Opinion | Teach Democracy, or Watch It Die

Democratic society shows what happens when the small, ordinary rooms of democratic life close, one by one. The fix isn’t another election cycle. It’s teaching people, again, how to do this together.

When did you last believe your vote would change something? Not hope. Believe. If the answer takes too long to come, you already know the feeling this piece is about.Something quiet is happening to democracy. It isn’t a coup. It isn’t a crackdown. It’s slower than that, and harder to photograph. People still talk politics all the time. But somewhere along the way, they stopped expecting anything to change. Hannah Arendt had a word for this. She called it the loss of “the common world.” That is the shared space where people once believed their actions carried weight. When that belief goes, democracy does not fall in one dramatic night. It erodes. Meeting by meeting. Election by election. Until the public square feels like a stage set. People are watching. They are no longer performing.

I keep thinking about this through Jammu & Kashmir. Decades of proxy violence. Decades of broken promises. The ordinary machinery of democratic life has been hollowed out. I don’t raise big political questions because it is beyond our reach . I raise it because it is a warning, sharpened by decades of violance , of something spreading more quietly elsewhere too. People everywhere are fluent in grievance. Fewer and fewer are fluent in governance. That is the real crisis. And the cure is not more politics. It is political education and civic engagement.

THE SHRINKING ROOM TO SPEAK

In Kashmir, the ordinary spaces where people once argued freely have been closing for years. A village square where elders once settled disputes. A student union where young people once encouraged vernacular debate. A local newspaper printed in the language people actually speak at home. One by one, these spaces have shrunk.

Cross-border proxies played their part. Gunmen targeted the very people who kept local democracy alive: panchayat members, councillors, ordinary political workers with no bodyguards and no national profile. Many resigned. Some were killed. Others simply stopped attending meetings, because attending had become dangerous. The seat stayed empty. The village lost its voice.

Separatist politics filled some of that empty space, but not kindly. It offered one answer: boycott everything, because nothing local is worth saving. That message travelled fast because there was so little local space left to argue against it. Extreme ideas moved in behind it, some openly hostile to the republic itself, treating ordinary citizenship as betrayal. Between the bullet and the boycott, the middle ground where most people actually live got smaller every year.

“Shut down a newspaper often enough, and people stop expecting news in their own tongue.”

Shut down a newspaper often enough, and people stop expecting news in their own tongue. Cancel enough student elections, and young people stop expecting a say in their own college. Silence enough panchayat leaders, and villages stop expecting local government to mean anything. None of this happens through one order. It happens through years of small closures, until the room to speak locally is smaller than the room to speak about the world outside.

WHAT HAS CHANGED, AND WHAT HAS NOT

Something did shift after August 2019. Law and order improved. Violence fell, not just in count but in intensity. This is worth saying plainly, because pretending nothing changed helps no one.The 2024 assembly election offered further evidence. By most accounts, it was the first genuinely fear-free election in the region in a generation, held with mass participation and without a single reported incident of violence or terror… The question now is less whether order can be endured, and more whether it will be honoured. That responsibility sits with mainstream political parties, in government and in opposition alike, both obliged to respect the public mandate rather than treat it as one more occasion for grievance.

But there is a habit worth breaking too. Holding onto an old story of the region, one that survives now mostly in speeches and headlines rather than in daily life, does not help build what comes next. The bigger constitutional questions belong to parliaments ,courts and to the people. They are part of what it means to belong to a democraic republic, and deserve their place in that argument. But democracy is not only that argument. It is also a smaller, more everyday thing: a functioning local council, a newspaper people trust, a classroom where a child learns to disagree well. None of the bigger claims replace this. And none of it happens on its own. It happens because ordinary people show up informed, ask better questions, and refuse to let politics be something done to them rather than with them.

AWARENESS IS NOT THE SAME AS LITERACY

John Dewey saw this coming a century ago. Democracy, he said, is not a set of institutions. It is “a mode of associated living.” Something you practise. Something you relearn, generation after generation, or it dies quietly while the buildings stay standing. Elections still happen. Parliaments still sit. But the substance can drain out from underneath, while the forms stay exactly the same.

Here is the paradox. People can be extraordinarily well informed, and still politically useless to themselves. In Kashmir, in tea stalls and barbershops, people debate distant wars with real sophistication. Ask them about the local panchayat instead. Watch the enthusiasm drain from the room. This is not ignorance. It is worse. It is disillusioned with literacy. People who understand power perfectly well, and have concluded, often with good reason, that it does not work for them.

You see the same pattern far from any conflict zone. People who can name every minister in a foreign cabinet, and cannot name their own local panchayat member. It is not a lack of intelligence. It is a lack of expectation. Nobody taught them that the local council is theirs to shape.

There is an older idea worth borrowing here, even if we rarely say it out loud anymore. A society only finds good decisions by letting bad ideas be spoken and argued with, in the open, rather than pushed underground. Silence an opinion, even a wrong one, and it does not disappear. You just remove the one thing that could have proven it wrong: an honest answer, given in public. Kashmir’s tragedy is not that people held extreme or mistaken views. Every society does. It is that fewer safe rooms were left where those views could actually be tested, out loud, against a reply.

