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Democracy as a universal value

Nickolas Hoog - 2/23/2009

Democracy while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.

John Adams, the second President of the United States, and one of the founding fathers of our contemporary capitalist democracy.

As part of the Western imagination, democracy, as a universal value, is believed to be a fundamental prerequisite to the creation of a modern nation-state. In our contemporary history, other forms of government are considered by many in the West - and are particularly portrayed in the media - as antiquated, barbaric, backwards and even suffocating to the populations they govern. Put simply, democracy is accepted by many as a given, something that should just be; and the few intellectuals who do challenge even the most basic principals of democracy are vilified with associations to "communists," "anti-capitalists," and "dictators."

The fundamental practices of democracy speak for themselves: the inevitability of democratic elections (whether in the West or East), by virtue of its processes, is that the majority vote is represented while minority beliefs and rights are set to the sidelines of the dominant ideological arena where they hope to find representation in laws of civic and governmental jurisprudence. In this way, it is easy to see that while democracy may semi-function in a society that values individualism, it proves to be even less practical - and even conflicting - in a sectarian society, particularly in South Asia where the mantra of British colonialism focused on the ideas of enumerative authority and divide and conquer, which segregated diverse communities into political rivals.

The question here this: is democracy always the best governmental technology? In a region of the world where land and people have been chopped apart through the lens of Western Enlightenment, how can it truly unify into a Utopian idea of universal nationalism and individual democracy, which relies so heavily on the foundation of heterogeneous empty time?

As Partha Chatterjee points to so cleverly in "The Nation in Heterogeneous Time," the basic principals of democracy are fundamentally flawed, especially in contemporary South Asia. He states that a conflict "lies at the heart of modern politics in most of the world. It is the opposition between the universal ideal of civic nationalism, based on individual freedoms and equal rights irrespective of distinctions of religion, race, language or culture, and the particular demands of cultural identity" [Chatterjee, pg. 4], which builds the foundation that individuals exist in two dimensions: at a personal, individual level, but also as part of some group(s). These group memberships help us to identify ourselves as an individual (through symbolic representations), but also as part of a greater whole; and our solidarity to these groups can be just as strong - and in some cases stronger – than ideas that we hold of nationalism and democracy, like holding Islam, Hinduism or Christianity as the central formation of one's character, as opposed to being a part of Indian nationalism first.

As Chatterjee explains, the ideas of civic nationalism relies heavily on the non-existence of group memberships and identities – but most people do have a language, culture, race and religion that we can be, and sometimes are, partial toward. Universal nationalism exists only in the Western imagination, as people are not one-dimensional drones, who only consider themselves to be a part of a nation, and nothing else.

Nobel Prize winner, Amartya Sen, argues in his essay, "Why not India?" that Indian democracy makes sense in its contemporary setting. As a vocal capitalist, he believes that democracy has not led to the economic or many social problems that India faces today. Instead, he severely downplays block voting in India, writing that:

While the outcome of political elections will certainly - and appropriately - depend on the force of numbers [it is impossible to determine the majority because] the majority cannot be identified, given the competing claims of religion, class, language, culture, political convictions, and so on. The statistical argument is ultimately misconstrued and hollow [pg. 45].

Sen's argument is essentially that bloc voting, or rather the majority, does not exist because people vote for many different reasons. Because people think about and consider many things when voting, no one votes pluralistically. But, while people are not homogenous drones, who vote according to a single principal and for a single reason, the roles that social relationships play in our daily lives - and especially the roles that they play in our public activities - cannot be underestimated. One thing that must be noted here and highlighted is that the current political turmoil in South Asia is not indigenous to the region, and it does not stretch back into the vastness of time, but is rather a contemporary one.

British colonialism, so Sen overlooks, reshaped identities and redefined how the people of South Asia think about themselves. The discursive practices and enumerative quantification of lands and bodies under British colonialism reshaped ideas of self in India, realigned group memberships, religion, class, and what it means to be Indian and modern. The chiseling of a communally diverse population into fragmented groups (under the plan of "divide and conquer"), have paved the way for political turmoil, as groups, sects, castes, religious groups and “untouchables” use the pedagogy of modern politics to mobilize themselves collectively in the political and social hierarchy of Indian society as it continues to develop into a global, social and economic enterprise.
As, David Scott explains in "Community, Number and the Ethos of Democracy," "there is to be found in liberalism (whether implicitly or explicitly) an account of the relation between individuals and their membership in a community or culture. Modern liberal democracy is inseparable from statistical principals"[Scott, pg. 186-187].

