Britain’s democracy in action as one prime minister smoothly and swiftly gave way to another this week was a reminder that India’s government is personal autocracy camouflaged in democratic attire. Indian TV commentators who babble boastfully about 900 million voters proving India to be the world’s biggest democracy don’t understand why Sajid Javid, the son of a Pakistan-born bus driver, who was Home Secretary under Theresa May, Britain’s second woman prime minister, and is now Chancellor of the Exchequer, called the United Kingdom “the most successful multiracial democracy in the world.”
Boris Johnson, the flamboyant new prime minister, probably knows India – or rather, Indians -- better than any of his predecessors since his second wife was half-Indian. But far more important than the incumbent is the underlying democratic process from which India has so much to learn. Nothing became Mrs May better than the dignity laced with emotion with which she quit office last Wednesday. Her exit was a triumph of the substance and symbolism of the parliamentary democracy that India claims to have emulated but which the Lok Sabha just cannot match. No wonder India’s major national newspapers like The Statesman long ago stopped publishing regular weekly columns discussing parliamentary doings. While Indian parliamentarians have ceased to deserve such attention, successive Indian prime ministers have paid scant notice to parliament. They prefer the populism of the public arena.
Apart from the moment when there was an audible lump in her throat while she addressed people outside Number 10, Mrs May handled the programme called Prime Minister’s Questions – the 95th of her tenure – with skill, stamina and a patience that no Indian leader would ever have displayed. She has replied meticulously to more than 4,500 questions in 114 hours of PMQs. This was the last one during which she painstakingly responded to points, complaints and suggestions about jobs, school admissions, medical care, trade, national security and of course, Brexit. She repeatedly upheld her successor’s credentials and reminded MPs that being still a member of Parliament, she would return as a backbencher to support him and the causes she had always espoused. This was democracy in action, proof of the departing Prime Minister’s repeated assertion that governance rests on the relationship between the 500 or so House of Commons members and their constituents. During that long session of questions, answers, barbed insults and cutting comments, Jeremy Corbyn of the Labour Party argued that Mr Johnson, the 14th prime minister of the present reign, enjoyed no popular mandate and should seek one through a general election. In turn, Mrs May told Mr Corbyn that he would do well to follow her example and step down.
The need for this historic change arose because of another manifestation of parliamentary power -- Mrs May’s inability on three occasions during three years and 11 days in Number 10 Downing Street to get MPs to vote for the draft divorce agreement between Britain and the European Union agreed to in Brussels. Her failure to persuade her colleagues, especially members of her ruling Conservative Party, that this was the best parting deal the EU would concede to and that it was in Britain’s interest to endorse it, prompted her downfall. It provoked an informal but no less coercive expression of no confidence in her leadership. As a democrat, Mrs May had no option but to bow to her party’s will and resign, whereupon the party set about electing a new leader. It chose Mr Johnson in an above-board process in preference to Jeremy Hunt, the former foreign and Commonwealth secretary who was the only other contender left, by a massive 92,153 votes to 46,656.
No one knows how long Mr Johnson will survive. Some predict a tenure of only three months. Some believe he just cannot deliver. Indeed, there are people who doubt if the man whose ambitions as a boy included being “world king” and, what may come to the same thing, “American president” (not an impossible dream since he was born in New York) has any consistent purpose in mind about what he wishes to achieve apart from being hailed as the saviour who rescued Britain out of the clutches of a grasping European Union.
The new British Prime Minister’s failures and virtues are not, however, part of this assessment. Even the dramatic announcement – “My job is to serve you, the people” -- in Mr Johnson’s first prime ministerial speech after returning from Buckingham Palace on Wednesday must be ignored for it is precisely the kind of rhetoric to which the most corrupt and undemocratic of our politicians is addicted. But the smoothness with which the change was carried out within 24 hours of the Conservatives choosing their new leader and the ease with which Mr Johnson moved into Number 10 within minutes of Mrs May moving out, bore witness to the security and stability of a mature and responsible political democracy in which institutions and traditions matter more than individuals and idiosyncrasies.
There were no emotional pleas for extra time or – worse still – to convert the prime minister’s house into a shrine. There were no dark rumours of caches of cash changing hands. No one mentioned purification rites, priestly incantations or auspicious moments, all of which smother rational thinking in the obfuscation of archaic superstition. The British equivalents of sadhus and sanyasis – Christian clerics since the UK is officially an Anglican state and the Queen is Supreme Governor of the Church of England – were nowhere to be seen. It’s as if Jawaharlal Nehru’s prediction that “politics and religion are obsolete; the time has come for science and spirituality” had come true thousands of miles from Sri Lanka where it was made in 1962.
One last explosion of the democratic spirit deserves mention. As Mrs May’s motorcade left Buckingham Palace after she had resigned the prime ministership to the Queen and Mr Johnson’s car with escort and outriders was sweeping through Admiralty Arch and down the Mall towards the palace gates, a small group of what seemed on the live TV coverage to be very young demonstrators in red T-shirts strung out across the road. They were from the Greenpeace organisation, said the news commentator, and the banner one of them unrolled claimed the protest was about climate change. Mr Johnson’s motorcycle outriders stopped their bikes, dismounted and gently moved the young men and women aside. There was no violence. No tear gas or lathi charge. But millions saw the protest and read the banner. Perhaps the Queen even asked her new prime minister about the interruption. A democratic point had been made and democratically noted. The voice of the people provided a fitting link between two democratic regimes.
The writer is the author of several books and a regular media columnist.
- Sunanda K Datta-Ray
