Comment

Between liberty and equality

IT is now broadly accepted that the grand ideas of philosophers, thinkers, scientists and discoverers have throughout history played a seminal role in the shaping of human societies. Just as the evolution of these ideas is shaped by the historical context and events coterminous with the life of the thinker, these ideas in turn, at particular times, equally play a critical role in influencing human behaviour and actions. This proposition can be easily tested by looking at the experience of modern western liberal theorists of democracy like John Locke, John Stuart Mill or John Rawls, to name a few. Their fundamental ideas about ‘basic values’ and institutions for democratic governance which were expected to ‘concretize’ these ‘values’ were in turn deeply influenced by the many debates, events and episodes that took place, especially from the beginning of the 15th century all the way to the 20th. Equally, in many ways the liberal democratic theorists were also the creators of their intellectual and political environment during the long phase when western societies were being transformed from feudal and despotic regimes to republican democracies.

All these debates – creationists versus evolutionists, idealists versus materialists – as exemplified by Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin and Newton among others, in their own way challenged the ideas of Church and the old monarchical/feudal rulers through movements like ‘No taxation without representation’, the British Chartist Movement, the American War of Independence and, most significantly, the French Revolution with its new ‘ideas’ about the rights of citizens to liberty, equality and fraternity. All these contests went into the making of modern Europe and the modern state system as also of the modern democratic theorists. Both John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government or John Stuart Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government were responding to the new urges and aspirations of a people influenced by new ideas and movements and who wanted a government based on the consent of the governed. It took close to five centuries to achieve the goal of representative democracy based on universal adult franchise so as to establish a rule of elected and accountable government on the basis of the ‘consent of the governed’.

This long, evolutionary process of modern democracy has led many western writers to argue that for the emergence and functioning of modern democracy some essential prerequisites need to be first satisfied, that unless the social soil is made fertile, democratic values and institutions cannot grow and flower. This quest for ‘essential’ prerequisites for the proper functioning of democracy in letter and spirit is reflective of long experience with the functioning of democracy in western countries.

Simultaneously, there is need to engage with the rich internal debate about the assumptions made by democratic theorists as also the actual experience of and with democratic institutions. John Locke, for instance, was for long dismissed as an apologist of British Whigs for advocating the right to vote for only the propertied classes. John Stuart Mill too was criticized for offering ideas based on ‘empty liberty and an abstract individual’. T.H. Marshall, in his seminal essay, ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, observed that throughout the 20th century, ‘citizenship and the capitalist system have been at war’, impelling many theorists of democracy to argue that the claim that all citizens are entitled to equal rights as normatively desirable is a non-starter. John Rawls, in his seminal work, A Theory of Justice, and B.R. Ambedkar closer home, directed attention to the adverse impact of economic inequality on the rights of citizens in democratic societies. No wonder, many students of democratic theory, current or earlier, have pointed out that the goals of freedom or the rights of man, as proclaimed on the eve of the American War of Independence (1776) or those of liberty, equality and fraternity propounded during the French Revolution (1789) have in the main remained unrealized because of an antagonistic relationship between liberty or freedom and equality in a society which guarantees private ownership of the means of production.

If the old ‘democracies’ of the West, despite their long experience with the system, have failed to resolve the conflicts between the basic values of democracy, except by offering a part solution of the state providing welfare services to redress some of the deprivations of citizens, it is even more difficult for present-day free market democracies to claim that they can ensure freedom to all citizens within a society which is fundamentally based on the system of ‘inequalities’ of every kind. This then remains the basic conundrum facing theorists and defenders of democratic governance on the basis of universal adult franchise and equality before law of every citizen, i.e. how to find a resolution to the fundamental antagonism between liberty and equality.

