‘Curing diseased democracy’: Why are voters attracted to political outsiders?

Political scientist Srirupa Roy’s incisive book The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism shows how India’s experience from the Emergency up to the emergence of leaders like Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal can explain why the world has become enamoured with self-proclaimed outsiders who wish to “cure” democracy. Her work helps explain the success of rising political figures like Vijay and his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam.

If populism is a “thin-centered ideology” or worldview of political and social life as a Manichean moral combat between a unitary and pure people and a dissolute and corrupt elite/system, then we need to understand how it both converges and conflicts with other, existing and older, ideas of the people: the central subject of modern political thought and practice.

If we take such an approach, two things quickly become evident. First, an investigation of populism’s backstory that goes beyond the immediate moment of electoral victories by distinctive new campaigns of angry politics in the name of a newly assertive political subject, “the people,” leads us to plenty of banal, bureaucratic-institutional processes and influences as well that have also fueled populism’s rise. In other words, it is not just an overtly emotional and exceptional politics of anger that produces the people/elite binary, and foments the idea of anti-establishment insurgency that is the distinctive hallmark of populism.

Historically patterned rhythms and routines of democratic politics; institutions that are crucial to democratic governance; events that have been widely hailed as advancing the cause of democracy; and things considered to be crucial for democratic well-being have all had a role to play in populism’s rise and salience.

Second, a closer examination of the broader historical and political context of populism reveals that a particular idea about democratic change fuels such a politics. If, instead of proceeding from the assumption that populism is sui generis, we ask where it comes from or what it comes out of, then we see that populism is a project of democratic reform fueled by an imagination of democracy’s “repairable lapses.”

The core of populist political appeal is the call to cure, revive, renew, or restore a presently flawed or diseased democracy. I term this broader political context and project curative democracy. I contend that contemporary populism both in India, the specific geographical location of my study, and in several other parts of the world is the latest manifestation of an older and ongoing politics of curative democracy that took root in the 1970s through the first half of the 1980s (the “Long 1970s”).

By the late 1960s, the steady “massification” or social expansion of electoral democracy strained political institutions with the mounting pressure of social claims, and placed the Congress system of managed negotiation in crisis. The leadership struggles that seized the Congress party after the death of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1964 also played their part.

Shortly after Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, became the party leader and the third prime minister of India, the Congress party split into two rival partisan formations in 1969, the Congress (Organisation) and the Congress (Requisitionists), the latter headed by Indira Gandhi. As the sixties came to a close, the flexible big-tent system of managing differences within a single capacious party organization that had multiple power centers gave way to narrow and centralized party formations dominated by a single leader, and heightened levels of interpartisan conflict.

The end of the 1960s and early 1970s in India saw a new language of political mobilisation emerge. Breaking from the prevailing Congress system’s logic of locally mediated and socially segmented appeals, the incumbent political regime of Indira Gandhi addressed an amorphous constituency of the people. In the new economic populist imaginary, individual and civil rights were cast as an obstacle to the realisation of popular sovereignty. By the mid-1970s, the devaluation of individual rights and freedoms took the very material form of the emergency declaration that suspended fundamental rights of individual citizens in the name of realizing order, security, and economic progress.

The term curative democracy refers to the complex of ideas, institutional interventions, and policy decisions that have the explicit aim of fixing and curing – hence curative – an existing system of political democracy. Together, these entrench new legitimisation vocabularies in political and public cultural arenas where actions in the name of curing democracy garner sanction and approval. But this is not only about normative innovations. There are material effects as well, for instance when laws on electoral reform and freedom of information that aim to end and prevent political corruption impact the ability to get a ration card that will grant access to subsidised food.

The curative democratic complex has several distinguishing features. First, it offers a diagnosis of disease and cure in which the democratic political system is approached as a discrete entity that can both be stricken by disease and targeted by specific kinds of remedial interventions. There is, moreover, a critical urgency to the diagnosis. This is the second distinguishing feature of curative democracy. The call to cure democracy is generally framed as a call to immediate action, and the health of democracy is invariably diagnosed as critically impaired, democracy on life support, as it were.

The third notable feature of the curative democratic complex has to do with the nature of the just-in-time remedial actions that it proposes, and the identity of the curative agent who is authorized to undertake them. Only the interventions of a political outsider who has nothing to do with the messy intrigues of electoral politics and the hunger for power that it breeds can cure democracy, it is held. Democracy’s external doctors can be of several different kinds. As the following chapters show, curative democracy projects in India have involved interventions by non-state institutions such as the media, state agencies such as the judiciary, and parastatal or quasi-governmental autonomous ombuds institutions. On other occasions, curative agency has been invested in individuals invested with superior intellectual-technical, entrepreneurial, moral, religious, or even magical/superhuman powers. Common to all of these varied expressions of institutional and individual curative agency is the assumption of political exteriority that places democratic sovereignty and the true power and authentic interests of the people outside the domain of electoral politics.

Unlike the ideals of political transcendence and renunciation that have long informed the “saintly idioms” of South Asian political cultures, the outsider norm of curative democracy projects in fact demands a renewed and intensified engagement with politics. Curative democracy is about going outside electoral politics in order to cure it. Political transformation is a central aim: the mission is to repair and restore rather than overturn or escape the existing political system. It is in relation to this restorative and politically engaged impulse of curative democracy that its fourth significant feature gains meaning, namely the emphasis on extra-electoral forms and practices of representation.

This is an edited excerpt where the academic notes and references have been removed. Excerpted with permission from Navayana.