WHEN THE GUARDRAILS GO

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in their study of democratic collapse, “How Democracies Die,” made an argument that has stuck with me. Constitutions and courts are not enough to save a democracy. What actually holds the system together are two unwritten habits: parties treating rivals as legitimate rather than as enemies, and politicians choosing restraint even when the rules technically allow more. Levitsky and Ziblatt call these the soft guardrails of democratic life. When politicians stop teaching those habits by example, and citizens are never taught to expect them, the guardrails come down quietly. No one votes to remove them. They simply stop being observed.

This is exactly the mechanism political education is meant to interrupt. An electorate that understands what restraint looks like can notice when it disappears. An electorate never taught to expect it barely notices the guardrail is gone until the car is already off the road.

WHY RHETORIC WINS WHEN REASON LOSES

When people cannot judge a leader by results, they judge by charisma instead. By tribe. By the emotional charge of a speech. Politicians notice, and adapt. Why campaign on the slow arithmetic of roads and schools when one good insult travels further, faster, for free? The decline in political talk is not really about bad character, though there is plenty of that. It is a normal response from leaders facing an audience never taught to demand better. Bad actors do not create an uninformed public. An uninformed public creates the opening bad actors need.

In places scarred by long violence, this gets worse. Local leaders get adaptive to the ecosystem, or worse. Propaganda floods the gap left behind. False stories succeed exactly where political education would have closed the door: the plain inability to tell emotional manipulation from evidence. Boycotts get engineered, not because people reasoned their way to giving up, but because the absence of civic training makes despair easy to plant, especially in a room already half empty.

“Bad actors do not create an uninformed public. An uninformed public creates the opening bad actors need.”

Robert Putnam gave this erosion a name: social capital. The web of trust that lets strangers work together. He watched it fray across older, settled democracies far from any war, warning that once people stop joining, arguing and organising together, the trust that makes shared life possible does not just weaken. It can take generations to rebuild.

DEMOCRACY IS NOT A FIVE-YEAR APPOINTMENT

Dewey again, and this line is worth sitting with: democracy has to be “born anew every generation,” and education is its midwife. We treat democratic life like something that happens once every four or five years, behind a curtain, in a booth. But everything in that booth depends on habits built long before anyone walks in. Listening without contempt. Weighing evidence over old loyalty. Treating institutions as tools to use, not stages to jeer at.

Nobody is born with those habits. They get taught, or they don’t, in three places above all. The family dinner table, where a child first learns whether disagreement means betrayal or is just ordinary. The classroom, where civic lessons too often mean memorising the structure of parliament instead of practising the actual mess of debate. And the informal spaces, youth clubs, neighbourhood committees, student unions, where democratic habits are quietly made, far from any podium. These are exactly the spaces that shrank across Kashmir. Rebuilding them is not a side project. It is the whole project.

WHAT POLITICAL EDUCATION ACTUALLY CHANGES

This is not about adding one more subject to an already full school day. Done properly, political education changes how people judge political claims. It moves attention from personality to outcome. From slogan to evidence. From grievance to accountability. And it builds a kind of resistance. People who understand how propaganda works, who have practiced telling arguments from manipulation, are simply harder to fool, whether the source is foreign or local.

This is where Arendt matters most, not as decoration but as the actual argument. For her, political action meant nothing done alone. It only became real when performed in front of others, in a shared space, judged by people capable of thinking for themselves. A public that has lost the habit of showing up as a reasoning citizen, rather than a passive spectator, cannot hold that common world together. Political education is the activity that keeps democracy alive, one citizen at a time.

None of this lets political leaders off the hook. Favouritism, broken promises, talk standing in for delivery, these need real fixes, not classroom ones. But the two reinforce each other. A public that knows how to demand substance is harder to deceive. Education without honest institutions produces bitter, well-informed people with nowhere to put their frustration. Institutional reform without education produces a public too easily managed by whoever shouts loudest. You need both, moving together.

A SLOW, UNGLAMOROUS FIX

So what do we actually do? Not a five-point plan from a podium. Something slower. Civic learning needs to be treated as public infrastructure, as essential as roads or hospitals. Classrooms where students argue, not memorise. Protection for local teachers and organisers doing this thankless work, often at real risk, from those who benefit when the public stays confused or afraid. Reopening, patiently, the rooms that closed across Kashmir and places like it: the union halls, the local press, the panchayat seat staying vaccant. It also means being honest about time. None of this arrives before the next election. It might not arrive before the one after that. A generation raised on real classroom argument and open local debate does not appear overnight. But every generation raised without it makes the next demagogue’s job a little easier, and every closed room a little harder to reopen.

Democracies rarely die from a single coup. More often they die from attrition. From a public that quietly stops believing its participation counts, in a village square that quietly stops being used. And they come back to life, when they do, not through one election or one charismatic leader, but through the slow generational work Dewey described. Teaching people, again, how to think and argue and hope together. In a common world Arendt would still recognise. Held up by the same soft guardrails Levitsky and Ziblatt warned us not to take for granted, and the same everyday trust Putnam feared we were losing. That is not a technical fix. It is a political one, and it starts, as it always has, in the classroom, at the dinner table, and in the tea stall. And it starts, above all, with us, as citizens who choose to stay informed rather than turn away.

Irshad Ahmad Bhat is a Kashmir-based research scholar, and can be reached at bhatirshad81@gmail.com.