Do you remember learning about democracy or other forms of governance in school? Or thereafter?
I do not. I am sure we must have had something on the subject. I do remember reading a civics textbook with the text of the constitution: the fundamental rights and the directive principles. Even fundamental duties. I remember, in particular, the right against exploitation, which has stuck in my mind because, to me, then as now, that seems to be one of the best rights. I remember reading how bills became acts. But I don’t remember anything about why a democracy is important to a people. Do you?
Oh, even if you do, let us talk about it again.
Why?
Because it is good to clarify things from time to time. Clarify what we stand for. Clarify what our values are and how they have changed over time. Clarify what we hope for. And clarify what kind of society we would like to live in.
Democracy has a lot to do with that last. Indeed with all of it.
So, let us talk about it.
First, what is democracy?
Let us start with this definition from Democracy: A World History.
Simply stated, democracy is a process through which people confer with each other to secure food, shelter, land, water, and peace for their mutual benefit. 1
This is barebones no doubt.
Safety and roti, kapda, aur makan (food, clothing, and shelter) are about survival. Beyond that is life. And life can be about many things. Love and friendship. Community. Cosmology. Beauty. Music and Dance. Storytelling. Science. Mysticism. Life can be about the many many things that make living something more than breathing. Life is about why we live and how we want to live. About what brings us joy.
Even so, the definition above gives an important and very basic framework for democracy. That,
Democracy is a process by which people get together to discuss how to share resources and socio-cultural space to come to a mutually acceptable understanding. It is important to remember that. It is a process, not a state. And it is collaborative. People have a hand in the discussion and the decision.
It does not have to be direct participation. Indeed, direct participation of all the members of a community or group might be difficult (but not impossible) as the groups grow larger. Thus, as the book says,
As groups of people grow larger, they usually form specialized committees to meet particular challenges.
When the groups grow larger, people get together to form institutions with members chosen through elections, subject to term limits, and working through a deliberative process to decide how to share resources and socio-cultural and political space; and to decide on the laws that would guide the process.
To sum, democracy is a process and it requires people to participate. It is a process and a practice.
But why do we need this process or a government constituted through such a process? Can’t someone else make the decisions for us? Isn’t it easier and better when we do not have to accommodate so many varied interests and instead can just listen to one, view? A most efficient and learned view?
Does democracy even work for any group bigger than ten? Or say hundred?
Really, direct democracy in small groups may all be well and good (and there can be concerns about that too), but what is the point of a representative democracy when it will always be someone else making the decisions on our behalf?
Ordinary people do not even get a say, do they?
Have you heard the story of the elephant and the tailor? You may have if you are a Malayalee. But let me not leave it to chance.
Once up on a time, in a village in South India, there lived a temple elephant named Jayabharati.2 She was quite popular. A temple elephant after all. And in Kerala, those are usually male, so she was extra special, let us say.
Walking with that attractive gait that elephants are famous for. Affectionate towards the people and children who hang around her, hoping for either a pat on the head with her trunk or a hair from her tail. Playful with her mahout. And thanks to the mahout, always ready when the temple wanted to take out a procession of the temple deity. Or when the church or the mosque nearby wanted a proud elephant to pep up their festivals. A beloved of the people in the area irrespective of caste, class, and creed. That was Jaya.
In that same village lived a tailor named Krishnan, well known for his style and craft. The richest came to him whenever they wanted a shirt or blouse that showed them off in the most opulent of arenas. The not quite rich looked with longing at his shop, dreaming of the day when they had enough to approach him for his service. The poor and the underprivileged caste folks did not even dare to darken his doorstep, alas, fearful of retaliation.
The tailor had a fondness for the temple elephant. His shop was by the side of the road that the elephant used to walk to the river where she bathed. And every morning, when she came by after her bath, he gave her a banana, with an affectionate pat on her trunk. She loved it and looked forward to the treat every morning.
One morning, as usual, the elephant came by and held out her trunk. The tailor had forgotten to get his banana. So, instead of the banana, he stuck his sharp needle into her trunk.
The elephant withdrew her trunk bewildered and hurt. She had thought that they were friends. She came to him and patted him wherever she met him. In front of his shop. In the temple. On the road. He gave her a banana every morning. Why hurt her in place of the banana?
The hurt passed, to be replaced by anger. The tailor needs to be taught a lesson, the elephant decided.
The next day, after her bath in the river, she drew a trunk full of muddy water. And on her way back, she sprayed it all on the lovely clothes the tailor had spread out, ready for the day’s work.
And that was that.
Patronage and gifts do not protect you. Not even if the ruler or the rich person is efficient, learnt, kind, compassionate, and belongs to your group or community. Any of those or all of those.
They may have a bad day and they may take it out on you. They may make bad decisions and blame you for it. They may use every tool or weapon they have to hurt you. What are you left with then? The elephant could rain down water on the tailor’s clothes. Can you? And would that help the pain?
