Inconvenient Facts: Thinking about Democracy
By Peter Ronald deSouza
There are several grey areas in any project of making
a democracy. Its attempt to encompass and democratize
new spaces produces several inconvenient facts. These
need our attention for by now we know that between
the ideal and the reality, the precept and the practice,
falls the shadow. The working of Indian democracy
in the Northeast is one such troublesome inconvenient
fact (or set of facts) that confronts the robust public
discourse in Delhi with several omissions and dilemmas.
For example, we see that the presence of the Northeast
in India's discourse on democracy remains primarily
of a region which is insurgency prone (hit), and not
that of a diversity of peoples striving to build secure
futures in the face of complex obstacles placed by
entrenched interests. What these interests are, and
what gives them the capability to place these obstacles,
are issues that need to be researched as does the
working of the party system, or the authoritarian
consequences of the politics of ethnicisation, or
the possible contradiction between the logic of democracy
and the logic of federalism. These are important issues
of the Northeast but in the Indian discourse on democracy
they find little place. An attempt to remedy this
deficit, however, is being made by the Eastern Quarterly.
In its last edition
(Vol. 3, Issue I), it brought out some of those inconvenient
facts which merit a second look. The subversion of
the human security in the region, in the ongoing confrontation
between the State and non-state forces, is an outcome
that needs scrutiny from within a democracy perspective.
The response of the state to the movements of all
hues and shades in the region is too muscular to fit
comfortably into the democratic project since it invokes
the ultimate justification of 'legitimate coercion'
too readily and too early and before other less muscular
and more deliberative stages are even attempted. If
the state behaves less like a democratic state, which
draws its legitimacy from coercion rather than from
persuasion and deliberation, then the non-state forces,
who also opt for the barrel of a gun, are no better
since they too prefer not to opt for the harder option
of democratic dialogue and participation.
The philosophy and
the intent of the State's response to the situation
are best exemplified by the presence of the Armed
Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA). Not only does
it expose a particular way of conceiving 'nationhood'
but it also exposes the essentially militaristic character
of the policy towards the region. The Northeast is
too distant, perhaps too alien, to warrant a more
gentle inclusion. Both the articles by A. Bimol Akoijam
and Th. Tarunkumar, 'The Armed Forces (Special Powers)
Act 1958: Disguised War and its Subversions', and
Kamal Mitra Chenoy, 'Nationalist Ideology, Militarization
and Human Rights in Northeast', have brought out various
facets of these contradictory or paradoxical aspects
that have marked the responses of the democratic Indian
State towards the conflict situation in the region.
While these look at the state, Pradip Phanjoubam's
article 'Widening the Human Rights Debates', looks
at the non-state forces in the region who are also
responsible for the subversion of the democratic space
in the region. The question we need to ask here is:
Is there a connection between the two?
Akoijam and Tarunkumar
seem to suggest that, from a historical perspective,
the militaristic subversion has been heightened in
the region through 'the process reproduction and appropriation',
of the State's militaristic 'structure and ethos',
by the other political institutions and by civil society.
They argue that while the fault lies essentially with
the State, it also makes the non-State forces, who
are initially victims, turn into victimizers. There
is also another side to the story, as implicated by
the views on State as an institution that has, in
the Weberian sense, the prerogative of violence. This
is something that Akoijam and Tarunkumar have very
insightfully probed in their article where they argue
that the distinction between domestic and alien spaces,
the location of the police and the army respectively,
is collapsed by the State to justify and legitimize
the use of violence under the AFSPA. Responding to
this logic the non-state forces, as alternative claimants
of statehood, (according to Phanjoubam) then become
liable to adopt the same logic of violence. If this
is so, then the subversion of democracy by the non-state
forces, or at least parts of it, can be seen to be
rooted in the same statist ideology.
This brings out the
crucial question on the relation between democracy
and violence. This is a relationship that has come
to the fore in debates within democracy today. What
are the grounds given for the use of such violence?
Are these justifiable? Were other pathways to achieve
similar desirable outcomes attempted? Does such action,
of resorting to violence, reduce tyranny or increase
it, bring people into a lively and garrulous public
realm or drive them into a sullen private world? are
questions that need to be addressed in the context
of the Northeast where the social trauma of violence
has left a bitter legacy. We need to ask how is democracy
going to confront this question of violence within
the nationalist politics (of both sides) as also the
question raised by Babloo Loitongbam in his article,
'Dignity and Human Security', where he has convincingly
argued that human security is an imperative for securing
national security. Critical and continuous engagement
with these questions would have crucial bearing on
democracy and peace in the region. The integrity of
this critical quest, and the genuine desire for peace,
requires us to face the question of insurgency, which
is nothing less than a violent armed insurgency. There
are political and historical grounds for this violence
and the sooner we recognize this, the better it would
be for democracy, peace, human security and national
security in this region.
It would be interesting,
in this intellectual ferment, to revisit the Government
of India's policy of responding to claims of exclusion,
deprivation and grievance by devolving power through
a strategy of federalism and thus creating ethnic
majority states in the Northeast. By creating states,
or granting institutions, for every identity-based
grievance the Government of India may have accentuated
and perpetuated the ethnic crisis in the region. Perhaps
the heretical idea of a single state for the eight
sisters, where everyone is a minority and where everyone
has to follow a strategy of building social and political
coalitions, a strategy that brings a certain pragmatic
politics into play, and its concomitant peace, is
an idea that needs revisiting today. India survives
on such an idea. India is the better for it except
for its inability to bring, with dignity, the Northeast
into the idea. For diverse polities and regions it
is the only idea that works. But there are just too
many entrenched interests to even give this idea,
of a multiethnic single state, the time of day. Yet
imagine what a powerful political entity it would
be for itself, for the region and for the country.
I would like to
conclude on a personal note. I have been a part of
a Study that seeks to explore the experiences and
working of democracy in South Asia. To do this we
held fourteen dialogues on democracy across South
Asia (India, Pakistan Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal).
We held one in Imphal in February 2004 where we had
participants from the different states of the Northeast
and in these two days we ('outsiders') were given
a glimpse of the struggle of the soul, were introduced
to an intense world in search, a world of searing
honesty. It was a brief connection which more 'outsiders'
must have the privilege of having. Such democratic
dialogue is good for the Northeast. It will be very
good for India.
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