What is Democracy?
Democracy is a word we have learnt to take for granted. Living in a democracy, we are used to having the word thrown around everywhere-by politicians, social scientists, historians, the media and so on. However, to understand the essence of democracy as we know it know, it is important that we trace back its roots in history.
The word democracy has its etymological origins in Greek, formed of the words demos and kratia literally means rule of the people. Indeed, this form of social organization, where the people were literally the government existed in ancient Greece, specifically in Athens, where people would literally meet to take civic decisions. This idea was not without flaws, as not everyone was represented, with a handful of slave owning males taking all the decisions.
Fast forward to 1776-On the 4th of July the 13 British colonies in North America declare independence to form the United States Of America(USA). The values upon which this nation was to be built was enshrined in the Declaration Of Independence which outlined the idea of democracy with the famous phrase given by Thomas Jefferson-all men are equal. Let us delineate this phrase. In principle, it means that all human beings have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that governments are instituted to secure this happiness with the consent of the governed. It is like a contract between the citizens and their representatives, where the former give the latter the power to represent their interests.
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To have such an idea that ran contrary to the status quoist notions of monarchy was itself an absurdly revolutionary act. To say that men not only had liberty but were created equal was absolutely unheard of at that stage! This sentiment was echoed again at the famous Gettysburg Address made by Abraham Lincoln who said that the “unfinished work” of those who died for these values must continue so that “government of the people, for the people, by the people shall not perish from the earth”.
The Lincolnian conception of democracy remains a benchmark that all governments strive for. From Athens to now has been a long journey, with more and more people being involved in the decision making process. From all men are created equal, we moved on to the idea of universal suffrage where all adults have the right to vote, after women were granted the right to vote only in 1948 in the US. Another stratifier that prevented the expanse of democracy to all people was race, where there were policies like the Jim Crow laws in the US, which destroyed decades of progress made in securing equal rights for the Blacks. It was only after a sustained campaign by Martin Luther King Junior, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, and many others that President Johnson undid years of segregation policies to allow Black citizens to vote, irrespective of their educational qualification, age or sex.
Since then, democracy has become quite a popular form of political organization, with many nations wanting to be identified as democracies. To place the contemporary 20th/21st century idea of democracy in context, let us look at few other ways of organizing governments. If there is a single ruler, in whose hands the complete power to rule, represent and make decisions is vested it is called a monarchy, with the ruler being a king/queen. There are still some monarchies in the world today, in countries like Saudi Arabia. Countries where a few individuals have power is called an oligarchy;Russia is a prescient example. Another form of rule, which is known to be the direct opposite of democracy is dictatorship, which is again a one-person rule, except that there is no lineage of royal family like in monarchy. A dictator often takes over in times of popular dissent against the ruling establishment, and abolishes all other forms of rule and rules as he/she pleases. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are good examples
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Discussions around democracy in contemporary times have been around the conceptions of what kinds of rights should a democracy provide its citizens, how independent the press is, how much state sponsored violence is prevalant, and most importantly, how secure the minorities are. We shall explore some of these aspects and a lot more over the nedt few posts. Stay tuned!
References
http://www.historytoday.com/robert-hole/american-declaration-independence-july-4th-1776
http://play.tojsiab.com/cHZQQ1lxS1pQM1kz
India-An Imperfect Democracy
When India won freedom from colonial rule, our forefathers envisioned India as a parliamentary representative democracy, based on universal franchise, enshrined in the Constitutional principles of liberty, equality, fraternity, and sovereignty. However, with India being a diverse country with many imperfections, this looked like a daunting task to achieve. No qualms were made by Dr. Ambedkar, who said that we would slip back into a dictatorship unless we kept three important things in mind
- The method of bloody revolution had to be abandoned, and all the disputes we face from now on must be resolved within the constitutional framework.
- In democratic India, we can be grateful or thankful to our political masters, but there is absolutely no room for hero worship, as that is the sure road to degradation.
- Finally, we must strive not only for political democracy, but social democracy as the former has no meaning without the latter, and this can only be achieved by the holy trinity of liberty, equality and fraternity.
