Confronting democracy

But to accuse politicians of engaging in votebank politics is at least as much an indictment of the people who elect them, as it is of those who seek their votes. Faced with the disquieting prospect that large sections of the demos might be complicit in events such as Gujarat, we resort to two strategies.

First, we argue that our politics has perverted the true meaning of democracy: democracy is not simple majoritarianism. It also enjoins a respect for fundamental rights, of reciprocal trust and equality between citizens, and so on. A properly constituted democracy is a constitutional democracy, restrained by laws that no majority can override.

Second, we argue that many of our practices of popular authorisation are not democratic at all. The vagaries of our electoral system mean that those with a minority of votes can claim the mandate to govern; the perversions of money and the concentration of power in this society mean that the voices of the people are never really heard; and the whole process is so hijacked by a colluding political class that the “people” figure nowhere in politics.

The “people” is, on this view, merely a fiction, whose will, if such a thing exists, is constantly perverted by a tiny few.

Both responses are in some measure correct. Democracy is not only majority rule in any simple sense of the term. And the institutional configurations of our society often subvert the practice of democracy. But both these responses also miss the gravity of the challenge we face; they are platitudes that help us avoid the true depth and disquiet of our predicament. It is all very well to remind oneself that a properly functioning democracy is also a democracy restrained from the outside, as it were, by constitutional norms.

But if sufficiently large numbers of citizens are willing to acquiesce in riding rough shod over those norms, an appeal to them begins to look practically and politically very thin.

In most of our debates over political reform, in all our attempts to seek correctives for the wrongs of our politics, we are increasingly tempted by non-elected institutions: new laws, new commissions, courts, independent tribunals and constitutional reform.

We appeal to these institutions to uphold the core values and aspirations of democracy in the face of the fact that our practices of popular authorisation often put fundamental values at risk. These institutions are, admittedly, part of the thicket of checks and balances that maintain such liberties as we possess.

In the absence of collective political effort, these institutions will have limited capacity for bringing about change. But a continual reliance on them is a tacit admission that a democracy cannot be trusted to run itself; and a democracy that relies too much on practices outside of politics to preserve itself is very likely to perish. John Locke, a theorist who knew a thing or two about rights that no democracy can abridge, was more prescient in suggesting that if the people ever go wrong there is little one can do but appeal to Heaven.

The second claim that a political class consistently subverts the true wishes of the people is in some sense obviously true. But it also begs as many questions as it answers. We all know collective action by citizens is difficult, we all know the pressures of ordinary life make sustained attention to politics a tricky affair, and we all know the design of our institutions makes popular participation in politics difficult.

It is worth wondering whether this is the entire story. This is, as it were, a supply side story about the quality of our participation. What about the demand side? Even making due allowances for all the difficulties mentioned above, are the nature and character of our participation as citizens in the political process such that they can inspire confidence? Are our attention, allegiances and judgement such that they create spaces for unpalatable characters and ideologies to speak in our name? Is our institutional structure what it is because we, as citizens, are not setting the right incentives for our representatives?

I should stress that any failings among the electorate have very little to do with income, education or class. After all, it is our middle and privileged classes that are becoming the seedbeds of political intolerance and abdication of political duties. But it is time we jettisoned the convenient fiction that we, as citizens, are somehow not complicit in the corruptions of our politics.

One cannot and ought not to indict whole peoples; but the myth of “our innocence” as opposed to the depredations of those who rule in our name is becoming one of the most debilitating obstacles to self-examination that a democracy requires.

This plea to not to readily excuse ourselves for the state of our politics comes from the conviction that only a democracy can correct itself. If the people’s allegiances and sentiments are corrupted, no institutional or political reform will be able to save us.

When popular authorisation, however imperfectly, is institutionalised, only the people can be their own instruments, only they can retrieve their own mistakes and those of their rulers. But it is a precondition of our trying to retrieve our mistakes that we understand that some of them might be our mistakes.

We seem to be tying ourselves in knots trying to reconcile federalism with secularism, Parliament’s authority with that of state governments, fundamental rights versus the authority of legislatures. But, in the final analysis it is not simply our politicians or the formal structures of authority that will determine the kind of society we live in. It will be our judgement, and the values we hold ourselves beholden to. We all ought to acknowledge that sometimes democracies can be complicit in evil.

To say this is not to make an anti-democratic argument. Rather, we ought to consider the proposition that too easily exonerating ourselves is a subversion of democracy. For consistently presenting our politics as a conspiracy of the few against the many can often be a way of suggesting that we are, as citizens, somehow not responsible for the consequences of the political choices we make.

And exonerating ourselves too easily is often to misdiagnose what can save us. The truth is only we can save ourselves, not leaders, not politicians, not laws and, God knows, not heaven.

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The writer is professor of philosophy and law and governance at JNU, New Delhi