The disproportionate reaction of the government to sustained mobilisation in civil society against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) – a project of weeding out citizens from the electoral rolls – is enough reason for intense anger, but also some pity. It casts relentless light on the inability of the government to understand, let alone implement the basic principles of democracy, particularly justice. The ruling class is peculiarly non-literate when it comes to justice which lies at the heart of democracy. And it claims that India is the mother of democracy! Seriously?The claim is both astounding and pitiable. Democracy was born in Greece; the word demos is a Greek word. Democracy gained traction with the French Revolution in 1789. The Glorious Revolution in England in 1688, and the American War of Independence from Britain (1775-1783) proved foundational moments for the development of democracy. Power shifted from monarchs to the political public. Democracy expanded with sustained mobilisation for the franchise in Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.And above all, it acquired a spectacularly emancipatory avatar during the freedom movement in India. Democracy means liberation from our chains. But the ideological forbears of our present rulers refused to participate in the anti-colonial movement. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) set up in 1925 by K.B Hedgewar, stayed away from the Salt Satyagraha in April 1930, and the Quit India movement in August 1942. Nor did it initiate any sort of anti-colonial struggle by itself.The RSS have not understood the first principle of democracyNo wonder that members of the RSS who are in power do not comprehend or appreciate the foundational moments of democracy. Protest or civil disobedience, is an integral part of democracy. Or that protest movements are perfectly legitimate responses to an undemocratic government. Or that democracy is about securing the well-being of the people. The rulers seem to believe that elections give them power. But they have no obligation towards the people who elected them in the first place. Democracy holds little meaning for them except as raw, brutal power.Understandably they have not understood the first principle of democracy. Sophisticated, experienced and democratic states do not come down on protesting citizens like the proverbial ‘wolf on the fold’. (This happens to be the opening line of the famous poem ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’ written by Lord Byron in 1815. We learnt it in school and the line still haunts imaginations.)Democratic governments recognise protest as a significant part of democracy. We the people have elected a government; we have a right to de-elect or de-select it if it abuses power. We have the right to facilitate a regime-change if the government loses confidence. A savvy ruling class would not get so rattled by peaceful protests. It would have requested the protesters to submit a memorandum, appointed diplomatic ministers and officials to talk to the protesters, met the leaders of the movement civilly and with compassion, even given young people who were out on the street day and night, tea, coffee, snacks and perhaps even a piece of chocolate or two (not necessarily Melody).The democratic ruling class, in other words, would honour the demands of the citizens, treat protest movements as justifiable, as a matter of right, and fully within the provenance of democracy. It would respect citizens and their right to call governments to account. Instead, our current ruling class sees it fit to inflict a regime of brutality on young people; nothing less than 35,000 security forces armed with lathis and presumably guns to put the lot in jail. And like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, the powers that be said: ‘off with their heads’.The reaction of the ruling class to protest brings to mind a famous anecdote from the storming of the Bastille by the citizens of Paris on 14 July 1789. Even as crowds were battering open the gates of the Bastille, the infamous prison in which eminent political thinkers, including the notorious Marquis De Sade who was a philosopher, had been incarcerated, King Louis the XVI, who was standing by a window in his Versailles Palace, asked his aide Duc la Rochefoucauld ‘Is this a revolt?’ ‘No Sire’, replied the Duke, ‘this is a Revolution’. An alternative version is that the conversation happened the next morning.The date is not the issue; the issue was the inability of the King to distinguish between a revolt and a revolution. A revolt can be a temporary uprising; a revolution aims to transform the structure. Similarly democratic governments should be competent to understand the difference between a revolution, a revolt, a peaceful protest, and a social movement. The current government, however, cannot understand the distinction. It proceeded to act as if the protesters planned to take the entire cabinet by its metaphorical throat, and throw it out of power. All that the protesters initially wanted was that the government should do something about the rot that has entered the electoral system.Because the government acted so mindlessly, the protest escalated and swelled to demanding the resignation of the government, nothing less than regime-change. And a note for mindless journalists and supporters of the government: regime change does not happen only during elections, but also when the government has lost the confidence of the people.A vibrant civil society has been stamped