking as we continuously exist in both. We must not fall into simple, neat, and wrong solutions (HL Mencken’s warning), but thankfully we exist in a system that naturally combats this instinct.
The writer is the Co-Editor of the Opinions Department, The Edict (AY 24-25).
(Edited by Srijana Siri)
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