One of the most dangerous things Indian democracy could do is dabble in the politics of clichés. Democracy as a system can outlay conformity, habit and everydayness. But cliché represents a collective hardening of thought that gets more heartless over time. Cliché, which derives from repeatedness of print, disowns orality as a mode of thinking. Indian democracy, because it disowns orality, has become a failure of memory.
Cliché is a global habit—as mediocrity, it has combined with authoritarianism worldwide. We can see examples in the US’ Donald Trump, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and even our PM Narendra Modi. The combination of mediocrity and majoritarianism leads to grim prospects of authoritarianism.
One party we hoped would challenge it was the Aam Aadmi Party. It sensed the primordialism and immediacy of protest. One could see it in Anna Hazare’s dramatics.
However, over time, AAP has become committed to the bureaucracy of continuity and competence. What was supposed to be a meeting place for eccentrics and dissenters became one for professionals and bureaucrats.
AAP today behaves like any other party.
As a result, it has lost its sense of charisma, a possibility of creating innovative and dissenting spaces. Delhi would have seen something beyond Lutyens’ Delhi, but AAP failed to keep its promise.
Indian politics is at a standstill today.
Hysteria becomes a substitute for political dynamism and family decline, an equivalent of institutional decline. There is a third point we must emphasise beyond mediocrity and authoritarianism: the very thinking of parties has turned fuddy and repetitive.
Currently, there are two ways of thinking about parties.
One represents the symbolic and representational, and the other the immediate and innovative. The direct democracy movement is a rare example of the latter. One must emphasise that most thinking about parties is representational. One must add that modern semiotics has shown such representation does not go far—that in India, citizenship is more a promissory note, a myth rather than a guarantee of a beginning. It regularises which smells of permanence haunt these encounters.
Semiotics points out that citizenship can be seen as being incomplete. A citizen is subject to role theory. She is either a consumer, a reader, a spectator, or a critic—she is never all of these at once.
This was brought out in the memorable Kitty Genovese incident. Genovese was walking back late one day in 1964 in the New York suburbs. She felt she was being stalked and tried to run, but was attacked by the stalker. As she screamed, the lights of the nearby flats came on. The stalker ran away at first, only to realise that people were just watching. He murdered Kitty, stabbing her over a dozen times. The next day, sociologists found that most people thought they were watching TV. They only considered themselves spectators.
Between the incompleteness of citizenship and the partiality of the role, politics has become schizophrenic. The whole is never more than a sum of the impoverished parts. What we need is a different concept—a different sense of politics that is more innovative, more dynamic and a bit less abstract. AAP tried to do this for a short while, but closed shop like a theatre group that had run its day.
We need a new theory of innovations. We need to dip into memory. The Indian national movement was more poetic about childhood. It was more theoretical about children as an anticipation of citizenship. Whether one reads Tagore or Gandhi or Patrick Geddes, one realises that childhood was seen as hope of deeper ethnographic playfulness. Childhood was seen as anticipating the innovation of citizenship.
We need new notions of childhood to replace the arid ones of school and society. The very idea of development has destroyed the potential of childhood. The source of innovation, the ideas of Maria Montessori and Jiddu Krishnamurti, and the power of folklore have to be relived through childhood.
Childhood also has to be seen as a right of passage with responsibilities of adulthood, and yet has to prevent adulthood from degenerating into a bureaucratic science. A reinvention of childhood as citizenship has to be one of the first goals of a political party. In reinventing childhood, it reinvents self.
Political parties have become sources of standardisation. We look at the marginal as a source of quota and reservation. We don’t see him as a possibility for diversity. Today, we ask if the Indian economy is 90 percent informal, then what happens to economics? We can ask similar questions about politics. It is only by sustaining the memory of diversity that Indian democracy can remain diverse in the future.
We also have to look at our institutions closely. We need to invent new institutions—one of the most interesting suggestions in recent times has been knowledge panchayats. This represents a group of diverse people, from housewives to farmers, debating the fate of policy. Policy cannot be democratic unless people debate and internalise it.
For example, the Narmada dams were a technocratic answer to a technocratic question—questions of democracy and diversity hardly entered the debate. We lobotomised citizenship, considering the citizen not a thinker any longer.
We have to see each citizen as a repository of knowledge, as a thinker, as a philosopher and as a potential future. One has to re-emphasise the old Chinese dictum of every man as a scientist, every village a science academy. The democratisation of democracy has to begin with time. To break the iatrogeny of expert knowledge. Today, policy seems to be subject to illiteracy and the pomposity of the expert.
So, language has to be more playful. We have to debate policy in ordinary language. For this, mass media and education have to lend a hand. The university has to reinvent itself as a cornucopia of modes of dissenting styles. The university is the first opposition party. It is only after that that other dissenting groups come into play. Without realising the cognitive power of the university, democracy is damaging itself, rendering itself into a monolithic language.
It is only with new ideas of citizenship and fresh ideas about democracy that India can redeem itself. Blaming politicians for everything is not the solution.
(Views are personal.)
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations