A democracy is built on several foundation stones – that of freedom and the right to dissent being the most critical. If you don’t have freedom, all liberal catchphrases become lies. And if you are not allowed to voice or give vent to your disagreements, democracy becomes a myth.

Let us refrain from berating the villains we love to hate – politicians, bureaucrats and corporations, and examine the mess we are in from a peoples’ point of view. After all, democracy, we are told time and again, is about people.

Everyone has an opinion about everything, but when opinions and interests clash, every such clash becomes a conflict situation. The right to protest is a democratic right, but when such protests overlap the interests of others, it becomes a conflict of interests. For a country as diverse as India, conflict of interest crops up in most situations. This, probably, is the reason why our country is in such a messy situation. We seem to be enforcing democracy across the country without taking into account what lies at the core – liberal values.

There are five Bs rampantly abused across the country, which are chipping away at our democratic foundations – bandhs, blockades, bans, boycotts, and blackmail. Fundamentally, there cannot be anything wrong with any of these tools. What’s wrong, is the act of enforcement.

Bandhs are so frequently called, especially in politically volatile states, that they have lost their essential significance. Bandhs now come attached with a tag of fear. Today, bandhs are as much enforced as they are called. The moment a person is coerced to support a bandh, it becomes undemocratic.

Looked at tactically, a bandh ought to be a last resort for protest. In times of turbulence, we see political and, occasionally, civil society formations falling for this last ditch effort way too often. Court judgments are hence against the very practice of bandhs. Without muscle power, few bandhs would be supported by people.

A blockade, on the other hand, comes with a mandatory tag of force. Blockades can be of many kinds – from the one that we saw recently in Manipur that choked the heart of the state to the rail roko and rasta roko agitations that are frequently organised across the country. The latter are usually spontaneous and are specifically designed to disrupt normal life.

Essentially, a ban is imposed by the state. In the Northeast, bans are frequently enforced through militant diktats. The issue is compounded by the fact that the non-state actors include civil society organisations, quite often for comfort. At its core, a ban is also enforcement. We are not talking of banning carcinogens here; we are talking of banning of ideas – that of freedom of expression. You cannot have censorship, in what we know as a democracy.

The counter to a ban can be a boycott. In fact, it is a more democratic alternative to a ban. In a democracy, one should be free to call for a boycott of anything – from books to people. Calls for boycotts, as we have seen in the case against many newspapers and magazines in the Northeast, come accompanied by vociferous and belligerent demonstrations, which by default assume the tone of an enforced ban, making it an anti-people tool again.

The trickiest of the lot is one that we see every other day in the newspapers – the politics of blackmail. The anti-corruption protests and the associated fasts have assumed the tone of blackmail – that of Parliament. It is fine to say that politicians are answerable to the people, but the same has been institutionalised by our Constitution. The Lok Sabha is the House of the People. Holding Parliament to ransom is undermining the values of the Constitution. The politics of fasting is coercion by other means. The essence remains the same.

There are no hard and fast rules here, and people and political formations can often be driven to desperation when simplistic forms of protest and soft-spoken voices of dissent are ignored. The way out is liberalism – my protest should not trample on your right to live.