By Amitabh Ranjan
The past few days, as we transitioned from 2025 to 2026, have not been pleasant. Not that the rest of the year gone by was particularly good. What are fresh on our minds are the recent incidents like the violence and vandalism during Christmas celebrations across the country even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended two Christmas events; the killing of Anjel Chakma, a youth from Tripura, who was holidaying in Dehradun, by rowdy elements who called him and his brother ‘Chinese’ and ‘chinki’ before fatally stabbing him; and the deaths due to contaminated water in India’s officially cleanest city Indore.
Then there are episodes like the High Court suspending the life term of rape convict former BJP legislator Kuldeep Sengar before some damage control, at least for the time being, was done by the apex court by putting the order on hold; the Ankita Bhandari case that is back in headlines for alleged police-politics nexus; and the denial of bail to Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam who have been languishing in jail for the past five years without even a trial, among others. These prick our conscience. And they should, for these are some of the more recent episodes that underline the symptoms of dilapidating democratic pillars—legislative, executive, judiciary, and the media.
The contents of Prem Shankar Jha’s latest book The Dismantling of India’s Democracy: 1947 to 2025 have an uncanny resonance with the situation that abounds in the country. As you go through the pages, it would read like a requiem for democracy but in essence it is a painstaking effort to make readers aware about what our Constitution-makers had started with and what we have come to.
Before starting to analyse the contemporary in minute details, reflecting how democracy is being dismantled brick-by-brick, Jha throws light at the very beginning when India chalked out its democratic journey few believed was possible. For a country that was left in pretty bad shape by its colonial masters, in utter poverty and a pathetically low literacy level, the first electoral exercise through universal suffrage was itself way ahead of its time. A seemingly impossible task was remarkably achieved.
So, where and when did India take the wrong road? It is with this question, in fact, that the fourth of the 16 chapters comprising the book begins. Before this, however, the author enlightens the reader about the evolution of representative democracy as the most acceptable form of governance. He also writes about India’s unique achievement in the context by creating a nation by accepting ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious diversities as opposed to enforced cultural homogeneity of European nation-building. The third offers an overview of popular disenchantment with democracy when constitutionally-formed governments failed to provide its citizens three most basic requirements of good governance—economic security, the rule of law, and speedy and affordable justice.
Jha’s answer to his own question is: “at the very start”. According to him, those who drafted the Constitution were of the firm belief that the country already had democracy by virtue of the Government of India Act, 1935, and what was needed was just widening of the electorate to universal franchise. As a clue, he says the ‘A Tryst With Destiny’ speech of Jawaharlal Nehru, still read with awe and admiration, did not once mention the word ‘democracy’. This was not because he was not a democrat, but because he had unquestioning faith in it.
This, Jha says, was responsible for two crucial omissions in the Constitution. First, the absence of any provision of financing the functioning of the political system and second, the failure to create any legal means by which the people could hold the administration, as distinct from political leaders, accountable for its mistakes.
The first oversight of not providing for the financing of the political system could have been set right by a constitutional amendment later. Instead, Indira Gandhi cut off the only legitimate means of funds for political parties—corporate donations—three years after the Congress came close to losing elections in 1967. This was done with the ulterior motive of starving her political rivals. In the next more than half a century of Indian politics, this meant that the country evolved from a popular to a predatory clientelist democracy that thrives on anonymous moneybags and a politics-crime quid pro quo much before 2014 when Narendra Modi came to power at the Centre.
There have been scores of books written by renowned writers on the subject of decay of democracy in India. Jha’s latest offering stands out for its academic insight, journalistic rigour and raw courage. Particularly gripping are the chapters which describe in details Godhra and its aftermath which will make the reader not only immensely worried, but very angry too.
It is exactly for this that the book makes a compelling read. And also because we must realise that the ‘We’ of the Preamble is in an imminent danger of being replaced by ‘I’.
The writer is a former journalist who teaches at Patna Women’s College
The Dismantling of India’s Democracy: 1947 to 2025
Prem Shankar Jha
Speaking Tiger Books
Pp 373, Rs 599
