The democratic temper of India

In my last column (I’m on TV, that’s why I’m angry, September 30) we looked at what “civil society” means. How can civil society impact law-making?
In a democracy, there are specific rights accorded to citizens by the state to help them exercise their political freedoms: freedom of speech and political association and related rights allow citizens — in other words, members of civil society — to get together, argue and discuss, debate and criticise, protest and strike, and even go on fasts and hunger strikes, in order to support or challenge their governments.

This is an essential part of promoting governmental accountability between elections: no one can seriously argue that a citizen’s democratic rights begin and end with the right to choose his government through voting alone. Indeed, as Amartya Sen so brilliantly pointed out with reference to India in his The Argumentative Indian, it is through such discussions and engagement that a deliberative democracy is created.
There is often a useful distinction between law and legitimacy: the greater the extent to which ordinary people are engaged with, concerned by and empowered to determine their own political destiny, the more they accept the decisions of the state institutions and the more legitimate the law becomes to the people.
So to that extent, civil society does and should have an influence on law-making. But that is not the same thing as saying it should have a direct role. In Switzerland, for example, ordinary citizens can actually bypass the elected legislature and write laws by voting for them in referenda that are organised by the state and whose outcomes are recognised by the government as having the full binding force of law. A few US states have adopted the same practice, most famously California. That is not the case, however, in most other democracies, where civil society’s impact is confined to the influence it is able to bring to bear on the elected law-makers, through the shaping of public opinion, effective lobbying, media campaigns and mass movements.
The current debate in India on the role of civil society should be seen in this broader context, but also in relation to the workings of our democratic system. The Indian system of parliamentary democracy has stood the test of time and is highly respected by many nations and peoples across the world. The founding fathers of our republic had been clear in their minds that the parliamentary form of democracy of the Westminster model was what they wished to establish in Independent India. This was understandable, not merely because we were demanding exactly the democracy that our colonial masters had enjoyed for themselves but denied us, but also because it could be said to suit the democratic temper of our people. Our ancient civilisation had the history of having sabhas and samitis where kingdoms were ruled on the principle of democratic functioning, extending right from the grassroots level in the form of panchayats and councils (which represented the broad as well as specific segments of the populace), to the royal courts where maharajas took advice from learned and wise elders. In this tradition, both majority and minority opinion were given due importance in the formulation of public policy.
This was no mean achievement in a nation and society as diverse and heterogeneous as India, with its innumerable groups and socio-religious identities. But it helps that the very idea of India is of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, colour, culture, cuisine, conviction, costume and custom, and still rally around a democratic consensus. That consensus is around the simple principle that in a democracy you don’t really need to agree — except on the ground rules of how you will disagree. Part of the reason for India’s democracy being respected in the world is that it has survived all the stresses and strains that have beset it, and that led so many to predict its imminent disintegration, by maintaining consensus on how to manage without consensus. Our democracy has indeed been an astonishing success for the past six and a half decades.
The working instrument of our democracy is the Constitution of India. It lays down the basic framework of our democracy, defines the roles and powers of the Legislature, the Executive and the Judiciary, delimits their jurisdictions, demarcates their responsibilities and regulates their relationships with one another and with the people. The adaptability of the Constitution to the ever changing realities of national life has effectively made it a vehicle of social change. The Constitution created itself as a self-generating and self-correcting entity, a living document that allowed for its own amendment to meet the changes of the times. In a way, it reflected the confidence in the people of this land to make adjustments to meet every new challenge to society.
Equally important, the process has been substantially facilitated by our Parliament, the institution conceived for that very purpose by the Constitution. During the past six decades of Independence, the Constitution has been amended more than 100 times by Parliament. The small-minded may consider this as one of its weaknesses, but those with a broader vision would understand that it is actually a sign of its inherent strength — a strength that derives from its ability to be flexible without the risk of self-destruction. It has the exemplary in-built ability to adjust to the needs of the times and the fact that this is enabled through a thoroughly democratic and representative process has been the key to its effectiveness in moving our society forward in a democratic and reasonably efficient manner.
So how do we reconcile civil society, the Constitution and Parliament in making laws that respond to pressures arising from within our society? More in my next column.

The writer is a member of Parliament from Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram constituency