The third point especially strikes a chord even today. We had a class discussion where we discussed which rights were being violated the most in the last 20 years or so, and almost the entire class converged on The Right To Equality. I think governments around the world, not just India, are violating this right. In India, as Ambedkar rightly pointed out there is political equality in sense of universal suffrage, free and fair elections and so on, but great discrepancies when it comes to social and economic equality. Rather than the nation-state, I think this is a problem of how we organize our political and economic systems, which force the to implement policies causing inequality. In India, we are allowing more and more FDI and private players to take charge in term of investment, without backing them up with adequate social security. Governments are not playing a good enough role in the fear of excessive spending and increasing their debt. motive of private players causes inequality as they disregard welfare. This is evident in terms of the rising income gap in India since liberalization. Similarly, a lot of policy-making in India operates without taking history into account, thus leaving inequities like caste and gender not addressed. Caste-based violence is rising(flogging of Dalits in Una, pouring acid in a well by upper caste), and the gender pay gap hasn’t fallen much. Fundamentally, I think inequality is rising because power is structured and organized in a manner that serves the interests of the few and fails to see the humanity in and India is suffering from this same problem.
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Another set of rights being violated today are those relate to immigrants and asylum. It is ridiculous to say the least that the second most populous country in the world does not have a migration policy! I think that in India, the right to seek asylum is being violated blatantly in case of Rohingya Muslims. The Rohingya Muslims are the world’s most persecuted minority and have been fleeing from Myanmar due to them being specifically targeted and ethnically cleansed in the Buddhist majority country. Many Rohingyas have landed in Jammu and some other parts of Jammu and Kashmir, seeking asylum from an unresponsive government back home. India has however unequivocally refused to grant asylum to this group, giving a number of reasons ranging from “national security concerns” to “their links with ISI”, and has decided to deport them back to Myanmar despite the turbulent situation there. India’s arguments do not hold as there hasn’t been any such established link of terrorist activities as such, except the finding of about 48 Hindu graves in Myanmar, which also arose as a reaction to the oppression of the State. A country like Bangladesh, which is much worse off compared to India in all senses of the term, has agreed to give asylum, which makes it even more morally untenable for India.
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The violation of these rights to such a large extent point to a deeper malaise within the political system, that is, the failure of representative democracy. Due to a large population, and a strong Nehruvian influence of power centralization through policies of industrialization, the Indian nation-state became heavily centralized and bureaucratized. We saw a video in class which told us how the structure of parliamentary democracy makes it inherently unresponsive to the needs of the people. There are so many power structures that it is confusing as to who an aggrieved citizen should approach for help. The intimidating bureaucracy and the arrogant politicians complete this process of alienation.
This alienation has provoked many people to take matters in their own hands to try and bring democracy back to the people. Over the next two posts, we shall explore two of these movements, and how the nation-state reacted to them.
References
The struggle to govern commons-Forest Rights Act
The struggle for democracy can is the struggle for the right to self govern. This was the mantra for multiple forest dwelling communities in India who had been systematically dispossessed by the colonial governments through legislation like The Indian Forests Act of 1927, which had nothing to do with forests. All forests were owned by the state to exploit the available natural resources, in this case, timber by the British. This law identifies an area as a forest and requires ta single official to “resettle” the resident population, which was often not done, as only the powerful were resettled and communities living in forests for years were left high and dry.
The Forest Rights Act arose as a response to this law. It grants legal recognition to traditional forest dwelling communities, as an attempt to correct prior injustice. A person identified as a forest dweller, on the basis of their time of residence and dependence on forests has three kinds of rights-Land rights, where those cultivators without documents can claim upto 4 acres, use rights-to collect medicinal herbs, patta, etc, grazing grounds/water bodies, and areas of use by nomadic pastoralists, and right to protect and conserve-which gives power to conserve the forests to the communities
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The FRA implementation has been poor so far mostly due to absence of political will, lack of coordination between central and state based nodal agencies and poor investment in monitoring and implementation. Apart from this there has been a lot of opposition to this law, especially by the forest bureaucracy and the Ministry Of Environment.
