Indian democracy is 75 years old now. The main framers of the constitutional democracy – Dr BR Ambedkar, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel – laid down an extraordinary foundation with a visionary written Constitution. Although it has faced some turbulent times, democracy in India has survived for more than seven decades.
During the Emergency, the forces outside the Congress fought collectively and ensured that the nation came out of the crisis in 1977. By 2024 and the 18th Lok Sabha election, a broad view outside the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ranks was that the Constitution was in danger. The Congress took the lead and galvanised the political forces outside the BJP/Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and made ‘protection of the Constitution’ an election plank. The INDI Alliance also went with that view. The BJP tactic of allowing Narendra Modi an unusual individualised manifesto – ‘Modi Ki Guarantee’ – reckoning that he would win a third time, was to give way to full-blown authoritarianism.
The very title of the BJP manifesto indicated that the party structure was completely compromised due to an individual’s authoritarianism. No self-respecting electoral party has allowed an individual leader to give such a title to its manifesto. It not only showed the collapse of political collective authority of a party of that size, but also the collapse of the moral authority of the RSS, which repeatedly claimed that it trains its leaders outside politics as moral, selfless nationalists. The dictatorial underpinnings of the manifesto’s title hardly remained undisclosed.
Modi did not show this kind of visible grip over the party and the RSS till 2019, when he was re-elected. The moral authority of the RSS was decimated by the end of Modi’s second term. This became apparent not just by the ‘Modi Ki Guarantee’ title for the manifesto but also when Modi started proclaiming that he was not biological but a person sent by Paramatma “with a purpose”.
The INDIA bloc carried out a very risky election campaign, when the Congress party’s bank accounts were attached and alliance chief ministers, who alone could lead their regional party campaigns, were jailed. Yet INDIA checkmated the individual guarantee drive – they stopped Modi’s (not so much the BJP as a party) numbers at 240. This election also gave new hope to all the social categories that come under the reservation bracket. The Congress campaign declared that INDIA would not only protect reservation but also stop Modi’s privatisation plans. Additionally, it also promised a caste census.
If Modi had gotten 400 seats, we do not know what would have happened to the nation, democracy, and our Constitution.
Three terms for any person in the prime ministerial position with a clear majority could lead to authoritarianism. During Nehru’s time itself, the Congress should have brought in a limit of two terms. The Indo-China war in 1962 mellowed Nehru, though he had become authoritarian by then. However, midway through his third term he died. Also, there were serious challenges to him within the party.
Indira Gandhi, in her second term, imposed emergency, but the 1977 election saved the nation. She was brutally shot dead during her third term.
But in the case of Modi, the RSS-trained-BJP ensured that there was no challenger to him in the party during his tenure as PM. His status became like the ‘king who can do no wrong’. For 10 years the nation witnessed how anything that Modi said and did was projected by the RSS/BJP combine as right. The risk to the Constitution came from the Caesar-type authority wielded by Modi.
Like Nehru in 1962, Modi went into his third term with a tendency of authoritarianism. If the RSS-guided-BJP was a more moral party than the Congress, it should have suggested a two-term norm and introduced a constitutional amendment to that effect. The opposition would have no option but to support such a principled stand. But the RSS did not show any such principled moral authority after Modi became the PM.
If such a norm were also applied to the chief minister position, it would not be possible for individuals such as Naveen Patnaik or Nitish Kumar to rule for decades. In such a scenario, competing leadership would emerge from different families and communities even in regional parties. The party president position is a different issue. One may continue for a lifetime in that position. But PM and CM positions are constitutional governing positions. The entire state apparatus comes under their control. It could slowly breed authoritarianism, which is likely to lead to dictatorship and then to dismantling of the Constitution itself.
The American political system, for example, safeguarded its constitution by limiting the President to two terms (4+4 years). In fact, the first president, George Washington, himself refused to remain in office for more than two terms. Unlike Nehru, Nelson Mandela refused to work for more than one five-year term as the South African president. Mexico limits its president to just one term of six years. This norm recently sent a very popular president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, out of office after one term, after which Claudia Sheinbaum from the same party became the president-elect.
Modi’s intent to hold political power single-handedly became clear after he was re-elected in 2014 with a comfortable majority by reducing the Congress to just 40 seats. The people around him started talking about changing the Indian democracy into a presidential system. Just before his third term, he was able to get the party to adopt ‘Modi Ki Guarantee’ and ‘Ab ki baar 400 par’. Some people in his party started talking about changing the Constitution once they get 400 seats.
It is not as if no party had got 400 seats earlier. The Congress got 404 in 1984. But there was no talk of changing the Constitution or about the presidential system when a young leader like Rajiv Gandhi was in power. But now we have a leader like Modi, groomed by the RSS, who after winning just his first term was imagining becoming a powerful leader like the American president, which also requires dismantling the Constitution.
In my view, this was not just Modi’s fault, but the RSS’ inner aspiration to be a perpetual ruler. RSS as an organisation runs under one man’s command. If the same command structure is forced on the nation, our Constitution goes for a toss. That innate desire of the BJP’s mother organisation for an authoritarian structure is expressed by the persons it trained when one of them becomes an unchallenged leader.
But the nation is not an RSS-like organisation. It involves the life, liberty, and future of 1.4 billion people.
So if the RSS is really a responsible nation-building organisation, it should moot a two-term norm for Prime Ministers, even if the party gets elected for unlimited terms with a majority of its own.
If the RSS/BJP combine does not take that initiative, the INDI Alliance must put forth the idea to protect the present Constitution from impending danger from individual leaders pushing themselves and destroying the very fabric of our democracy.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist, and author. His latest book is The Clash of Cultures—Productive Masses Vs Hindutva-Mullah Conflicting Ethics.
Views expressed are the author’s own.