The problem

WE live in the midst of violence; its traces are evident everywhere, even in modern democracies. Rarely does a day pass without the front page of the morning newspaper carrying a picture of a body smeared in blood. If anything, reading newspapers these days has de facto become a training in brutalization. If violence is so omnipresent, and if social solidarity is all too often shattered by its eruptive presence, the question one is impelled to ask is: How come, and through what magic, does the state as a political formation survive in the first place? Despite all the uncertainties and glaring fault lines, it somehow still seems to function and manages to retain a unity, even if tattered. The curious fact is that the more democratic states come under the sway of violence, the more resolute people seem to be in their demand for more democracy. This is a great paradox of contemporary life. What is it that makes democracy so durable despite its myriad loopholes and thousand histories of disappointment? There is an urgent need to understand and unveil this apparent contradiction.

Amartya Sen has characterized the rise of democracy as the pre-eminent event of the 20th century, a century which was otherwise witness to two epochal communist revolutions among other important developments. It is during this century that democracy, as a mode of political rule, became, to paraphrase Sen, a default case, that is, considered right unless the claim is somehow precisely negated. Perhaps one reason for this pre-eminence is that democracy offers a powerful weapon to both the rulers and the ruled. It encourages people to make demands on their rulers and, if not granted, to go in for greater struggles. And as some would maintain, the more the people are engaged in the fight for democratic rights, the more they are incorporated within the folds of democratic governance.

In textbooks of politics, democracy is presented as the right of citizens, as equals, to participate in deliberations and partake in the decisions of the political processes. The images of the heroic warrior-citizen of the Greek polis, the patrician-citizen of the Roman civitas, the merchant-citizen of Christianopolis, and the bourgeois-citizen of the metropolis, says Engin Isin in his book, Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship, are deeply entrenched in western memory. Isin argues that encoded in this very act of conferring an identity and narrative continuity is the inevitable etching out of an alterity, the relationship of the ‘proper’ to those kept waiting at the margins, the so-called barbarians, the providers of labour.

Taking the city as the space for political demands and counter-demands, he calls it (in light of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze) ‘a difference machine’. The city is such a machine that is kept alive by differences between its inhabitants – in political positions, economic disparity, social unevenness, clashes of interest, differences of taste and preference. Action and counter-action is what keeps this space mobile. For centuries, argues Isin, the struggle over citizenship has always taken place not only in the city but, more importantly, over the city.

In the process, democracy invariably involves its double. Good democratic rule means absorbing the excess that democracy as a form of political mobilization throws up. Democratic rule is all about ever renewed attempts at assimilating the anarchic energy of the parts that do not properly fit into civil society; it is all about conducting the multifarious conducts and modes of people into a civilizing process. It is about incorporating the heterogeneous and ensuring an attainment of hegemony that can only be partial and transitory. The crux of democratic rule is located in this flexibility, this incipient restlessness. As Ranciere has observed, democracy is not the practice of making consensus but dissensus, of partaking in two theatres simultaneously, which keeps reopening the gap that the practice of ruling relentlessly plugs.

It would be useful to carry out a stocktaking of the life of Indian democracy at the current conjuncture of history. The questions to ask are many: Is current day democratic practice absorbing the excess that democracy as a form of political mobilization throws up? How successful is the state in assimilating and incorporating the multitude of challenges which provide the self-generating supremacy of popular sovereignty? How are we to explain the recent spate of rape and brutal assaults on women in our cities? Are the strategies of pacification not working any more? What kinds of ties, adjustments and conflicts mark our post-colonial democracy with the advent of neo-liberal capital and the changing demography of cities? What is the template of new exclusions and dominations? Who is the ‘people’ in ‘We the people’?

What sort of parallax do the ‘people’ inaugurate between transcendence and immanence, between the rights of man (inalienable and universal, but in practice the rights of those who are for all purposes rightless) and the rights of the citizen (positive and instituted and standing for freedom and equality, but in effect the rights of the few)? Does this split also bring about a split in the practice of democracy itself – between a properly constituted democracy that is amenable to rational discourse and recognized by the constitution, a law-abiding democracy, so to say, that professes equality and freedom, and one led by populist, irrational and opportunistic practices that justifies itself in the name of addressing historical injustice and looking after electoral advantage?

If this is so, what sort of an instrument of democracy is the ballot box then? What does it mean to represent a constituency? No doubt, voting gives democracy its judicial legitimacy, but surely that cannot be all in the life of democracy? What of the distinct trend in recent years to challenge and combat the trust deficit of democracy through the politics of surveillance which, along with its antithetical trend of block voting along caste and religious lines, is emerging as a powerful form of democratic mobilization.

This issue of Seminar attempts to discuss these and other contemporary aspects of Indian democracy – not to provide a holistic picture or offer a set of coherent observations and effective prescriptions, but rather to make the reader think once again by presenting contesting viewpoints, inconclusive workings of intellectual departures, and unavoidable incomprehension of a scenario, vast and aleatory.

MANAS RAY