out by this governmentBecause an otherwise vibrant civil society in India had been stamped out by this government, major and multiple protests erupted to challenge power. They were supported by thousands of people. Here again we see the difference between a sophisticated democratic government, and a government that has little idea of what, let alone sophistication, democracy is. This distinction, the creative Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) taught us.Gramsci wrote his memorable pieces in what became the Prison Notebooks, in a very specific period. Benito Mussolini took over power in Gramsci’s own country Italy, and established a fascist state. The working classes had been defeated. Gramsci, by then in prison, wrote in period of intellectual ferment, when the canons of Marxism expressed by the Second International had been disproved. The belief that the advanced capitalist world would catalyse a revolution had been negated. Crisis in the economic domain had not led to a political crisis and revolution. And revolution had taken place in Russia, a feudal, Czarist country, contrary to basic Marxist theory. The renewal of Marxism awaited a narrative of conscious, cultural ideological intervention in cultural and social fields. The history and sociology of the earlier Marxist positivist tradition had to be rethoughtWondering why revolution had failed to take place in advanced capitalist countries but in semi-feudal states such as Russia, Gramsci gave to us a theory of the state. All states are coercive. But sophisticated states ward off discontent by hegemonising civil society. Gramsci relocated the site of consent, and of domination from the economy to civil society. Reductionist theories of the state as the prime mechanism of coercion were recast. The use of brutal force that breeds further opposition can only be neutralised when citizens have the opportunity to discuss, deliberate and criticise the state in the space of civil society. And when holders of power listen and respond.Civil society is a set of social relations located between the state, the market and the household. It is the site of hegemony of the capitalist classes and the state. It is also the site of counter-hegemony, a revolutionary project that radicalises the cultural sphere. There is much more to the concept of hegemony, but here let us concentrate on how a democratic, sophisticated state prevents popular uprising. This is not meant to let off exploitative states; the objective of this piece is to concentrate on the distinction between sophisticated and unsophisticated states.Pressure cookers without safety valvesConsider the following: when citizens have access to the participative space of civil society, to vent their opinions, views, grievances and problems, revolutions hardly happen, (or as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady (1964) famously said ‘ardly appen’). The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government from day one set out to demolish all organisations for civil liberties, human rights, and social wellbeing, erase spaces for deliberation and criticism and hijack institutions including the Supreme Court. It has, in the process, created a pressure cooker without a safety valve. And we all know what happens to pressure cookers without safety valves to let out steam; they explode. It is precisely this that has happened in India. The people have no option because all avenues of interaction between citizens, and between the citizens and the government have been battened down and locked.Resultantly, waves of discontent and protest spilled over into the streets and public spaces. Let not the government and its supporters blame the protesters. The “godi media” is as illiterate as its masters. Protest is the right of every citizen. The difference is that when protest is channeled through avenues, when the government listens, when the Supreme Court takes on the government for breach of civil liberties, when the media does the job it is meant to do, represent the interests of the citizens as the fourth pillar of democracy, democracy flourishes as it did in the period 2000-2014.Many notable laws were passed with the aid of the court including the right to employment, right to food, right to information and right to elementary education. What has happened to the once progressive Supreme Court?The disproportionate response of the government, its inability to accept public criticism as legitimate, and its crack-down on young people, particularly women, is deplorable. It is also shortsighted. For as Gramsci pointed out the revolution in Russia took place in the context of immoderate exercise of military power, a feudal Czarist state, and a closed polity. We have on our hands a group of people who rule without respecting citizens, who have eroded institutions, who are openly oligarchic, and desperately authoritarian. The protest movement throws as much light on the incompetence of the government as it does on the courage of our citizens.PM Modi had said that those who want to sit in the prime minister’s chair must enjoy popular acclaim. Let us add to this – those who hold onto to their chairs despite lack of popular confidence in their ability to protect the wellbeing of citizens have lost their right to rule. This is regime change, the people electing the government and the people deselecting the government. The government has lost the confidence of the political public, it must go.Neera Chandhoke is a former professor of Political Science, University of Delhi.