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Musings on - A digital republic
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Where electoral democracy is still the basis of political authority and the key to social transformation, an over-emphasis on digital democracy can preclude initiatives aimed at imagining new communities, testing alliances, and securing more vibrant practical versions of the ideal of the republic. A comment by RANJIT HOSKOTE on the eve of the Republic Day.
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Photos: V.V. KRISHNAN/SHAJU JOHN/P.V. SIVAKUMAR/ THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY
Collage: K.B. JAWAHARR
THE futures of nations are born in the daydreams of typographers. While looking through the proofs of a book recently, I came upon a misprint that seemed to me to incarnate the radical transformation of collective life in our nation-state: where I had quite plainly written "modern India", the proof mysteriously said "modem India". Do spell-check programmes now routinely change "modern" to "modem", I asked myself. Democratic representation, civil liberties, the right to information, the power to communicate widely with fellow citizens, to resist oppression or official deceit: do all these now lie within the gift of an electronic device? And the republic, what of the republic, I asked myself in mounting alarm: must we all be equipped with the modem, writer and manager and artisan and farmer, in order to exercise our rights and articulate our views as citizens? Is this the instrument of miracles, which will succeed where the ballot box is seen to have failed?
For two decades now, we have translated our disenchantment with the State and its functionaries into an experimentation with alternative forms. When the State fails to deliver on the basic mandates of health and education, we turn to the NGOs; when it falls down on the housing front, we turn to developers; when social justice is denied, we have embraced public-interest litigation; when it cannot guarantee safety of life and limb, the more affluent have turned to private security agencies or caste armies, the less affluent to vigilante outfits. Most recently, as the State pushes legislation through half-empty chambers and in back rooms hidden from the TV cameras that record parliamentary proceedings for an audience habituated to long-running soaps, it appears that the real site for the discussion of vital public issues is the online community.
A digital democracy has been achieved: disclosures are made, views are aired, campaigns of protest are organised, communities are formed around specific themes. These alternative forms of discourse about public affairs do propose an energetic model of resistance to hegemonic power: they may not be able to stop war, massacre and occupation; but they can and do bring some pressure to bear on states, multinational corporations, and the United Nations. At the local level, since their strength lies in an informal structure and in tactical flexibility, such forms can expose crooked dealings, bring to light those webs of intrigue and malfeasance that remain concealed from the more established media.
The weakness of these alternative forms lies in the fact that they are condemned to the Sisyphean duty of resistance. Since they do not possess the executive authority of the State, sanctified by the contract of representation that holds the rulers and the ruled together as a society, they may speak on behalf of the people and even be heard — but we are not yet at the stage when their findings would carry the same weight as those of a government-appointed committee. Nor yet has their claim to represent the popular will or the public interest been translated into a mechanism as definitive as the general elections. And then, slow and rigid as they might be, the institutions of the State have the force of sanction, the aura of permanence on their side.
Vigorous, effective, combative and even necessary as the expressions of digital democracy may be, it could be argued that they are limited by the voluntary and transitory nature of the associations from which they arise. Also, by the fact that enthusiasm is not always identical with engagement: the online community, as serious practitioners of new-media political forms are the first to assert, cannot be effective unless it is integrally linked to offline commitments in civil society and the polity. We may click on our mouse-pads and sign petitions urging the release of prisoners of conscience or the lowering of the height of a big dam. Such instant demonstrations of feeling should not divorce us, however, from the millions of citizens living on the wrong side of the tracks in our big cities, and in the vast acreages of rural India. These are the natives of pre-modem India, who wake up to the drone of municipal bulldozers, are informed about their imminent expulsion from hereditary pastures by notices they cannot read. Where electoral democracy is still the basis of political authority and the key to social transformation, an over-emphasis on digital democracy can preclude wider initiatives aimed at imagining new communities, testing alliances, and securing more vibrant practical versions of the ideal of the republic.
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Meanwhile, in modern India. The foundational anniversary marked by Republic Day is categorised as a celebration, a moment for self-congratulation. As though, while watching the latest models of tanks, fighter planes and submarines roll by at the traditional parade in New Delhi, we were saying to ourselves: Well, despite all the internal factionalism and the multiplicity of foreign hands, it's still there, isn't it, the republic? Just about there, actually. The truth is that the republic has always been a work in progress, surviving against the odds. It has been secured, not by the ordinances of charismatic dynasts or Bonapartist generals, but through the continual interplay between State hegemony and critical resistance. Sometimes, though, the republic can come across as a work in retrogress. Our commitment to this ecumenical space, where all citizens may participate equally and have their desires and causes represented, has been placed under pressure precisely, and paradoxically, by the strengthening of that democracy which the republic is meant to sustain.
In the 1950s, the republic presupposed citizens who were defined only by their subscription to a nation-state, and to an inspiring mythology of collective progress through universal adult franchise, industrialisation, scientific advancement and the affirmation of sovereignty. All these presuppositions have been negated by the catastrophic history of post-colonial India: some by the exigencies of geo-politics, others by ecological devastation, yet others by the neglect and dilapidation of infrastructure. But no factor has more dangerously challenged the ideal of the republic than the mechanism of electoral democracy itself, as introduced into a social formation still largely feudal in its structures and perspectives, with the manifestation of brute force exacerbated by updated technologies of expansion, reach and control made available by the processes of globalisation.
In such a society, the critical question of representation is not premised on viscerally important issues such as entitlements and opportunities. Strangely, such issues lack colour when it comes to mass mobilisation. The appeal is made instead to identity, to ethnicity, caste, region and religion; the private self is constructed, for these purposes, not as a civic individual but as the bearer of an endangered collective. Recent events in western India invite us to consider these issues carefully. The attack on the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune and the destruction of its library, by activists belonging to an outfit describing itself as the Sambhaji Brigade, has justly attracted widespread condemnation. The attack, mounted in the name of preserving Maratha honour against the alleged vilification of an overseas scholar (promptly charged with every crime of Orientalism and imperialism), has resulted in an official decision to ban the study, rather than to apprehend the miscreants. While most liberal intellectuals have deplored the violence, others have expressed the classic reservation: Was it necessary for the scholar to have "raked up" a controversy? The "Letters to the Editor" columns of the Mumbai press bear testimony to appalling ignorance. One irate reader has gone so far as to demand whether "25 years of study gives Laine the right to speak on Maratha history"; doubtless an edifying diet of Bhalji Pendharkar movies is a far better qualification.
Very few among the cautious intellectuals and the vast public have read the book, although it has been widely reviewed in India before the Pune disruptions. It is doubtful whether the functionaries of the Maharashtra government have read it either. And yet, like Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses long before it, James W. Laine's Shivaji: A Hindu King in Islamic India has been proscribed; the publishers, despite their apology, have been threatened with legal action; and critical scholarship as well as the free practice of writing has been blatantly threatened with physical violence. The celebrated writer Dilip Chitre, who has supported the right to expression of ideas in this as in other cases, has had to be provided with police protection against the attentions of the Sambhaji Brigade, whose activists, needless to say, walk free.
It appears that people would march rather in the name of a medieval king or to defend their right to invoke the Divine by the loudest of the technical means possible, than in the cause of civil rights or to demand the wider availability of basic food supplies. It is evident that people can be roused to inflammatory levels of passion by perceived insults to their ethnic heroes or their regional languages, while remaining apathetic on the issues of public health and literacy. The phantoms of ideology have prevailed over the materiality of want and need.
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