People tend to take the concept of democracy for granted. Commenting on it recently, a friend of mine added that democracy is a form of life that exists like an old brand name. It needs a renewal of both the problem it addresses and its poignancy. One can’t keep going back to the cliché of its Greek roots. It needs to explore new forms of indigeneity.
Democracy continues only if it is reinvented again and again. For this, it needs a different kind of storytelling and a different sense of philosophy. It needs to be reworked almost like a fresh pedagogic exercise.
One must begin with the fact that democracy needs a new theory of nature. Christian cosmology tended to see nature more as a utility, a commodity—something to be subjected to cost-benefit analysis. Now, several new theories of nature are being elaborated within science. Outstanding among these is the idea of Gaia formulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margilus. The hypothesis holds that nature should be treated not just as collection of higher mammals—the virus plays an equally important role.
Lovelock showed that for over a million years, it was the viruses that sustained the atmosphere. One needs a social contract in a multiverse where trees, roots, bacteria, animals, humans interact in a more complex way. It is the sins of nature and cosmologies associated with it that one needs to develop a new sense of the sacred, a new kind of interactivity. An evolutionary worldview that links life, lifeworld, lifestyle, livelihood and lifecycle—the five Ls, as I call them.
Today, when we ask whether trees have a legal standing or animals have rights, we are asking about a different kind of nature. This is a nature which not only has rights but a different sense of interconnectivity. Without such a sense of nature, democracy cannot sustain itself. It will be completely barren as an ecological imagination. A philosopher friend of mine pointed out that democracy needs new complexity and connectivity. He told me a story to illustrate this.
A few decades ago, the dodo disappeared from New Zealand. Its extinction had a major impact. Many trees disappeared after that. A zoologist exploring this erasure realised that the bird was ingesting seeds with strong endocarps. The digestive system of the dodo would wear away the strong shell and let the seeds germinate. It is this sense of connectivity that democracy has to capture.
C V Seshadri, for example, pointed out that the sea has to be an ecological part of the constitutional imagination. An India without the sea-side is unimaginable in any constitution. Such an understanding would have given us a different understanding of the Nicobar, Bundelkhand and the Aravalli projects today.
The second thing one needs to look at is the changing nature of violence today. To use Hannah Arendt’s theory, democracy today has banalised violence. Violence has become part of everyday life. Violence today has become more innovative than science. It includes obsolescence, triage, genocide phenomenon which go far beyond brutality. The recent examples of varied kinds show that violence has become an act of consumption. The replay of violence is a ritual part of the event today. Violence has to be consumed again and again to acquire a particular quality. Violence today has to grasp the concentration camp and the nuclear bomb.
Democracy needs a new theory of problem solving. Even Satyagraha needs a new theory of mass violence. The amount of people lost is something statistics do not face. Democracy is desperately a fresh census of violence that goes beyond formal events and chronicles which disappear in silence. This raises the question of citizenship and other concepts that democracy is currently using.
One of the crises that democracy is facing is the erosion of concepts confronting within the democratic imagination. Central to this is the idea of citizenship. Citizenship, once a testament to democracy and a guarantee of rights, has now become an empty term. It has become both tenuous and temporary. Between the Election Commission and refugee committees, they leave behind little of citizenship that is human. The very concepts like minority and marginality rather than being life giving have eaten into the life and blood of democracy.
Democracy needs to revitalise citizenship and needs a new concept of concepts. The recent elections—whether in Bengal or in Assam—show that democracy in its own variant and banal way can erode the idea of citizenship. In fact, it leads us to confront the ironies of democracy. Several times, even elections seem like an exercise of choices between alternative authoritarianisms, like the one in Bengal. This is the ultimate irony. The recent controversy around the Chief Justice of India’s ‘cockroach’ remark, despite subsequent clarification, revealed how quickly democratic discourse slips into metaphors of contamination, suspicion and exclusion. When citizens, critics or unemployed youth are described through the imagery of parasites and infestation, democracy ceases to nurture citizenship and begins to police it as legitimacy.
It is in this context that a friend of mine pointed out that mere legislation is not enough. A right to information is an absolute necessity, but a right to memory and to oral memory is also an important asset. Memory is both ecological and lifegiving. One needs memory to protect all life forms. Memory becomes a source of invention and new ways of looking. It is in this context that one must emphasise that old forms of democracy and electoral reincarnations are not enough. One needs memory and invention in every sense of the term. In fact, democracy needs to be more inventive than science to sustain itself.
The challenges facing democracy go beyond what the Greeks or the Romans imagined. Democracy needs to breathe different kinds of time, be futuristic before it can always dream of alternative imaginations. And it is this necessity of alternative imaginations that haunts democracy. It needs a new language and new dreams of alternatives. One must admit, however, that solutions are appearing but they are slow for adoption. One thinks of the idea of cognitive justice to mediate between knowledge systems, the institutions of the knowledge panchayat to discuss.
Finally, the idea of the tacit constitution. Democracy needs a new unconscious, a feeling for myths which is embodied in the informal cosmologies that surround the Constitution. A tacit constitution can be a tremendous source of redemption.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)