By Deepa Majumdar
To an outsider, the Indian democracy can appear tumultuous … quite the opposite of the seemingly seamless American democracy. Indeed, proceedings in the US Senate appear supernally disciplined. American presidents do not engage in coups. When voted out of office, they respect the mandate of the people. The British Parliament perhaps fits in between … not quite gentlemanly, and yet, never a total bedlam. Lady Justice appears to hover in the background of western parliaments, sometimes propitiated, sometimes ignored. To the outsider, the difference between traffic discipline in the west and in India, seems replayed in the difference between the surface styles of their respective parliaments and their respective democracies.
And yet, a deeper look may change our views. Beneath the formal discipline of traffic here in the west there can be road rage, quite as beneath the ordered western democracy, the quality of friendship, which is the hallmark of democracy, can give away to a rank alienation that withers true representation and transmutes the vote to coinage. Going against the will of their people and expending the blood of their youth, western democracies engage in high-tech wars. No more than plutocracies window-dressed as democracies, the western polity can be dangerous.
It is not as if the Indian democracy is more virtuous … The gulf between the people as such and their elected representatives can be enormous. Like so many knife wounds, many are the disparities that threaten Indian unity and equality. If the voice of mob fury has not, as yet, expressed itself in gross forms of international violence, despite India’s creeping militarism, this may have to do with the beneficent aura of our past sages. Perhaps their heartfelt prayers have prevented such mayhem. While democracy, as such, imparts only a formal equality … by weighing every vote equally … a moral democracy calls for greater equality. It calls for that feeling of friendship, which equates all individuals who participate in the friendship, even as it allows for meaningful inequalities.
At least two questions arise at this point. First, is India truly democratic in her micro-foundations … does she honor the individual … or is she a group democracy ruled by unthinking pockets of blind, tribalistic people? Second, what does it mean to govern?
I am sitting in a dining hall, with fellow travelers. We are in a wonderful monastery in rural Bengal. Suddenly, a young girl recounts her experience of visiting a hair dresser, somewhere in Bengal. Her hair dresser, she said, dictated to her what her hair style should be. Notwithstanding the economic rise of India, the basics of a market democracy (a euphemism), it seemed to me, had not yet struck roots in this part of India. The free enterprise model, so well developed in America, had not yet impressed itself in moral terms. If this model has succeeded so well in the form of the small town business (not the soulless corporation), this is because its victory is primarily moral … not pecuniary. For this model entails and thrives upon the fact that the seller must serve the customer, in exchange for the money received. It entails therefore, the democratic good manners, of letting the customer choose the product to be purchased. It leads therefore to a level of microscopic consumerist justice. Everyone under the same price domain must pay the same price. Every customer must be free to choose. It is hardly surprising then, that the Invisible Hand is worshipped today as a godlike Arbiter. The omnipotence of the Market is essentialized in this Hidden Hand.
And yet … I have always had a distaste for deifying the Invisible Hand. No more than a mindless arbiter that allows us to serve one another under the aegis of rational self-interest … this Hand can never express true unselfishness. It can never elicit the most altruistic forms of behavior. So long as money exchanges hands, one’s spirit of service is likely to be tarnished by self-interest. And yet, this Hidden Hand serves as a wonderful middling ground … for it prohibits direct dictatorial behavior, even as it brainwashes the buyer with advertisements, sales strategies, and mindless materialism. In short, the Invisible Hand does not allow a hair dresser to dictate to his customer, her choice of hair style. Instead, it drugs her with mindless options and endless materialism.
