Review: To Kill a Democracy by Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane

The issues could not be more basic, or more important. “In Noida, a city adjoining Delhi, an eight-month-pregnant woman died in an ambulance in the course of a frantic, 13 hour search for a hospital bed. She was refused admission in eight hospitals… A Delhi grandee of the Congress party took to Twitter after his family’s harrowing ordeal trying to get his wife tested in the national capital: ‘Despite growing up on a hospital campus & knowing every medical professional of consequence, I had to move heaven and earth just to get her tested. Delhi’s health systems are broken.’ For lesser beings in lesser cities, it was infinitely more hellish.”

Starvation is up next. “On New Year’s Eve in 2018, Budhni Brijiyan, Sanchi’s mother-in-law, died after four days without food. Sanchi had run out of rice and neighbours weren’t able to come to the rescue with offers of extra rice. Budhni caught a cold, and her broken body couldn’t fight back”. On the Global Hunger Index 2020, India ranked 94th, along with Sudan, faring worse than countries such as Congo and Nepal and miles behind China and Brazil, which are among 17 countries that have low levels of hunger and hence go unranked. “The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that 190 million Indians – nearly three times the population of France – are undernourished”, the authors remind us.

There’s water scarcity: 600 million Indians, according to the government’s own reckoning, face high to extreme levels of water stress. The water they do get is often so polluted that it makes them very sick. The issue, like others, is given a human face through the case study of Nandlal Baiga in a place called Singrauli in Madhya Pradesh, part of an industrial belt on the state’s border with Uttar Pradesh that supplies 15 percent of India’s coal-based electricity – at great suffering to the area’s original inhabitants, who have lost their farm lands, and even clean water, in the bargain.

The authors connect these multiple social failures with democracy failures, manifest, for example, in the open criminalisation of its politics. “Crumbling social foundations and the Indian state’s failure to deliver basic services create conditions in which voters have little hope of accessing justice or public goods in a rule-based manner,” they say. “A candidate’s disregard for the law and the ability to get away with it is a sign of their ability to get things done… Politics becomes a protection racket. Election campaigns resemble street fights… Democratic failures and despotic rule flourish in the subsoil of a crumbling society”.

The final question is what awaits a degenerate democracy in the grip of a government intent on reshaping institutions with the help of big business friends, compliant courts, police violence and elections victories dominated by dark money, media manipulation and muscle power. The answer that the authors give is that, apart from the old ways of military coups and revolutions, there’s now a new possibility: despotism, a killing of democracy in the name of democracy – the sort of thing attempted with varying degrees of success by leaders such as Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Donald Trump in America.

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