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Part IIITRAPPED IN OUR OWN MAKING
9Democracy
Discussing politics is a favoured pastime in India. The newspapers here are chock-full of all things political, with Indian television channels constantly blaring out ‘breaking news’ on politicians and the government, and it is common to hear the buzz of opinions, defence or criticism of politicians, parties and public government schemes.
There always seems to be so much going on in the governance of our own country that we have little bandwidth to learn about the domestic affairs of any other country. The public discourse overall tends to be dominated by an enormous focus on our politics and politicians’ lives and problems.
As economist Amartya Sen has pointed out, we have a tradition in India of being discursive or ‘argumentative’.1 Over various works, Sen has delineated the historical recognition that public discussion has received in India. As one of the earliest examples of this, he mentions the organized discussion of the Buddhist Councils, started in the sixth century BC by Ashoka, which brought together different points of view represented by participants from across India and even abroad. In the sixteenth century, Emperor Akbar also organized public discussions on religious differences.2 Referring to a less distant past, subalternist Ramachandra Guha extols the intellect of the leaders of India’s freedom struggle to argue in subtle and sophisticated ways with each other.3
Indeed, intellectuals in India and abroad are delighted by public discussions about politics, which they often say is the basis for democracy. In saying so, they are not referring to the narrowly institutional view of democracy that characterizes it mainly in terms of elections, even though this view has its champions, including Samuel Huntington, who wrote: ‘Elections, open, free and fair, are the essence of democracy, the inescapable sine qua non.’4 But those who consider public discussion the basis of democracy believe that it is through the exchange of views concerning political questions that people broaden their understanding. They are enabled to make intelligent political choices, not just at the ballot, but also while participating in various other policy and governance decisions. John Rawls has called this ‘the exercise of public reason’, and in his book A Theory of Justice he laboriously argues how democracy is fundamentally linked to public deliberation.5
Making a case for Rawls’s argument in the Indian context, Guha distinguishes between the ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ of democracy.6 He writes that while the scholarly and popular understanding of democracy tends to focus on the ‘hardware’—multiple political parties, free, fair and regular elections, freedom of the press, an independent judiciary, freedom of movement—little attention is paid to the ‘software’. These are the cultural and emotional aspects of democracy, which include free public discourse on politics and governance.
Just this difference—Huntington’s institutional definition of democracy versus Rawls’s discursive view—highlights the various meanings of democracy in contemporary times, its debated areas of focus, and the plurality of ways to attain it. Intellectuals, as much as the public, have occupied themselves with thinking about this subject, leading to an enormous body of academic work on it the world over.
I would argue that democracy—in fact, governance as a whole—which was intended to be a means to an end, seems to have become the goal in our times. For centuries, governance systems—within tribes, kingdoms or nations—were established so that people could roam freely, speak and act in a way that allowed other members of that collective to do the same. Instead, in a Frankensteinian turn of events, today we excessively speak about and are bound to act in accordance with our governance systems that may or may not have our individual or collective interest in mind. This is the central point that I wish to expand upon in this essay.
In the early years of human evolution, it was our own idea to create some sort of a system that would support us in our instinctual activities of surviving, exploring, procreating—and we have discussed this in the first part of this book—in a free yet organized manner. Over thousands of years, we have experimented with creating and trying out various old and new forms of this ‘system’, and democracy is one of them.
Today, there is a near-unanimous acceptance globally—almost a moral imperative and missionary zeal—that every country must be a democracy, without having an equally unanimous agreement on what democracy means. In fact, the meaning of democracy varies so much that it is possible to trace its various ‘versions’ of democracy to different eras in time. For instance, the discursive democracy of the sixth century BC Buddhist Councils was not that of an elected government. Even in ancient Greece
