Dr. Samir Kumar Das, PhD
Elections, as the textbooks of democracy would have us believe, serve as a key democratic institution for governing those who in turn govern us, whether by selecting them, or by holding them accountable to us or by recalling them in case they fail to live up to our expectations or even any combination of them.
I propose to view present-day elections mainly as a technology of constituting the people (demos) in the first place, bringing them into what Spinoza would have called the ‘whole’ and thus governing them. They “must necessarily come together”, Spinoza declares, if they are “to live together as securely and well as possible if they are to enjoy as a whole the rights which naturally belong to them as individuals”. Their life should be no more conditioned by ‘the force and desire of individuals that will be injurious to other fellowmen, but by the power and will of the whole body’. A brief attempt will be made here to drive home the argument that elections are instrumental to the formation of the people as a whole. The people, in short, are not external to elections, but are produced through them.
While much is being said about the problem of refining and thus improving the electoral institutions so that people may exercise their ever greater and albeit more effective control over the governors with a slew of electoral reforms, correspondingly much less – if at all – is written on how people are constituted into a body and thus are transformed into a mere object of government through the instrumentality of elections. This will take us beyond the textbook definition of democracy we became familiar with as we grew up and forces us to understand how the people are reduced to the numbers of an electorate – to an electoral arithmetic, how they are organized and classified into constituencies, booths and administrative units, how constituencies are gerrymandered and delimited, how voters are enlisted and electoral rolls are prepared, how their names are incorporated and dropped from the voters’ list – a phenomenon variously known as ‘scientific rigging’ in West Bengal particularly during the Left Front rule or as ‘D’ voters’ in Assam and so forth, how the electorate is mobilized and campaigns are conducted, in short how the people are constituted as a ‘whole’ to be able to cast their votes as subjects by the very instrumentality of elections.
The plea thus has the potential of turning around one of the founding assumptions of the liberal-democratic architecture which says that the voters otherwise constituted as rational subjects go to the polling booth and cast their votes while exercising their democratic right to franchise. The voters as rational subjects must remain unaffected by the institution of elections. In fact, the institution of elections is designed to protect their identity as rational subjects. What we argue instead is that the elections become a technology by which people’s subjectivities are shaped and constituted insofar as they are incorporated into the whole. In short, political subjects do not exist prior to the elections. They become subjects in and though the elections.
Let us explain the point by way of trying to unpack the otherwise complicated relationship between ethnicity and elections. One cannot stop referring to ethnicity as one seeks to make sense of the politics of our country. The central question is: how ethnicities are sought to be governed and managed through elections for the ‘convenience’ of governing the people? One way of answering it is to argue that people vote along the given ethnic lines. Subjectivities being uniquely ethnic in a country like India are formed along the ethnic lines and electoral outcomes only reflect the given ethnic composition of the particular society in which election is held. When electoral outcomes reiterate the ethnic composition of a given political unit, it is the ethnic majority that calls the shots and ‘ethnocracy’ masquerades as democracy. Electoral majority and ethnic majority become one and the same in an ethnocracy.
Theoreticians of representative democracy like John Stuart Mill could have anticipated such an eventuality and therefore argued that representative institutions like elections function best in mono-national and mono-ethnic countries. Only these countries have the potential of organizing the electorate in a way that would enable it to put up a ‘joint resistance’ to the tyrant rulers – which, according to him, lies at the centre of democracy. The society in India is irreducibly plural and winning elections here throws up the challenge of governing the very plurality of the society. Ethnic homogenization through reorganization of states and constituencies does not seem any longer to be an option, for there is no end to it. Ethnic minorities are bound to remain, notwithstanding our best efforts at achieving ethnic homogenization of any given space.
The second option therefore is to manage the elections by way of keeping the opposition votes ethnically divided. This could indirectly facilitate the consolidation of the ethnic majority and the political party that rides on it.
Besides, there is a third option. One can win elections by building alliances across ethnicities. The liberal-democrats would certainly heave a sigh of relief once the third option is exercised. They would rather take it as the growing maturity of our democracy. For such alliances across ethnic divide would propel gradual de-ethnicization of the whole and leave space for the free play of individual subjectivities let loose from their ethnic allegiances and anchorages. The existing literature on elections in India is of course marked by this liberal expectancy captured through such phrases as ‘second democratic upsurge’, ‘silent revolution’ and so forth. Elections are expected to bring about this great social transition – from ethnically identified electoral majority to an electoral majority that is what Sheldon Wolin would have called an ‘ideological cipher’ emptied of its ethnic essence.
Alliance-building across ethnic groups and communities oscillates between the twin extremes: On the one hand, a political party enters into bargaining with each and every significant agent of the ethnic communities and strikes a deal with them. Local agents and neighbourhood networks have acquired an unprecedented importance in contemporary elections. Needless to say, the demands from the agents have a tendency of acquiring increasing stridency over the years as the competing parties come to offer competitive deals to them. Switching of allegiance from one political party to another and fragmentations within the community are the inevitable consequence of this. Much of the election violence in present-day West Bengal emanates from this stridency on the one hand and shrinking resources that remain at the disposal of the political parties. On the other hand and as a corollary to this, such political alliances in order to be stable and free from violence calls for social transformation of sorts that political parties in recent times are reluctant to undertake. Myron Weiner’s classic work for instance shows how party building and social transformation were coterminous particularly during the initial years of our republic.
Conclusion
The challenge today is not so much to make the government democratic, but to govern democracy itself – constitute the people into a whole, shape their subjectivities, bring the demos into existence as a collective, a ‘whole’ as Spinoza argues and render them ‘docile’ and governable. Let us call this body an electoral community because it comes into being in and through elections. It is not ethnocracy of the Israeli type, for, it does not replicate the existing ethnic fault lines, but seeks to manage and govern them.
Is this then the end of the road for democracy? The growing depreciation of elections as a democratic instrument across the world is also accompanied by a visible expansion of democracy outside the institutional limits. Farmers’ protests outside the precincts of democratic institutions finally became successful in getting the three farm laws repealed. There are multiple points of law making in the society and legislative bodies are only one of them. In the words of an octogenarian, agitating farmer: ‘kanun sadak par hi banta’ (laws are made in the streets). Shall we describe it as the ‘democracy of the streets’?
The author is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Calcutta
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