Attrition of Democracy
Prabhat Patnaik
When we talk about the 'Idea of India', I would like to draw a distinction. This distinction which is also
relevant whether we are talking about ‘democracy' or ‘secularism' is as follows. There is one concept of
India where you can think in terms of a country with a multiplicity of identity groups. We can
conceptualise an “idea of India” where we have different religious communities, linguistic communities
and castes living peacefully and in harmony.
There is an alternative idea of India. That actually says that we visualise an India in which people have
transcended their specific identities and have come together to constitute an alternative collectivity
orfraternity of citizens.
This is not to say that identities of all kinds get obliterated under the latter concept. But, there is an
overarching identity or overarching foundation of a fraternity of equal citizens that transcends individual
identities. I believe that these two distinctions also afflict the concept of democracy.
One notion of democracy has to be seen in terms of representation of different identity groups and their
accommodation whereby they can coexist because you have negotiations between them. The alternative
notion of democracy is the formation of a collectivity of citizens as a fraternity of equals. They can
intervene politically to shape their own lives and destinies.
I believe that the former concept of democracy is a false concept. The latter is the only concept of
democracy, because the former believes in negotiations and accommodations between different religious
communities and linguistic groups to coexist. It is not only tolerant of pre-existing inequalities in society
but also entails that over a period of time there is no equilibrium. The equilibrium shifts in favour of the
majority community in each of these cases.
I think in a democracy we need to look at people as a collective of citizens which can actually intervene
politically to shape their destiny. I think this was the concept of democracy which underlay the 1931
Karachi Congress resolution. This also is the concept that actually underlies the Constitution, which talks
about “We, the People of India”. The people of India according to it constitute a collectivity. This
involves a transcending of their individual identities into a new collective identity.
I believe that any authentic notion of democracy must mean that the people can collectively constitute a
group that can intervene meaningfully through politics and shape their own lives and destinies. But, if this
does not happen then there is a danger of sliding into the other concept of democracy, whose foundation
is accommodation of identities through negotiations. This essentially means the continuation of an
unequal society, which over a period of time means the strengthening of the more powerful groups and
strengthening of the majoritarian tendency.
Spontaneous System
In order to realise the authentic notion of democracy, certain minimum conditions must be fulfilled. The
first condition of course is that everybody must have a certain minimum level of living in terms of
education, in terms of health, in terms of nutrition, in terms of a minimum material standard of life
without which you cannot have the kind of collective subjectivity of the people that is essential for
democracy. The second thing is that you must have a degree of egalitarianism; otherwise it subverts the
notion of a collective subject of people. The third, which is not often realised, is that in a democracy, the
people must collectively politically affect their own lives. In that case politics must matter. For politics to
matter it is important that politics must govern economics. In my view that is not what happens under
capitalism. A capitalist society is driven by a whole lot of inner tendencies which are independent of
people’s wishes. Nobody wants a crisis in a capitalist economy but crisis happens. That happens not
because anyone wills it to happen but because it is a spontaneous system in which things happen
independently of people's will and consciousness.
Now if that is the case then in such a society, intervention in a political manner through the state in the
functioning of the economy has inherent limitations. John Maynard Keynes argued that a capitalist
economy, left to its own devices, generates unemployment; people are not going to tolerate it, so it is very
important to have an intervention by an agency that embodies social rationality, namely the state. As a
result, through politics you will be able to rectify the errors in the system. The collapse of Keynesianism
is in a sense a proof of the fact that this is impossible, that the spontaneity of capitalism as an economic
system wins over in the long run. Because any political intervention in its functioning produces a kind of
dysfunction where either you carry political intervention further and further, in order ultimately to
overcome the system itself; or alternatively such intervention as there is gradually wound up.
The fact that politics is something whose capacity to make a difference to the functioning of the economy
is greatly attenuated is particularly true for the period we live in. On the one hand there are nation states
whose people elect the government they want. On the other hand you have a country, which is part of a
flow of global finance, a flow of global capital. The capacity of nation-states to intervene in the
movements of globalised capital once their countries are open to the process of globalisation is of course
minimal. In order to prevent capital from flowing out in vast magnitudes you have to make sure that
global investors are happy with your economy, that global capital finds within your shores a hospitable
space where it can dwell. If anything happens through political intervention that goes against the
predilections of globalised finance, then finance leaves the country and the state is forced to cut back on
this intervention. Today we are living in a world of globalisation in which the capacity of the people to
intervene politically is limited because it is confined at best to the terrain of a nation state. So you actually
have in a very fundamental sense a restriction of democracy because you have a restriction on the very
scope of politics.
Meaningful Diplomacy
And if that is the case, then necessarily what you find is that the other requirements which I said are
essential for realising the notion of democracy where people as a collectivity intervene politically to shape
their own destinies, get subverted and undermined. The minimum standards of living which are essential
to making a fraternity of citizens are in fact, being increasingly denied. There has been without a doubt a
worsening of the living conditions of a large proportion of the country's population. Likewise, inequalities
have increased dramatically. All the pre-conditions required to progress towards a meaningful democracy
are being subverted in the current economic regime under which we live. What happens therefore is that
the other notion of democracy comes to the fore. We have, on the one hand, a situation where the State
has to cater to the caprices of globalised finance and globalised capital. On the other hand, we have a
plethora of identity politics. What is remarkable is that there is no contradiction between these two
aspects.
The state kowtowing to the caprices of globalised capital amounts to the fact that the people who are
politically supposed to assume a subject role are reduced to the role of objects. So we have a combination
of objecthood of the people and a denial of space for democracy. That is because of the economic regime
we are in, particularly the economic regime of globalisation. It has given rise to a kind of identity politics
where the collectivity of the people and their capacity to intervene is subverted. These two, namely
globalisation and the practice of identity politics, go in tandem.
We are witnessing today a global economic crisis and its manifestations in the Indian context. The Indian
context takes the form of a stagnating growth rate, declining value of the rupee and inflationary
conditions. The fact that we have inflation going on even when money incomes are not indexed implies
that there are some people who are continuously suffering because of it. So there is a squeeze on the
living conditions of the people through inflation. There is also a squeeze through heightened
unemployment, which manifests itself in an enormous swelling of informal sector employment, part time
employment, and casual employment. All this entails a swelling of the poverty stricken population.
Now the generation of employment is going to be further hit as the economy moves into stagnation and,
therefore, you will have a compounding of the crisis. So a combination of inflation and unemployment is
something which is going to affect the people very sharply. Not surprisingly, this is also the context in
which a serious effort is being made for a corporate control of the state through an individual who has
been projected in the media as the next Prime Minister. To my mind it is an effort at a direct corporate
control over the state, which is a symptom of fascism.
If you get caught in the vortex of a globalised financial movement then popular sovereignty wherein the
people can shape their own lives through political intervention gets subverted. If you want to recapture
the supremacy of the people then you have to create space where the state has a degree of autonomy. For
this it must delink itself from the vortex of globalised finance so that a better India can be built.
(Prabhat Patnaik is an economist and political commentator and former Vice-Chairman of the Kerala State
Planning Board. He taught at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in the School of Social Sciences
at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.)