We were illuminated about the harsh realities of the struggles of the forest dwellers through a talk by Mr. Madegowda, a tribal leader and activist operational in the BRT Hills of Karnataka. Belonging to the Soliga tribe, he highlighted how the forests of BR Hills had a rich variety of flora and fauna over 574 sq km, and that the life of the tribals was intimately and inextricably linked to life in the forests, leading them to practice conservation since time immemorial. Their livelihoods depend on their collection of non-timber forest produce(NTFP), like honey, lichen, arale, amla and so on. The trees are treated as sacred groves, and never cut, irrespective of size. The area’s rich biodiversity led to it being constituted as a wildlife sanctuary in 1974. The main challenge for the tribals, post the implementation of FRA, was the formation of BR Tiger Reserve, which effectively gave the state control to demarcate the area into core and buffer areas, regulate tribal life, and so on. Mr. Madegowda elucidated on how there had to be multiple workshops conducted among the tribals to generate awareness, demand various kinds of rights, from conservation to community rights to the right to graze cattle and so on. The struggles led to a to and fro between the state and the tribes with memos and demands circulated at the district and state level, with the tribals organizing themselves into well formed groups. He stressed how victory was possible and the community got their rights in 2011 only because of the heightened awareness and quick political action taken.
Finally, he told us how the tribals perform a variety of serviced which help not just the forest but also the government. They control forest fires, remove parasites, plant trees, build check dams, provide information about poachers and so on. There are so many forms of knowledge that the community possesses and which the government can benefit from, but only if they respect the tribes, study their practices and knowledge systems with the intention of doing them benefit and mutually cooperating with them. Only then was there scope for reconciliation.
The success of the Soligas is a huge victory for democracy in its truest sense. Another such success story was scripted in Rajasthan. Read on to find out.
References
http://www.thehansindia.com/posts/index/Columnist/2015-09-29/Tribals-forest-rights-trampled-/178215
“What Is This Act About?” The Forest Rights Act, 20 Apr. 2016, https://forestrightsact.com/what-is-this-act-about/.
“Jaanenge Toh Jeeyenge”-The Right To Information
Information is a great leveller. It is a source of transparency between the nation-state and the citizen, the governor and the governed. The gap between theory and practice, and policy and implementation are the chain of processes in between, and it is the right of every ctizen to know its government inside out. This was the premise for the struggle for the Right To Information.
Image Credits-Rajasthan Voice
The Right to Information refers to the right of the people to demand transparency and accountability from their government, in the form of various records. The struggle for Right To Information began in Rajsamand district of Rajasthan where a few villagers came together under the banner of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti and led by retired IAS officer Aruna Roy, and several other like-minded people who wanted transparency in government functioning. MKSS took up various issues which affected the daily lives of the people and this snowballed into a movement to target and end corruption by demanding RTI, which happened legally as Rajasthan passed the RTI Act in 2000.
To explain the nitty-gritties of the RTI we had a guest lecture by Rajendran Narayan, who has worked with various organizations in this sphere. He first established how the RTI is inextricably linked to NREGA ,as the struggle for information first started in Rajasthan when labourers did not receive the wages they were entitled to under NREGA for months, due to the loopholes of the wage flow between the block and the panchayats. The struggle began when, workers demanded that the muster roll, a document consisting of the attendance sheet, be made publicly available so that it can be used to prove their worksite attendance and hence claim their wages. This was met by resistance at several levels, and continued pressure by the MKSS forced the hands of the authorities in the higher levels to allow the muster rolls to be made public, which opened a can of worms, as many false claims about wages and work were proved false by the villagers. Rajendran highlighted how NREGA is like RTI as it requires proactive disclosure of information in the public domain. It also puts the onus on the government to provide for unemployment allowance, and involves the Gram Sabha in decision making, thus enhancing participatory democracy. Most importantly, RTI expands the idea of Right To Life to include Right to Work, as work expands human capabilities.
