To “flirt with something” is defined in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary as “to take risks or not worry about a dangerous situation that may happen.” Authoritarianism as a noun could be thought of as the idea of “believing that people should obey authority and rules, even when these are unfair, and even if it means that they lose their personal freedom.”
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These respective definitions of these two words caused upset on either side of the recently concluded 2024 U.S. Presidential election. Had I been born in India and been upset by an election or the words or the lack of words or action of a particular political leader, I could have discussed it or listened to what an excellent guru might have had to say about it. At the very least, I thought maybe if I could talk to an expert. If not talk to an expert, I could at least read a book by an expert or a specialist that might help me feel more calm and less worried.
If I could become detached and view what was happening or what I might fear most happening through the lens of a different culture that was and still is a democracy, I might feel a tiny bit better about these things.
At a New York City literary festival held in upper Manhattan, I discovered a book called Sixteen Stormy Days written by Tripurdaman Singh. Reading or rather studying it, I felt as though I’d inadvertently enrolled in a mandatory India History class taught by Professor Singh at UCLA. (For the record, Tripurdaman Singh is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Commonweath Studies at the University of London, UK.)
There is a sentence in the latter part of this book that jumped out at me: “India has often been said to be flirting with authoritarianism.” And I thought, well maybe that seems to have been what bothered Democrats most about Republicans and conversely bothered Republicans most about Democrats. During this most bitterly contested election campaign, it seemed to be all about whether it was Biden/Harris or Trump who was, had been or would be flirting with authoritarianism.
Sixteen Stormy Days concerns Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s moving the Constitution (First Amendment) Act, before India’s Parliament on May 10th, and the Act becoming part of India’s Constitution on June 18th, 1951. It stated that freedom of speech and expression could be limited for reasons of “security of the state,” “public order,” “decency and morality,” “contempt of court,” “defamation,” or “incitement to an offence,” or when free speech might harm national security or social or societal harmony.
Nehru’s political party was the Indian National Congress, or the Congress Party whose political agenda included and still includes the achievement of social equality, freedom, secularism and equal opportunity much of which is similar to the political platform of the present-day Democratic Party.
For example, in 1950, there was a Hindu nationalist weekly news magazine named the Organizer that criticized Nehru and his policies so that on March 2nd, the chief commissioner of the Central Press Advisory Committee in Delhi, issued a ‘pre-censorship order’ indicating Organizer content would need governmental approval before being published.
Tripurdaman Singh quotes the editor of the Organizer: “To threaten the liberty of the press for the sole offence of non-conformity to official view in each and every matter, may be a handy tool for tyrants but [is] a crippling curtailment of civil liberties in a free democracy. . .”
By contrast, a huge majority of the U.S. legacy press and a majority of mass media supported the Democratic Party agenda and viewpoint. But the Biden/Harris administration apparently did not appreciate criticism or contrary viewpoints expressed on social media platforms such as X (the former Twitter) or Facebook and are said to have leaned on social media technical experts to program algorithms to sharply reduce viewing accessibility to online contrary content viewpoint. To some Republicans, this amounted to the Democrats flirting with Authoritarianism.
Another similarity can be seen in the area of Affirmative Action. In India, Affirmative Action began as early as 1921, when the government in Madras province issued its first Communal General Order. This consisted of setting up “reservations in government departments and educational institutions to ‘prevent the over representation of students belonging to a particular community.’”
However, on July 21, 1950, three judges of the Madras High Court ruled that under the first Communal General Order, “grounds of religion, race and caste could not be the basis of admissions . . .” and that the Order violated the Indian Constitution because it “constituted a form of discrimination.”
On June 29th, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that now prohibits the further use of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. The basis for its prohibition is that “it violated the principle of equal protection by separating (college or university) applicants into two distinct groups based on race.”
“This is a devastating blow for racial justice and equality, especially as barriers to higher education become more restrictive. We condemn the Supreme Court’s decision to end these affirmative action policies and make it more difficult for Americans to access higher education,” wrote Democratic National Committee Chair Jamie Harrison.
In a way, Harrison was agreeing with Nehru’s Congress Party assertion that social equality and equal opportunity for all was being blocked by High Court quibbles over the constitutionality of particular political college and university admission policies. And since Trump is conservative, Democrats could see him as flirting with Authoritarianism by appointing Conservative judges to the Supreme Court whose decisions (they believed) would always stand in the way of social equality and equal opportunity. And the Biden/Harris administration apparently further believes that anyone who voted for Trump totally favors America never achieving national social equality and equal opportunity.
Trump made a statement during his campaign that some liberal Democratic women considered authoritarian; “whether the women like it or not,” that he would “protect” them. However, Harris, at one point in her campaign, said, “my values haven’t changed.” To some Republicans, her values, as in her support of elimination of private health insurance, decriminalizing illegal border crossings and banning the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035 seemed authoritarian.
Tripurdaman Singh mentions how a close colleague of Nehru’s believed that India’s first prime minister introduced the First Amendment Act to Parliament because he “was irked by constitutional restraints and willing to disregard them in pursuit of his political goals.” Either Trump or Harris could be accused of ignoring the same guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution in order for them achieve their political goals.
It could be said that any authoritarianism enabled by the Indian Parliament’s adoption of Nehru’s First Amendment, continued in India way after 1950 with Indira Gandhi’s Emergency suspension of civil liberties that went into effect June 25, 1975, and wasn’t lifted until March 21, 1977. It’s estimated that over 100,000 political, press and individual opposition dissenters were put in jail.
This contrasts with the aftermath of the January 6th Democratic labelled Capital insurrection when over 1,400 rioters were charged with federal crimes with over 900 convicted and many given what Republicans described as politically motivated punitive and wholly retributive lengthy jail sentences.
To answer my question posted at the beginning of this post, one could say that both Trump and Biden/Harris and have flirted with Authoritarianism in the past and might, given the opportunity, do so in the now or not-too-distant future.
However, for me, the best part of Tripurdaman Singh’s book is that it reveals that despite every authoritarianist action that happened in India from 1950 until today, India just keeps on going and the absolute worst part of what everyone feared, hasn’t happened. I just hope at this time of Thanksgiving that the same holds true for America no matter how polarized and divided we have been and may still be, going forward.
If you like this post or India, you may like my imaginary trip to India book, "Myself Lost."
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