First, a no-confidence motion against the Lok Sabha Speaker and then a notice for impeaching the Chief Election Commissioner. Two back-to-back initiatives by the parliamentary Opposition need to be seen in the larger context of the health of democracy rather than with mere exasperation at the Opposition.
While incumbents are identified as the guilty, the issue needs to be situated as one that involves citizens’ trust in the institutions these incumbents run and the offices they hold. In this sense, both initiatives by the Opposition draw attention to a more serious condition: The inability of institutions to transcend personalities and incumbents; the inability of office-holders to imagine themselves as protectors of institutional boundaries beyond immediate political considerations; the unwillingness of rulers to establish a working relationship with the Opposition; and consequently, a worrying condition of a trust deficit that will have a long-term effect.
The issue is not merely about the present incumbents — they are far too small compared to the larger issue at stake. Democracies are predicated on a complex cusp of trust and suspicion. Citizens and watchdog institutions are supposed to hold all power-holders in healthy suspicion: You have power, and so I shall always suspect you lest you become too powerful or arbitrary. At the same time, this architecture of suspicion can work only on the presupposition that citizens trust institutions: I trust that institutions will function appropriately under pressure of suspicion and scrutiny.
Trust means that there is a generalised or diffuse belief that a) power-holders will exercise power with restraint, b) power will be exercised in an answerable manner and c) the intent in exercise of power is generally free of mala fide. In this sense, trust constitutes the basis of successful democratic politics — where contestation and competition are seen as natural and, in particular, the neutrality of umpire institutions is supposed to be the protection for such contestation. When trust in institutions dwindles, the basis of democratic politics can easily be undermined — in other words, democracy falters.
Therefore, the current issue is about institutions more generally. The investigating agencies have already earned disrepute for being responsible for the miscarriage of institutional autonomy. Constitutional watchdogs are underperforming. The many allegations of judicial abdication coupled with the judiciary’s touchy response to certain admittedly oversimplified criticisms are perhaps symptomatic of the crisis of trust. The Court is aware that there is a trust deficit and also aware that trust is central to its constitutional prestige. Thus, the crisis of trust permeates all institutions. Almost every single institution is allegedly being hollowed out or captured so blatantly that it is unable to maintain even a fig leaf of neutrality and autonomy.
A couple of decades ago, a study, “State of Democracy in South Asia”, had suggested that low trust is more often associated with institutions that have a high frequency of direct interface with citizens. Today, in the absence of reliable data about the current moment, we choose to be oblivious to the far-reaching implications of the trust deficit. Instead, commentary and analyses are content to blame the Opposition for maligning institutions by questioning autonomy and performance. There have also been easy arguments that by questioning institutions through media, public trust in institutions declines. The former criticism presupposes an Opposition that doesn’t oppose while the latter believes that all dissemination of information has to be only conformist.
Once we have got rid of this devotional delusion that everyone with a different voice is drowning the country in an abyss, we are left with taking a hard look at how the ruling dispensation has addressed issues of its dominance, exercise of power and above all, the issue of working within the institutional confines of constitutional democracy.
Right through its three electoral victories, the BJP’s approach to the exercise of power has been that of supreme arrogance — that it is the sole repository of national interest. For the first victory, this initially seemed to be an electoral posture designed to win the election but soon it was evident that Congress-mukt Bharat was not an electoral gimmick but an article of deep belief. This also led to the misreading of the electoral outcomes — that victory is carte blanche, a popular mandate to carve out a new political culture. This approach easily tempts the ruling dispensation to imagine all previously existing institutions as baggage and trust in institutions as an impediment to reshaping politics.
Finally, the ruling party has consistently attempted to convert the state apparatus into a weapon of complete control, aiming to conflate the party with society at large — expecting to occupy the entire social sphere. In this scheme of things, there is no society, no public opinion, no scholarship, outside the universe supported by and supportive of the ruling establishment. These characteristics not only produce distrust between government and Opposition, they in fact welcome the trust deficit.
The puzzle of trust deficit becomes clearer when we realise that under the above characteristics, we are witnessing a decade-long suspension of disbelief. It is true that headline management and a sustained politics of narrative-building have been instrumental in snatching the faculty of critical examination away from citizens. And yet, it is also true that social scientists, including this writer, have not been able to adequately explain this long bout of collective suspension of disbelief.
But that failure does not take away from us the impending crisis of trust. The current deficit of trust can be understood only if we comprehend, as I have been arguing, that through the three features — delegitimising the Opposition, misreading electoral outcomes as a mandate for regime change and occupation of the entire social sphere by the ruling establishment — we are witnessing a regime change. It requires that pre-existing institutions be made irrelevant and the idea of truncated democracy be superimposed. When a regime chooses to be founded on hate among citizens and suspicion about the Opposition, institutional trust is a casualty that nobody mourns.
The writer, based in Pune, taught Political Science