The tension between public and private selves in South Asia, so David Scott explains, plays a relevant role in modern politics, as there is "an intimate connection between modern political legitimacy and the rationality of numbers" [Scott, pg. 163] and that "democratic and electoral institutions are being accepted and even demanded, but the modern principal of political equality that goes with them has not yet been full grasped" [Scott, pg. 164]. When democracy is used as a device of mobilization, bloc voting, and the like, as it often is, does democracy live up to its ideal that it protects individuals from stringent sovereignty or are democratic societies - particularly in South Asia - living under the tyranny of the majority?

The focus of individual enumerative worth in South Asia, particularly in India and Sri Lanka, as David Scott and Partha Chatterjee point to, was not about an individual ego standing for themselves, as Sen assumes, but about the individual, who is a part of, and represents numerically, a collective whole. "Unlike utopian claims of universal nationalism, the politics of heterogeneity can never claim to yield a general formula for all peoples at all times: its solutions are always strategic, contextual, historically specific and, inevitably, provisional" [Chatterjee, pg. 22]. Political nationalism, in this way, creates a series of problems that are central to diplomatically handling and representing the minority in a majoritarian democracy [Scott, pg. 160].

In the Western "modernized" East, Democracy has "thrown open the bastions of caste privilege to attack from the representatives of oppressed groups organized into electoral majorities" [Chatterjee, pg. 25]. Chatterjee show us that: It is morally illegitimate to uphold the universalist ideals of nationalism without simultaneously demanding that the politics spawned by governmentality be recognized as an equally legitimate part of the real time-space of the modern political life of the nation. Without it, governmental technologies will continue to proliferate and serve, much as they did in the colonial era, as manipulable instruments of class rule in a global capitalist order.

Hilton L. Root, in "Capital and Collusion," writes a compelling argument about what Chatterjee explains. Root shows us how bloc voting has become deeply rooted in Indian politics, revealing how some Indian politicians exploit and manipulate ethnic fragmentation to their full advantage. He writes that:

Bloc voting allows a few barons of power to control large numbers of voters. In the predominantly rural stats such as Bihar and Orissa, the poor, who depend on upper-caste landlords for their livelihood, cannot afford to vote independently of the wishes of their patrons. The village "big men" must in turn be loyal to patrons they depend on higher up, so that a senior member of the patronage chain ends up controlling a large number of votes. Candidates for political office can assemble the votes for an electoral victory just by backing a few key clients. Thus bloc voting allows democratic selection processes to be circumvented by small coalitions.

In this way, we can see not only some of the social politics of democracy in India, but also the economics that shape some views and votes at polling stations. What is interesting here is that fractionalized groups can play to the full advantage of elite, upper-class politicians, and, realizing this, many political leaders in India not only manipulate the social arena to gain votes but thrive on it. Root also points out that "ethnic fragmentation is a strong incentive for bloc voting to emerge," and he explains that "imams of the prominent mosques n India employ the logic of bloc voting to control the votes of their followers simply by issuing a fatwa." While it is not interesting that some religious institutions in India take political stances (as this tends to be the case in just about every society in the world) what is noteworthy is that "before the national election, the contending players would turn to Old Delhi's Jama Masjid to influence the imam's call to the Muslims to vote for a particular party. Political observers believe the imam's edict helped turn the Muslim vote against Indira Gandhi in the post-Emergency elections." This shows us that bloc voting has been institutionalized by some politicians, who exploit ethnic segregation and religious fragmentation for their personal career growth and economic gain. The use of religious and social institutions as political mechanisms is compelling in the make-up of contemporary democracy in India; and, I would suggest that the failures of democracy are not just symptomatic of democracy playing out in the development of the “third world,” as many scholars contend, but is perhaps deeply rooted in the very backbone of democracy worldwide and in the things that we take as natural and given.

The struggle involved when gaining power and control over others in a political system that values the majority and sidelines the minority, is cause for concern in a highly fractionalized society. Ideas that universal nationalism and heterogeneous empty time exists outside of the Western imagination need to be further explored, and the superiority of democracy as a modern governmental technology needs to be heavily and further scrutinized.

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