What happens when it is not a mere pin on the trunk but an assault on your life?
It is more likely than not that a person with all that much power and no checks on them will not have any of those qualities. Power can make people cocky and teach them to not fear their own choices. To not fear their ignorance or weaknesses. That will lead to mistakes.3 Power can also make people focus on retaining that power rather than serve the public. What then?
If you are working, or plan to work, what protects you from your boss having their way with you? No matter how flimsy, what is that legal shield that makes it illegal to harass an employee? What protects you from not having to spend all your time working for a pittance? If you were to leave your company after five years, what is the basis for giving you gratuity? Your provident fund? Whatever social security you might have on retirement? Maternity leave or child care?
Forget work since everyone doesn’t work for pay and most folks who work do not yet have the protections and securities—even on paper—that the few in some sectors do have. Let us think about something else.
What protects women in marriage (or out of it) from violence to the limited extent that they are protected?
I am not asking you why domestic violence is still a thing, mind you. Or rape and harassment are still things that girls, women, boys, men, and people of any other gender all need to know about. I am asking, what protects you? And what might protect you better in future?
What shield protects Dalits from caste-based atrocities (if anything)? And what gives them a say in the government and institutional structures that we have? What guarantees them entry into temples when privileged caste people have denied them the right and continue to do so?4 What allowed underprivileged caste men and women to cover their breasts in Kerala without being taxed for it? Or use a walkway without having to step aside when a person higher up in the caste hierarchy comes along and asks for right of way?
What protects inter-caste or inter-religious marriage, and why is there a law against manual scavenging, flouted so liberally by people, businesses, and governments alike?
What protects you and allows you to live and thrive when you are a small fish in a world with quite a few big fishes?
When the law and society does not protect you, how do you find a way to make the government, and society, change their habits?
Ultimately, the only check upon oppression is the strength and effectiveness of resistance to it.5
Democracy wherever it exists—to the extent that it exists—is the result of resistance to tyranny (whether monarchist or dictatorial, ethnocracy, or plutocracy). It starts with an idea, and somewhere in the middle—not at its culmination because none of us have ever reached that stage anywhere in the world, yet—ends up with an institutional framework to discuss how to make life and society better, arrive at solutions, and then, implement them.
Democracy in practice thus has two forms that feed into each other.
One is what many people think of when they say democracy. Periodic elections. Institutions of representatives elected by the public or appointed by representatives so elected. A constitution, preferably written, that limits the excesses of the government and society and guarantees rights. Laws and rules written by the elected representatives after deliberation. And a justice system that interprets the constitution and laws and ensures that people are protected and justice is served.6 When you say India is a democracy or US is a democracy, that institutional structure could be what you mean. But that is not the only part of it.
The other part is people’s movements, protests, and small level decision making networks that allow the direct participation of people; ways for people, perhaps otherwise excluded or unheard from, to make their views heard, effecting change.7
People’s movements and protests are how we got our democracy. How that democracy ended up with vote for everyone on the first go rather than following on the footsteps of some other democracies that started by giving votes to rich (slave-owning) landowners. It is how those democracies ended up giving power to women and minoritised populations. It is how we got our Right to Information act; how the Adivasis got the Forest Rights Act; and how the people who keep our streets clean pressured the government into making their lives slightly better by giving them permanent employment and benefits (or promising to give them).8
And lest we think that protests and people’s movements are all about expanding freedoms, people’s movements are also how Chile got a coup and a dictatorial regime, India got a government that relishes attacking its minorities, and the US and Brazil got their insurrection and attack on their government buildings.9 It is how India got its book bans. People's movements can be against ethical and liberal democratic practice.
Irrespective of the ideology and intent behind it, people coming together, discussing, protesting and organising for change is part of democracy. It is how people who are unhappy with a social condition or a government decision get their voices heard by the public and the elected representatives in between and during elections. That is why a robust democracy must have space for protests and dissent.
If you are a small fish that feels helpless in unpredictable or uncontrollable socio-economic circumstances and fears being swallowed by either them or a big fish, if you are a big fish that fears being swallowed by the state (the biggest fish), or if you are a state that fears being swallowed by the people or your own fragments, democracy offers the best form of protection against such attempts. Never automatically. Always with a fight. But it does.
Democracy does not mean that the decisions taken eventually are yours or mine, or even the majority’s (given constitutional and ethical constraints that should be there on any state). Nor does it mean that the decisions will be correct and will promote the public good. What democracy ensures—when it works at least—is a framework for correction that is, in the long term, better than a one-person, one-dynasty, one-people or one-party rule.10
Democracy, in practice, does not mean that there will be no violation of human rights. That there will be no excesses of the state or the governing politicians or bureaucracy, no corruption or enrichment at the cost of the disadvantaged. That there will be no violence. What democracy offers is cultural and institutional space for holding the state accountable when such a thing happens. Something that might lead to a strengthening of our freedoms and the institutional checks on the state, so that in the future at least, a horror like the Emergency, the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, the Tsunduru massacre, the Gujarat 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom, or the current violence against Muslims, Christians, Dalits, Adivasis, and dissenters and many others like it never recurs.11
Democracy does not mean that you will always be protected from the centralisation of power. From fascism and its horrors. What democracy offers is mechanisms to check such attempts, provided you have the will, the patience, and the persistence to use them.
