The World Bears
Witness to its Destructive Outcomes
Sixty-eight years ago on August 6, American planes dropped
“atom bombs” on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This reprehensible act 0f the Harry S Truman
administration is worth examining. Apart from the moral and humanitarian
dissent against nuclear weapons, there also were strategic differences. Allen
Dulles, who was CIA chief at the time, admitted in a candid television
interview years later that he knew the Japanese wanted to surrender and had
informed the administration. There were other influential voices, including one
Gen Dwight D Eisenhower, ranged against the bombings. President Truman and his advisers ignored
them.
Truman’s motives were duplicitous: one, avenge Pearl Harbor
and two, get a head start on the Soviet Union in the incipient arms race. Besides,
the Democrats had been in office since 1933, having been elected for three
successive terms under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So it was easy for Truman, who was sworn in
after FDR’s death in April 1945, to ride roughshod over dissenting voices.
The allusion to this controversial decision is by way of
drawing attention to a political phenomenon that is sweeping emergent democracies
in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Russia, in Belarus; also in established democracies
like Turkey and Hungary: that democracy is a winner-take-all system in which
the majority can assert power without any concern for dissenters.
Majoritarian politics has prevailed in most Western democracies.
Concepts like public order and national security have often triumphed over
notions of privacy and human rights. We’ve seen the case of the US National
Security Agency snooping on citizens; Swiss authorities confining asylum
seekers to mountainside bunkers and restricting their movement.
Challenges to the majority principle first arose in the
United States and the United Kingdom, where equal rights, racial discrimination
and nuclear disarmament became central political issues, on which
elections were won and lost. In both countries though, conservative leaders emerged
to revive the Majoritarian agenda: in Britain, Margaret Thatcher and in the US,
Ronald Reagan succeeded in restoring national security and free-market economics
as the focus of public policy, steamrollering “bleeding heart liberals.”
In India, too, prevalent political winds are driving policy
in the Majoritarian direction. Hindu
nationalists want to define India as a Hindu nation. On the other hand, India’s
business barons want a Thatcher-Reagan style focus on business-friendly
government policies. Both support a Majoritarian
order, in which policies are made without concern for alternative views.
Such hard-line thinking, notable for its deaf-blind approach
to alternative streams of thought, can lead to serious breaches of national
security. Witness the strife on the streets of Istanbul, Cairo and elsewhere.
It happens also in the mature democracies of the West, though a strong and effective security regime there simply
overwhelms protest.
Back in India, the current government seems to be aware of
the ascent of Majoritarian forces. Given an inept security apparatus, it has allowed
dissent full play. For that, it has been lambasted as being paralyzed, without
vision, corrupt and inept. A lot of the criticism is noise; fact is, the ruling
dispensation has been able to complete nearly two full terms and notch up some
significant policy gains.
Negotiation and the art of compromise could help govern this
diverse milieu of warring interests and rising aspirations. However, in India, as
elsewhere in the world, intolerance is on the rise and people, bureaucrats and
politicians articulate extreme positions on every subject from economic policy
to foreign affairs, from urban governance to rural development.
One group of people feels the government’s policies in aid
of the poor are profligate, pointing to “leakages.” Another group feels the
government is not doing enough to help the poor; a third lot feel the government’s
policies are a drag on the economy. This clash of perspectives has fueled
public debate in India since Independence. Today, this is compounded by an
immature opposition party that disrupts Parliament; a shrill media with
opinionated and crusading journalists, obstructionist bureaucrats and a cynical
citizenry.
The result is a pervasive sense of disaffection in which
rational and mature opinions have been marginalized; in their place is a
general disenchantment with politics and its practitioners. This sort of opting
out has created space for champions of Majoritarian politics. They offer
visions of decisive leadership with a sub textual rant against the “vermin,”
religious, ethnic and ideological opponents.
Kemal Ataturk, the first president of Turkey, led the
nationalist movement after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. He is credited with turning
his Muslim majority country into a modern, secular democracy following the
First World War. India had a parallel in Jawaharlal Nehru, who did something
similar after the Second World War.
Ataturk’s Turkey and Nehru’s India are both under challenge today by advocates
of Majoritarian politics.
An edited version of this article appeared in The Economic Times, August 17, 2013.
