Comment

Democracy in distress

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THE Indian Parliament celebrated its 60th anniversary on 13 May. The special sitting the day after was marked by predictable homilies about Indian democracy and the Parliament. Apart from Sushma Swaraj’s emphasis on inadequate female representation, there was hardly any meaningful stocktaking or analysis in the speeches made. Obviously, parliamentary democracy in India has only been partially successful. Indeed, democracy itself appears to be going through a critical period of churning in the country.

On the one hand, the Maoists are locked in gory battles with the state in different parts of India, and secessionist movements in the North and the East of the country are gaining in mass support. Both these phenomena are weakening the democratic base of the nation by undermining the authority of elected governments and, in a deeper sense, the idea of ‘India’ itself. On the other hand, we witness the spectacle of an overzealous ‘civil society’ that seems to behave like the moral guardian of the polity even while flaunting a holier-than-thou attitude vis-a-vis politics and politicians. Indeed, such has been the frequency and intensity of ‘civil’ movements in recent times that it looks like constitutional democracy in the country is in danger of being usurped by the ‘democracy’ of the street.

While apolitical pressure groups can be a positive element in a democracy, they have to function within the parameters of the laws and institutions of the state if they are not to lose their constitutional legitimacy and their relevance to the sections of the population outside their own fold. Moreover, a close look at the nature of the causes espoused by the ‘civil society’ reveals biases that ill serve its ‘enlightened’ image. Thus, while we find a multitude of the urban middle class joining the so-called anti-corruption movement on the street and in the social media (mostly without caring to understand the nitty-gritty of the Lokpal bill), we are still to see any broad based ‘civil’ group crusading for a time-bound eradication of, say, extreme poverty or women trafficking.

To take an example from Bengal, where one is domiciled, the tragic fire at the upmarket AMRI hospital, Kolkata, understandably led to public outrage – so much that the Chief Justice of India felt constrained to alert the Calcutta High Court judges against falling prey to populism in trying the accused. Yet, no such public reaction was elicited when days after the hospital fire, more than a hundred people in suburban Bengal died after consuming adulterated country liquor retailed by licensed joints. Irrespective of the nature or the class affiliation of the cause, however, it is axiomatic that members of the ‘civil society’ cannot claim the democratic right to organize protests and strike at the root of democracy at the same time. In a parliamentary democracy, people exercise power through the elected representatives they send to Parliament. When the Parliament is sought to be bullied or bypassed, it is people power itself that is dishonoured and undermined.

One distinguished commentator on the issue has been Andre Beteille. Arguing against the Gandhian ideal of ‘stateless societies’ and for Ambedkar’s vision of a constitutional order, he points out that ‘the state and its institutions (make) possible the organization of life on a scale that could never be attained in stateless societies.’ And the constitutional order, he cautions, ‘cannot be safeguarded if the state is kept under constant attack by every section of an expanding and discontented middle class.’ <http://www.telegraphindia. com/1110830/jsp/opinion/story_14435648.jsp>

True, there should be space in a democratic system for the private individual to express their opinion outside of the parliamentary framework as elected representatives might not always voice or be able to voice the views of all who elected them. Indeed, democracy – aiming to achieve the greatest good of the largest number and obliged to work by majority opinions on most things – has an innate proclivity toward a lack of discrimination that is inimical to the spirit of discernment essential for individual difference to be recognized. Democratic politics pays obligatory homage at the altar of numbers, and this has the potential of being detrimental to the interests of the individual, whose liberty the democratic state is supposed to promote and safeguard.

But even here the solution is not to bypass democratic institutional processes but to create and nurture spaces within the democratic set-up itself, wherein individuality can realize itself and whereby dissent is allowed expression. As John Dewey, the prime theorist of democracy observed, ‘An individual is nothing fixed, given, ready-made. It is something achieved, and achieved not in isolation but with the aid and support of . . . economic, legal and political institutions as well as science and art’ (The Future of Liberalism). The purpose of civil society is to maintain a dynamics of mutuality and civilized dialogue between the state and its citizens through a set of apolitical institutions like the media, the university, debating societies, and other such fora. Instead, what we have seen in our country in recent times is the rise of a belligerent power-mongering on the streets that tends to breed a dangerous relation of conflict between the state and its citizens.

Another malaise that afflicts parliamentary democracy in India, apart from the rise of a wrong-headed ‘civil society’, is the pervasive party culture inherent to the parliamentary system of the country. Here, unlike in the British parliamentary system, the political party is the king. Whereas in the British system the members of the Lower House elect a leader who leads both the House and the party, in India the head of the party is the chief centre of power, and the leader of the parliamentary group often does not have the reins of the party in his hands. Rather, the political party controls the parliamentary wing, including the group of ministers, and influences all its decisions, thereby undermining the sovereignty of the Parliament.

This lionization of the political party even after the public has elected its representatives lies at the root of partisan and, therefore, poor legislation and amounts to a denigration and insult of parliamentary democracy. Moreover, the party’s power over the Parliament ensures that the latter is subject to populist vote-bank politics and cannot take necessary decisions that are likely to hurt the electoral prospects of the ruling party/parties. Examples are the inability of successive governments to withdraw the huge subsidy on petroleum products that is a massive strain on public money or to revisit the caste based reservation policy followed in government institutions. Evidently, India has imitated only the structure of British parliamentary governance: it has, so far, failed to emulate the spirit of that system.

However, despite its many shortcomings, Indian democracy will survive: the faith that the makers of the Constitution reposed in the Indian people has so far stood the test of time. The Emergency proved with blinding clarity what the tyranny of state power could be like. If we are not to witness the tyranny of military power, like in the Middle Eastern countries that are bathing in blood in their struggle to win democracy, we have to nurture the democratic state machinery that we have inherited.

It could be the subject of a public debate whether India would benefit by adopting certain elements of direct democracy or of the presidential form of government; it should perhaps be a concern for the right people to seize on an effective means to delink politics and big capital, and certainly to devise effective ways to curb corruption. What remains indubitable is that none of these or similar activities in the public domain should be allowed to hijack constitutional processes or to weaken democratic institutions.

India must significantly better its performance in order to reach near world standards in the human development indices. How to do this while continuing to play by the rules of an increasingly ‘open’ market economy is a live issue. It seems a truism, however, that the form of governance that can most likely create conditions favourable to the achievement of this goal is democracy. The President of the USA was more acute than he probably realized when in his address to the Indian Parliament in November 2010, he remarked that India has succeeded not in spite of, but because of democracy.

Suparna Banerjee

 

* Suparna Banerjee is the author of Science, Gender and History: Mary Shelley and Margaret Atwood (forthcoming).

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