It is hard work.12 It needs collaboration and persuasion. It needs taking into account another’s point of view even when you disagree with them. It needs compromises. It means working together with people whom you dislike, and letting them having the same freedoms as you.13
It also needs vigilance and constant engagement, so that it is not stolen from under your nose on false pretenses. As Masha Gessen says in their rules for surviving autocracy, institutions will not save you (unless you save them first).14
However, when democracy works, it provides a pathway to happiness and the freedom to be for ever increasing numbers and groups of people.
At the very least, you will not be going to war over succession.15
In conclusion:
What is democracy: A process by which people get together to decide how to share resources and socio-cultural space.
Who is involved in a democracy: You and I and the rest of the people. Not necessarily citizens since countries like the UK allows non-citizen residents to vote and since constitutional safeguards protecting right to life and liberty as a rule should apply to non-citizens as well (those rights are inalienable16). Not necessarily residents since many countries allow overseas citizens to vote. A previously agreed up on group subject to change based on people’s movements and persuasion through ethical and material arguments.
How: Through movements, constitution, elections, institutional set up (such as the parliament, judiciary, executive, independent institutions and the press), and again movements.
Why: Best feedback and corrective mechanisms, avoids dictator’s trap, avoids succession wars, offers mechanisms for protecting the weak from the strong, and government from mob rule. Best doesn’t mean without flaws or that liberty is always guaranteed. Hence the need for practice.
Where: Everywhere. A threat to democracy anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere. And a democracy anywhere is a threat to authoritarianism anywhere (since ideas have a tendency to migrate).
When: Every when. If you need to keep your democracy, you need to practice constant or at least continual engagement and vigilance.
I hope all of you are A1 political scientists now. Discuss. And comment. Or not.
Notes
Temma Kaplan, Democracy : A World History, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2014, pp. 1-4.
I gave her a gender and a name. :) In the story I heard, before I was six years old, it is just an elephant. No background. And if you have seen old Malayalam movies, you would know why the name. :)
Charlie Warzel, “Elon Musk’s Text Messages Explain Everything,” in The Atlantic, Dec 29, 2022. URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/elon-musk-texts-twitter-purchase-exhibit-h/672595/. Read up on effective altruism. Vox: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23500014/effective-altruism-sam-bankman-fried-ftx-crypto; The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruism-and-the-question-of-complicity?utm_campaign=falcon_e4bcaa8fba22b6feb7b8c2ec1e5388d1&mbid=social_twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=twitter&utm_brand=tny.
TNM Staff, “'You’re like chappals, stay outside’: Dalits denied entry into temple in Karnataka,” The News Minute, August 17, 2019, https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/you-re-chappals-stay-outside-dalits-denied-entry-temple-karnataka-107916. Search for Dalits denied entry and you will find many such entries from many different publications. It is still a thing across the country.
Barbara Jeanne, Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” in New Left Review, 181, 1990, pp 95-118.
Though of course, who counts as a ‘person’ or people to be protected would depend on the expansiveness or limitations of your democracy.
Democracy: A World History.
NCPRI, “Brief History of the RTI Act,” http://righttoinformation.info/brief-history-of-the-rti-act/ Accessed: January 13, 2023. See also, https://www.fra.org.in/ and The Hindu Bureau, “Strike in Karnataka: What Pourakarmikas want,” The Hindu, July 01, 2022.
Democracy: A World History. Also:
Brian Klaas, “Vladimir Putin Has Fallen Into the Dictator Trap,” in The Atlantic, March 16, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/putin-dictator-trap-russia-ukraine/627064/.
K.G. Kannabiran, The Speaking Constitution: A Sisyphean Life in Law, Translated by Kalpana Kannabiran, Kindle: Harper Collins India, 11 Dec 2022, pp 11-85.
Iyad El-Baghdadi, Palestinian activist, had said this once on twitter: that the only way to get freedoms is to agree to have them for those you hate too (or something similar). I could not find the tweet but I am citing him.
Masha Gessen, “Autocracy: The Rules for Survival,” in The New York Review of Books, November 10, 2016. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2016/11/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival/?lp_txn_id=1414044.
On the most part (see insurrection, Brazil or US or Chile or Iran. Or US invasions.). But then that is the fragility of democracy, and points to the need for engagement and vigilance. And a robust press.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights, Accessed: January 13, 2023.