We need to build a deliberative democracy

Neera Chandhoke

Political Scientist

There was a time when elections in India were described as ‘the carnival of democracy’. Today, they are a theatre of war. And war has no rules. In the Mahabharata, law-giver Krishna advises deceit: recollect the killing of Karna, the tragic hero who epitomised courage, valour, honour, generosity and loyalty. Analogously, in the current elections to five Assemblies, every rule protecting human dignity has been violated. Wild allegations are thrown around, history is distorted, people are divided, the hijab becomes a core issue, poverty and unemployment are non-issues and politicians strike Faustian bargains. Political languages are turned upside down, and we no longer know who stands for what, or whether they stand for anything at all.

The unnecessary hype over elections is odd. In parliamentary democracies, elections come and go, politicians appear and disappear, and life goes on. In India, elections are a matter of life and death. Television channels carry no other news. Ministers of the Central government focus their attention on state and even panchayat elections, and pay scant attention to what they should be doing: governing the country, providing jobs, ensuring wellbeing, moderating political excesses.

Considering that every year some or the other state goes into the election mode, we are fated to live amidst this hysteria and this name-calling, this empty symbolism and even emptier rhetoric.

The solution to this problem is not one election for state Assemblies and Parliament at the same time. We will merely further the politically unwise project of homogenisation. We have to recover a sense of the place of elections in a democracy. This, of course, depends on how we conceptualise democracy. Minimalist theories of democracy suggest that this form of government is preferable because it enables a peaceful transfer of power from one set of elites to another. This justification of democracy is completely unpersuasive. It reduces citizens to mere voters. But we are shareholders. We have the right to participate in the making of decisions that affect us individually and collectively. We have the power to hold our representatives accountable.

Democracy is the only form of government that enables us to be authors of our own lives; which allows us to write our own histories. The histories we land up with may not be the histories we wanted to write, but this is not the issue. The issue is that the capacity to author our own lives, and to speak back to a history not of our own making, nurtures agency. We act, we are not acted upon. Nor should we be spoken down to, or even spoken of without our authorisation and our consent.

We are social beings. We can hardly write our own histories without others, without their knowledge, their moral judgments, their solidarity, and their compassion. We write histories of ourselves amidst others. This is the basis of substantive democracy. It concentrates on the creation of a deliberative community. In this metaphorical space, citizens engage with each other on issues that are of common, and of public concern, as equals.

The notion of democracy as deliberation has become even more important today because we have realised that plural societies like ours confront a major problem. How do people who subscribe to different conceptions of the good, who speak different languages, and who worship different gods learn to live together in some degree of harmony?

Our power elite will try and intensify differences, because this benefits them. They reduce politics to administration. But democratic politics resists invisibility. Therefore, one politically viable alternative is to initiate a conversation among ourselves, to create a deliberative community, and just connect. This enables us to make the move from a purely ‘self-regarding’ perspective to an ‘other-regarding’ one. Through deliberation, we establish that we respect others as free and equal partners. And this by itself contributes to the ironing out of senseless conflicts that arise out of the lack of recognition.

It is not easy to create and sustain a deliberative community. We live in an unequal world. There will always be conflict over land, over distribution of resources, between castes, between religious communities, between ideas of what our society is and what it should be, over nation and nationalism, and over ideologies. There will be no one version of which procedure to iron out differences is fair and just.

But then, there is no such thing as a post-conflict society, as Plato had envisaged. We cannot be sure that reason will rule over passion or, that if only philosophers become kings or kings are philosophers, we will secure harmony. We have to live with conflict the way we live with our own selves as divided and troubled souls. We may reject Plato’s notion of an ideal society, but we have to accept that our city or our country reflects divisions of our souls and fragments of ourselves.

When we are troubled, we talk to a friend, and sort out our problems. Similarly, members of a deliberative community have to keep a conversation going to resolve issues. Elections are but one moment, albeit a defining one, in a democratic life.

Democracy is not about the ruler and the ruled, it is about the ruled holding the ruler to account by the creation of a deliberative community. It is time to reject the notion of democracy as elections and to reinstate the notion of democracy as deliberation that allows us to author our own histories.

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