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conflict between the claims of state power and the rights of individual citizens. In France and continental Europe, on the other hand, democracy was seen as a means to reconcile a society at war with itself: where there were fierce divisions along partisan lines, marked by revolution and civil and religious wars. Democracy in those countries offered a way of resolving conflict between groups who sought to capture the state and to turn it to their own purposes—to build a revolutionary future, for instance, or restore a usurped monarchy. In each case, distinctive forms of political representation were invented. In the Anglo-American model, a random mix of citizens in a defined unit of territory were asked to choose a single person to represent their interests. Once elected, the representative was expected to exercise judgement not just in favour of all within his territory but in the interests of the nation as a whole. This model, organized as parties of government and opposition, worked to check overweening powers accruing to the executive. In many parts of the continental European model, the idea of representation was somewhat different. Here, the elected assembly was supposed to reflect, in proportional measure, the political affiliations, social composition and religious beliefs of the electorate. Electoral systems were not designed to represent mixed territorial constituencies—rather, they aimed to entrench in the political system the existing antagonisms of the social order, and so to mitigate their destructive capacities. In the Indian case, representative democracy served to legitimise an inherited, largely undamaged colonial state. But, and more importantly, its purpose was also to politicize a social order at once rigid and
riven by local loyalties. The problem Indian democracy had to address was the idea that certain forms of identity—whether of religion, of caste, or of language and culture—were primary and could trump other claims. By drawing such groups into political and electoral competition, the founders hoped to make those groups more malleable, and thereby neutralize their potential to corrode India’s unity. Still, they immediately qualified the model of territorial representation that they adopted—single members representing geographical constituencies—by creating reserved seats for the lowest castes. Electoral democracy alone could not lead to the social justice to which the founders were committed, and so from early on they used law and administrative means to balance democratic numbers. What we seem to have forgotten, 60 years on, is that those special provisions were conceived as temporary ones—expedients that the founders never envisioned as permanent features of the system. And indeed, reservations can make sense if thought of as something like a stimulus package—to kick-start participation in public life by excluded groups. Yet not only have we failed to devise exit strategies from such stimulus measures, we’ve actually gone on expanding them further—with the result that we are fundamentally redefining the nature and purpose of our representative democracy. Political representation is by definition a claim to speak on behalf of others. As such, it is an inescapably political idea, since it is always open to active dispute. When Gandhi declared, ‘‘I am a Harijan”, when Nehru claimed to represent all Indians, Muslim and
ARVIND YADAV/HINDUSTAN TIMES
Dissenters: (above) Bahu jan Samaj Party president Mayawati; and (from left) Mulayam Singh, Lalu Prasad and Sharad Yadav are among the prime critics of the Bill. non-Muslim, their claims had to be sustained by arguments and actions. And their claims were vigorously disputed, by men like Ambedkar and Jinnah: men whose own arguments invoked their identities (to bolster their claims to be more authentic spokesmen) but also appealed to reasoned views about social justice and minority protections. We are now unravelling that idea of political representation. We have embraced a politics in which claims have to be prefaced by the locution: “As a…” after which one inserts one’s caste, gender or cultural identity in order to silence other arguments. This “As a-ism” marks the triumph of an idea of democracy as expressive of social voice rather than representative of political vision.
In such a democracy, if one can assert an identity between leaders and followers, then leaders no longer need account for their actions. Thus, when an elected Dalit woman leader arranges to have herself festooned with a wreath of thousands of Rs1,000 notes, merely the latest display of her amassed illegitimate wealth, she relies on her identity to absolve any need to explain her actions. Her wealth avenges the past oppressions of “her” people. As the most important decision maker in India’s largest state, she doesn’t have to actually do anything—just be. At her worst, she exemplifies our new national motto: not “Just do it”, but “Just be it”. Reasoned action has ceded place to stupefied being. But in far more places across our land, we seem to have moved from a view of reservations as a necessary if regrettable supplement to the workings of representative democracy to one where reservations are the basic operative principle of the system. And with that comes a troubling irony. The great achievement of 60 years of Indian democracy has been to politicize the social order: to transform apparently age-old social allegiances—of caste, religion and culture—into allegiances of political choice. The great risk, now, is that we will accomplish the reverse: socialize the political order, and entrench within it social identities and divisions. Sunil Khilnani is the author of The Idea of India and is currently working on a new book, The Great Power Game: India in the New World. Write to him at publiceye@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Sunil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/sunilkhilnani