By Dr JP Singh
As a witness, I state what I have seen unfold in the world and in India over the last two hundred years. Democracy, as it is imagined, is an ideal—a utopia not easily attainable except among a fully self-aware and spiritually awakened people—a people unwilling to be manipulated, a people who have mastery over their baser dispositions, and who are prepared to give to others more than what they would keep for themselves. Only a people free from fear, jealousy, anger, hatred, and greed can produce ideal leaders like Sai Baba of Shirdi, Mahatma Gandhi, and Gautama Buddha—souls who rise from amidst the masses and help steer the world towards an ideal order where nationalism means humanism, justice, and compassion, and where religion signifies righteousness, public service, and sacrifice. Only then can democracy truly find its home.
Who are politicians, after all, but mercenaries of democracies—men expected to maintain hold not merely over the hearts and nerves of the people, but also over their expectations, aspirations, fears, and apprehensions, much like the ancient vaidya who never loosened his fingers from the pulse of the patient.
Before the dawn of democracy in India after 1857, and before the actual establishment of the Indian National Congress in 1885, the British sought to create political “weathercocks” who, much like later ideological cadres, would keep the colonial government informed of the heartbeat and undercurrents of the Indian populace. The purpose was simple—before any unexpected eruption or insurrection could arise, it might be contained in advance, either through arrests, exile of leaders who could spearhead rebellion, or through selective piecemeal reforms granted as a safety valve and confidence-building measure.
Democracy was rarely intended to function purely as “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” except insofar as it safeguarded the interests of those at the helm and the political and economic powers they protected.
It was not long after either the French Revolution, or the American Revolution which preceded it, that power—in the name of the “rights of the people”—was wrested from ecclesiastical, feudal, and monarchy-supporting classes and gradually transferred to the enterprising mercantile class born of the post-Renaissance economic revolution. Geographical exploration, scientific innovation, expanding trade routes, and control over the means of production gave this class extraordinary power.
Yet, as millions displaced from their traditional livelihoods crowded into the slums and ghettos of emerging industrial towns seeking employment as proletarians, new forms of poverty, exploitation, and oppression emerged. The Industrial Revolution thus produced not merely wealth, but also a new class of leaders among the impoverished masses—leaders required to act as shields for an increasingly naked and profit-driven capitalist order.
This new order possessed the capacity to perpetuate a silent genocide: millions losing age-old self-sufficiency derived from craft, trade, and agriculture without battle, without proclamation, and often without historical record. For when death comes through hunger, disease, displacement, or despair rather than through direct violence, it escapes the legal categories of homicide or murder. Thus accountability disappears, while entire civilizations quietly erode beneath the machinery of economic progress.
In order to sustain democracies in these emerging nations, nationalism arose as a new mask after religion had long served to anesthetize the masses into mistaking myth for reality. The factories of the new age obliterated distinctions between the organic human being and the inorganic raw material fed into the guns of production. Nationalism became the new wine served in the bottle once occupied by God, Pope, and organized religion.
Intellectuals struggled to explain these contradictions embedded within democratic ideology. Politically, equality was proclaimed; economically, glaring disparities deepened. If power truly belonged to the majority through the vote, how could such duplicity and dissimulation persist?
Hence, in the nineteenth century arose the ideas of economic justice, socialism, and proletarian struggle—movements that challenged nationalism itself and demanded control over the means of production. Faced with such pressures, democratic States gradually introduced welfare systems and socialism in order to contain resistance and discontent growing among the populace. Franchise, once restricted to the wealthy and denied even to women until the early twentieth century, was slowly expanded.
In India, as elsewhere, politicians became little more than mercenaries of the system—zookeepers managing peoples of differing dispositions, castes, classes, and predilections under the rhetoric of sovereignty and self-government. Under colonial rule, India’s natural resources, flora, fauna, and labour mattered far more to the Empire than Indians as human beings. Thus, after 1885, political intermediaries were cultivated through manipulation, stealth, and calculated social engineering.
“The British keenly exploited India’s inner divisions: the pride and prejudices of the Western-educated elite, the orientalist, and the half-educated pseudo-orientalist alike—each of whom, in their own distinctive hue, texture, and temperament, formed their own political configuration and style.”
Ancient caste antagonisms were aggravated, while religious tensions were fanned, especially after the Partition of Bengal. Though the partition was annulled in 1911, the fire itself was never extinguished. The pan may have been removed from the burner, but the flame beneath it remained alive through organizations like the All-India Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha. Like the departing villain in old Hindi cinema, colonialism often left behind only ashes and flames.
In order to survive by popular mandate, politicians became dependent upon vote banks and constituencies, while the real functioning of the State increasingly remained tied to those who controlled finance and production. Wealthy interests granted politicians legitimacy and protection, while politicians, in turn, safeguarded those interests through elected governments.
For roughly the first two decades after Indian independence in 1947, socialism and welfare policies provided significant concessions to the people. Yet, even these indirectly benefited industrial and commercial classes by educating and training the technical and managerial workforce required for expanding enterprises.
But with the growth of capitalism, socialist and left-leaning politicians themselves gradually shifted rightward. This became evident when even staunch leftists in states like Kerala and West Bengal softened economically, while socialist leaders of the Lohia tradition, such as George Fernandes, eventually aligned themselves with right-leaning governments they had opposed throughout much of their lives.
For the essential character of the modern State anywhere in the world remains largely constant: the management of people in whose name governments rule.
If the economic cake of a vast nation were distributed with complete equity, little would remain for private accumulation, corporations, or global capital—entities that often recognize no religion higher than profit and mammon. Hence, politicians who could capitalize even upon the smallest divisions of tribe, caste, religion, and identity became increasingly valuable. With the rise of leaders like Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad Yadav, countervailing forces rooted in religion and nationalism also grew stronger to overshadow competing social coalitions.
Thus, democracy increasingly became a condition in which a divided people—locked in perpetual competition, conflict, and latent civil war—enabled both capitalism and political coalitions to coexist comfortably. Justice, in such systems, ceased to arrive as an inherent right and instead came as concession: mediated through politicians, corporations, business houses, and financial interests.
When nationalism and religion become the principal instruments through which governments rule, power granted by the people gradually transforms into something akin to divine sanction. In such a condition, social and economic equality retreat into the background, and what citizens receive is no longer experienced as a right earned through democratic power, but as benevolence granted by rulers.
In a truly healthy democracy—perhaps only a utopia in the books of philosophy and history—people earn justice through living power on the streets and in public consciousness, not merely through dead votes cast once into a ballot box before an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent State.
Otherwise, before the machinery of the modern State, man’s stature is reduced to that of a buzzing fly, a restless bee, or the distant trumpet of the last surviving elephant stranded at the edge of the world—without any real voice or power to transform life upon earth as truly desired by the Creator, in whose name even the democratic constitutions of the world’s greatest democracies continue to vow.
Unless the only true ethical and moral values are sustained, internalized, and reflected as the sole Dharma—from dhṛdhātu, meaning “that which man holds within himself” as Dharma—no global conscience of humanity can ever truly arise.
—The writer is retired Associate Professor of History, Delhi University
The post Democracy and the Mercenaries of Power: A Two-Century Inquiry into the Modern State appeared first on India Legal.