My brother's arrest has given me much cause for reflecting on the nature of the the democracies that we - the privileged and comfortable - now live in. Many often defend the notion that India is the world's largest democracy. I sometimes say so myself, recalling how successfully mass popular opinion in 2004 proved to be the undoing of the BJP at the centre as well as of the TDP in Andhra Pradesh. In both cases a smug and arrogant punditocracy had badly underestimated the power of mass opinion. The US - and I here I mean the people AND their government - regards itself as a democracy, as does the UK. Israel, too is widely regarded as the only democracy in the middle east, despite the prevalence of war crimes and apartheid against the Palestinian population in the territories that it occupies, and that it claims as part of Eretz Israel. Turkey, the country where I now live, also regards itself as a democracy, with some justification. All these countries have the formal institutional attributes of a democracy - a parliament, a supposedly independent judiciary and executive, and periodic elections where popular opinion is supposedly expressed. They also claim to have what are commonly regarded as two other invariable concomitants of a democracy - free markets and the rule of law. Indeed these countries regard themselves as so committed to free markets, democracy and the rule of law that they are prepared to sacrifice the lives of their own citizens (and many times more the lives of others) in their name.
In a recent graduation speech to the students of the UC Berkeley Department of Rhetoric, Mark Danner referred to the term "war on terror" as a "rhetorical construction", implying that it is a discursive device that shapes and channels perception, reasoning and emotions in ways that obscure rather than illuminate the truth. In the same sense, the ideas of freedom (as in "free markets"), democracy and the rule of law, in whose name the "war on terror" is being fought, are also rhetorical constructions.
What "rule of law"? My brother's arrest was reportedly ordered by the Secretary of Law in Chhattisgarh under the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act 2005 (CSPSA), and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act of 1967, modified in 2004. Further charges under sections of the Indian Penal Code of 1860 [sic!] were added later. Yesterday his judicial remand was extended for fourteen more days, yet he has not been formally charged in court. My brother has been working for most of his adult life for and with the powerless and disenfranchised workers, tribals and peasants of Chhattisgarh, sometimes even helping the state design a low cost health care system in villages. Recently he reported on the way the state-created vigilante tribal movement called Salwa Judum was killing and raping other tribals suspected of maoist sympathies in collaboration with "security" forces. These well known facts need to be recited to ask the question: WHOSE freedom and security are being protected by these laws? Furthermore, why do we, as citizens of a free and supposedly democratic country, still need a Penal Code designed by our former imperial rulers 147 years ago? You have to wonder about the law making process in our country if a law as egregious as the CSPSA can be passed all the way to the President and approved. Protests by organizations like the PUDR seem to have no effect in improving the scrutiny of such laws by those who are charged with the duty to do so.
What "freedom"? The freedom of the market in our country appears to be maintained through the bondage and deprivation of those who cannot play in it. The purpose of the state's security apparatus seems to be to deploy its legitimate monopoly of violence in favour of investors and corporations, and of the politicians that are in bed with them, not to protect the rights and property of citizens, whoever they are. Why does the Salwa Judum movement or the maoist insurrection even exist? As the work of people like my brother has revealed, it is because the tribal, dalit and the landless peasantry in many parts of India are being pushed off the land by the state to make way for "development" - industries, infrastructure like roads and dams, the exploitation of natural resources like minerals and forests. It is not lack of "development" and "socio-economic backwardness" that has created the insurrection, but the expropriatory nature of "development" itself. Compensation exists only in name, and is derisory compared to the loss of livelihood and dignity that accompanies such assertions by the state of its rights of eminent domain. And why do we expect the powerless victims of our "development" to respond to such expropriation by simply protesting peacefully, or passively accepting their fate? Because "you cannot make an omlette without breaking eggs"? Whose eggs get broken, and who gets to eat the omlette?
What "democracy"? Any close study of actually existing democracy the world over will show that the mere presence of the forms of democracy - elections, parliament, judiciary, executive - is not enough to ensure its substance. The real substance of a democracy is difficult to create, and fragile even when created. It consists, in my opinion, of four PARTs - Participation by ALL citizens (not just the more powerful or privileged among them) in public life and decision making, Accountability of power by those appointed to exercise it to those in whose name it is exercised, Responsiveness of the state to the demands of all of civil society, and Transparency of the processes by which all power is exercised. Democracy in this substantive sense cannot exist until the state functions as a servant of the people and state executives view their work as serving the people. My guess is that it should be possible to trace the failures of democracy in many countries to the lack or inadequacy of one or more of these four PARTs. Even where democracy is well entrenched in form, it is frail in substance, as the recent regression into corporate oligarchy in Britain and the US has shown. History will probably show that all so-called democracies have actually swung unevenly between an imperfect or incomplete substantive democracy with its four PARTs, and dictatorships of various kinds, both benign and malign.
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