Image Credits-The Hindu
In his second talk, Rajendran went into the technical details of NREGA, and pointed out how due to constant reliance on technology and centralized systems, a lot of power gets concentrated in hands of unlikely few like computer operators and junior engineers, and how RTI is crucial to keep a system of checks and balances. This is where the concept of social audit or jan sunwai comes in, where the local people themselves hold the authorities responsible by conducting audits in teams, where the records ar verified vis a vis ground reality. He also narrated instances where the state tries to complicate procedures by handing over wage disbursement contracts to private banks, who further delegate it to private firms, who then eat up the money which they owe the villagers in forms of bonuses and profits! He concluded by highlighting how certain loopholes within the RTI needed to be worked on and highlighted how working on that is the next crucial thing we need to focus on.
With successful movements like FRA and RTI in recent times, there is some hope left for Indian democracy. But are we doing enough, or do we need more? Read on to find out!
References
http://www.rajasthanvoice.com/2010/10/mkss-mazdoor-kisan-shakti-sangathan.html
Alternatives for Democracy
Having gone through this rollercoaster ride through the twisted tracks of democracy, we now know that democracy in the modern nation-state has some features. With its origins in the US and spreading across Europe and eventually Asia, post the 1940s and 1950s a key driver of modern democracy is Industrialism. The main measure of development is productivity and the economics of such a democracy is to industrialize the nation. This was mostly driven by the state in some democracies and by the private sector.
Democracy as we know it today is mostly representative, as in we elect some people to represent us, at appropriate law making forums while the people are not directly involved in decision making. A key trend has been that people’s trust in their representatives is fast eroding with the rise of money and muscle power in politics taking center stage, and people’s issues remaining unresolved for decades. Other than that it is often seen that the industrial nation-state’s interests clash with those of the people, as it functions like an autonomous unit, with its own mind and brain, mission and vision, and administrative machinery, forgetting that its power is derived from the very people it is trying to thwart. More often than not, as we have seen, the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed are often sidelined and ignored by this nation-state, as is visible from the trends of rising wealth accumulation and inequity worldwide.
Image Credits-NDTV
Thus, alternatives have become a bare necessity. An inspiring example that has become the role model of governance for many villages across Maharashtra, is the village of Mendha Lekha. Located in the Naxal affected Gadchiroli district, this village decided to take a more active role in governing itself when it united against the building of a dam. There are multiple democratic forums within the village, with the most important one being the Gram Sabha, where all decisions related to collection of forest produce, watershed management, forest protection rules and so on. As a recognized legal local self government body, it has regular meetings, where all members of the village have a say in taking policy decisions. Apart from that, there are the Mahila Mandals, consisiting of women doing forest protection through regulation and patrolling, and the Abhay Gats, which are small study groups which study the forest, biodiversity and the natural life around the village. In 1992, a Joint Forest Management programme was set up, in collaboration with the Forest Department, where degraded lands are handed over to the villagers, who cultivate valuable timber, and take home upto 50% of the generated revenue. With many such schemes that empower people to be their own masters Mendha Lekha has become a true role model of swarajya, or self rule
Image Credits-CEECEC
Another thing which we have not spoken about much is education, which is not at all democratic, as we live in schools run in some kind of watertight hierarchies where the students have no say in what they are taught, how they learn etc. Cultivation of democratic values begins in childhood, and to create democratic citizens we now have a lot of democratic schools cropping up in India. There Waldorf Steiner inspired schools, or child centric schools like Marudam schools, where the child learns whatever he/she wants to, in close connect with the context he/ she lives in. Of course, Gandhi’s Nai Talim has always been an inspiration for education, with its learning by doing, and mind-hand-heart approach. Other philosophical alternatives like the Krishnamurti Foundation schools have been successfully running for a number of years now, along with new schools like Poorna school. Most of them are characterized by similarities like making learning relevant, giving children more autonomy by making then responsible for many decisions in the school’s governance engaging them in some form of production, teaching them a variety of subjects, designing interdisciplinary syllabi that break watertight moulds and so on.
While we have many alternatives to modern democracy, it must be noted that it is still the large pervading mainstream system, which brings us to the question-Do we need alternate systems of living altogether?
The next unit will answer that question!
References
Click to access Maharashtra_CaseStudy_Mendha_LekhaVgeGadchiroli.pdf
https://www.ndtv.com/photos/news/controversial-cartoons-in-ncert-textbooks-13029
india's futures and me 