Before this incident I had had one too many distressing experiences of inequality in India … experiences that made me long for America. In the streets of New York, I knew I could speak to any homeless man or woman. For the assumption was that we were equal in our human potentiality … unfortunate circumstances had put one of us on the street … it was my duty as a human person, to speak in tones of friendly, egalitarian sympathy to the visible poor on Fifth Avenue. But in India, where a far greater message has been taught over centuries … namely that each being (not just human beings) is a manifestation of the one undifferentiated God … the practice, it seemed to me, was a grotesque caricature of this lofty teaching. I was struck by the unbelievable social inequality … by the pathos laden diffidence in the down trodden. I remember visiting my grandmother’s home in Kolkata, chatting with my eldest cousin. There he sat, shaving himself, when suddenly I felt a motion at my feet. It was the cleaning lady mopping the floor. If she ignored us totally, it was because we were wholly inaccessible to her, despite decades of communism. What was saddest was the fact that she expected us to ignore her as well. Indeed, had we extended our friendliness to her … had we included her as an equal in our conversation … she would have been nonplussed. I saw the same stiff diffidence in the waiters at our conference. Had we chatted with any of them, they would have been bewildered … embarrassed. How sad … how truly and terribly sad. Before this gross absence of equality on the one hand … and the presence microscopic everyday tyranny, on the other hand … can we claim to be a real democracy? Can a formal structure bequeath democracy, if at the grass roots level, the down trodden are ruled by elaborate fiefdoms of corrupt Babus? If indeed, the heart of India lies in the villages, we must ask this question. Do villagers vote as thoughtful individuals … or as blind followers of blind tyrants? It is not as if Indians lacks individuality. Contrary to western stereotypes of the Indian … that we are passive, that we are not individuals, etc. … Indians can be highly individualistic … willful, opinionated, argumentative. But the roots of a true democracy lie, not in individuality as such, but in virtuous individuality … in an “I” that serves as a seat of conscience. And this latter type of individuality is rare anywhere in the world. It is this virtuous individuality that must be presupposed by a successful moral democracy.
If the great Plato mistrusted the Athenian democracy, we have the same reasons to mistrust our present day structured democracies. For the voice of the people decays to a cacophony, when the people are a mob … when they cease to be thoughtful practitioners of conscience. Without leadership, democracy becomes mob rule. And without democracy, leadership becomes tyranny. What then does it mean to govern?
To govern is to serve. To govern is to serve in the teeth of opposition and temptation from the greatest enemy of service … namely, the will-to-worldly-power. To govern therefore is to serve, while surrounded by sycophants who thrust upon us the scepter and the crown. The act of governing ought to be an act of love. Only she rules, who rules with altruistic love. Blind representation is horribly inadequate to effective governance. The elected representative should neither rule his voters, nor betray them. At the same time, he should not be their slave. The act of representation should be neither mechanical, nor passive. Every elected representative ought to be a true moral leader, a real public servant, ready to obey the people, but at the same time, equally ready to disobey, through acts of civil disobedience, all unjust mandates from a mob-like demos.
To govern with love, the leader must be brave enough to take unpopular stances. To govern with love is to lead morally … not merely technically. For the leader stands heads and shoulders above the faceless facilitator. To govern with love is to be gentle, humble, true … To govern with love is to be willing to lay down one’s life for the sake of the governed … which is why Swami Vivekananda defined a sardar (leader) as a sirdar (one who is ready to sacrifice his head). Above all, to govern with love is to relinquish all will-to-power. Per force his unselfishness, such a leader cannot help but be not only idealistic, but also pragmatic. For an ideal pragmatism derives from the practice of unselfishness. Hardly a technocrat, such a leader is in fact the truest servant … a magnificent servant, glowing with the spirit of service and the gigantic, ego-free self respect that comes in the wake of such altruism.
This kind of ideal leadership can be premised only on organic relationships of deep trust. It is only when the people trust the leader and the leader the people, that the “I” at the helm becomes capable of not only representing the “we,” but also re-presenting it … by leading it. For, given the filaments of charity (not the Invisible Hand) that now bind the we into a whole, the “I” and the “we” find mutual fulfillment in one another. Such an ideal polity would be ruled more by mandates of duties than by the clamor of rights. For, it is the unselfish rhetoric of duties that would reign high above the sometimes selfish rhetoric of rights. By infusing the sense of obligation, the sense of duty guarantees a spirit of service. A mature spirit of service, in turn, sublimates the usual conflict between desire and duty. It synthesizes the two. When we mature, we desire to do our duties. We hunger and thirst to serve others. Only he who has earned the trust of his people, through supreme moral perfection, is worthy of the mantle of leadership. Only he has the capacity and duty to govern. Nobody else. Not even the elected representative. (The author is Associate Professor, Purdue University, USA)