A little over a month ago, in one of those groups where very smart people meet to discuss serious things with unserious humour, someone asked a question that has refused to leave me since:
Is democracy possible in India at all?
Now, this is the kind of question that can only be asked by people who believe in thinking for its own sake, who have lived long enough with history and irony to know that the two often rhyme. And, as usual, because I cannot leave any such provocation unanswered, I began to respond. Not with a line or two (ah, no, I don’t do ‘a line or two’, like, ever), but with a series (flood?) of voice notes, maybe two dozen by the end of the day.
Those who know me know the specific genre: part history lesson, part philosophical wandering, part ideological rant, and, somewhere in the ruins, part hope, a stubborn belief that humanity, or at least our society, might still be capable of better. The group, patient and amused, listened through all of it and then said, “You really ought to write this down.” I agreed, of course, and then promptly didn’t.
Until now.
Because it is indeed an interesting question, one we can all agree is worth asking, even if we’ll never agree on the answer. My own answer, as I said then, was,
Both, yes… and no.
Yes, democracy is possible in India.
No, it hasn’t quite arrived.
The strange thing is that I already know what I want to say in each part, not because I’ve written them out yet, but because, in retrospect, that chaotic mess of voice notes does seemingly follow some sort of pattern, like a hidden architecture. And that is the structure I am planning to follow now.
So this is how the series will unfold, reconstructed from the debris of those notes:
Part I – The Soil of Democracy
How democracy takes root: not as a gift from rulers, but as the outcome of centuries of struggle, prosperity, and moral levelling. Why the West, after wars, renaissances, reformations, and revolutions, finally produced the idea of equality from the compost of its own history.
Part II – The Fault in Our Foundations
Why India never underwent that slow flattening. How caste, hierarchy, and colonial mediation kept us from the moral imagination of equality. And how our intellectual and religious traditions have both preserved wisdom and prevented rebellion.
Part III – The Sacred Text and the Unready People
Why, despite all this, democracy endures here, not because we are democratic, but because we have come to treat the Constitution, and Ambedkar’s authorship of it, as sacred. How that faith, even if unexamined, might be the one thing standing between us and authoritarian collapse.
So that’s the plan. I will write when I can, as clearly as I can, and as honestly as I can. I don’t promise answers, only reflections. And if, at the end of it all, we are left not with certainty but with a better quality of doubt, then perhaps that itself will be a small democratic act.