There is broad consensus among western writers about viable democracy needing a threshold level of economic development. However, this proposition does not seem to apply to India, a ‘democracy’ for close to seventy years post-Independence. Despite suffering from high levels of poverty, inequality and disparity of income and wealth, India’s electoral, competitive democratic system not only works but also provides enough space to the deprived and oppressed social groups to democratically organize themselves and struggle to change an unjust social order. How does democracy survive and operate in such a socially divided and unequal society of billionaires, multi-millionaires, middle and lower middle classes and sizeable ‘below poverty population’? Is it the presence of a sizeable ‘middle class’ that many believe is a prerequisite for democracy? India has about 300 million people in the upper and middle classes; according to the ‘prerequisite’ theorists, they should have been the backbone of Indian democracy. Is this valid? First, most members of the upwardly mobile middle class – professional technocrats, entrepreneurs and other self-employed groups – come across more as ‘social secessionists’, uninterested in societal problems and indifferent to their neighbours. Few among them even care to ‘exercise’ their right to vote. Selfcentred and selfconsumed, their primary goal seems to be making a lot of money, which further distances them from other strata of society. Second, the Indian ‘middle class’ appears both ‘security conscious’ and ‘socially conservative’ at the same time, though its members might join social movements for a change of the system if they perceive such movements to be insignificant.

It is imperative to test these premises and assumptions against the reality of functioning democracy in the age of global capitalism. After all, it is not only Indian democracy that is revealing some ‘new tendencies’; even the metropolitan West is experiencing new pressures. For a start, every country, developed or developing, is witnessing the inexorable process of a deepening inequality of income and wealth, resulting in the emergence of ‘oligarchic social classes’ who seem to have affected a near complete takeover of the state. For long, it was assumed that the liberal democratic state system enjoys relative ‘autonomy’ from other centres of social power and politics, and that the state in the driver’s seat, would be able to organize and manage society irrespective of social class distinctions. Clearly, the idea that the democratic state as a preeminent institution for the governance of society appears more a wish than reality, because ‘billionaire oligarchs’ are able to control the levers of state power as a result of their economic clout.

Second, many liberal democracy propositions evolved at a time when the modern state systems were still in the making and a close relationship, even linkage, existed between theorists and the imagination of the nation state. In an era of globalization, however, neither classic democratic theory nor the imagery/idea of a modern nation state appears relevant because of the powerful impact of transnational capital over the state systems. With a blurring of national boundaries, the transnationalization of capital has led to a transnationalization of decisionmaking and the emergence of supranational institutions like the World Bank, IMF, WTO and other nonelected and unaccountable global institutions as the real centres of power. Little surprise that the emphasis by liberal theorists on the role of elected national representative parliaments and an accountable elected political executive at the centre of decisionmaking at the national level, appears somewhat misplaced. National parliaments seem to have little control over national economic policies and, in this new situation, elected representatives are unable to pursue policies to achieve ‘equality’ in society, a great value for liberal democratic theorists. How can supranational institutions defend equality of citizens in the absence of any mandate from or accountability to the citizens of a country who in turn play no role in the functioning of these supranational institutions? It does appear that the ideas and institutions born during the past four centuries – like equality and its guarantor, nation states governed by elected representative parliaments – have become out of date because of a fundamental change in the ‘essential nature of capital’.

Finally, just as the idea of equality has been deeply eroded and replaced by the reality of nearabsolute inequality of social classes, the other central pillar of liberal democratic theory, liberty, too appears deeply compromised by our elected political executive subordinating individual citizen’s rights to the commanding idea of ‘national interest’. The freedoms of individuals, as guaranteed by our constitutions, have been pushed aside by our elected representatives on the plea of safeguarding national interests and territorial integrity of the country, not only in times of war but even during times of peace. Half a century back, US President Eisenhower, while vacating the Office of the President, observed that America was governed by a ‘militaryindustrial complex’; the message was that in such a democracy, neither equality nor liberty constituted the highest value in society. More recently, George Bush with his ‘global war on terror’ justified the promulgation of draconian laws curbing freedom of individuals. India is no exception to this general trend of freedoms being curbed in the name of the fight against terrorism. Think Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) or Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 2008.

The upshot is that even as India, like other liberal democracies of the West, may claim that liberty and equality as enshrined in the Constitution are the defining principles of our democratic governance and that all the essentials of democracy – whether its values or institutional arrangements – have worked well throughout its history as an independent republic, the distressing fact is that Indian democracy has neither managed to establish a social order on the basis of equality nor guarantee individual ‘liberty’ for the people to freely organize themselves to struggle and for the overthrow of their unequal and oppressive and exploitative social order. In a society of absolute inequality, where individual liberty and fundamental rights can be sacrificed at the altar of the nation’s superior interests, democracy is but an empty shell.

C.P. Bhambhri