Is India's democracy real?

Direct democracy or pure democracy is a form of democracy in which people decide on policy initiatives directly. This differs from the majority of currently established democracies, which are representative democracies.

Direct democracy is based on two assumptions:

1. The voter knows everything about the candidate and what he is likely to do when he comes to power in the future. By voting for the person, the voter takes responsibility for the future actions of the elected representative
2. On the candidate’s part, he/she will keep the collective interest of the nation’s future on top of all his private priorities, even over the misguided expectations of his electorate

But as we all know, this form of democracy is hard to practice. So hard in fact, that it is never practiced. Representative democracy as the name suggests is a skewed brother of real democracy. Here identities matter. Identities permit the formation of groups and interests. Groups and interests are then leveraged to bargain for votes. That is not a problem. Identity politics can be more useful in enriching the poor faster, passing on the benefits to the most needy, etc.

The crisis starts when the electorate and the elected pursue two different agendas. Identity is only an artificial stairway to get to the top. What happens at the top, remains at the top. The true ill about representative democracy (as is practiced in India) is that it does not represent anything in the end.

I live in Gurgaon. Here, if you want to own any property (keep owning it), you need to live in a gated community where an army of failed farmers from the rural areas stand guard to your possessions. Outside the gate, the freewheeling thieves own everything. Policemen are few and far in between. If you find one, he is not interested in taking down your complaint. You will see everyone from the corporation engineer to the dhobi going around in cars with a red/blue beacons. Private guns are as much as a status symbol as is pair of Levis jeans. This is India’s brand new city, which I am told has the world’s largest number of Fortune 500 offices. Gurgaon has changed in the last 25 years, from being sugarcane farms to India’s largest corporate club today. Yet its politicians remain woefully ignorant of the change in the class they represent, and their needs. Ironically enough, over half of Gurgaon doesn’t vote. They don’t even exist on the electoral rolls. At least, I don’t.

Representational democracy does not work for the benefit of the country or its citizens as a whole. It works only for the people it represents and skews the nation's perspective to an extent that the majority always comes to hate the minority. Its nomenclature of issues are troublesome – minority welfare, not citizen’s welfare; differential fuel pricing, not better transport networks; food subsidies, not universal food guarantee; farm loan waiver, not efficient market for farm produce; selective bank loan waivers, not about creating better economic environment where loans can be serviced better.

In the larger picture, we are all minorities and majorities at the same time. We all have our skin in this same game. We either pay for it, or benefit from it. Representational democracy reduces a nation to a zero sum game. In cases, where you are a minority, it makes you feel that the majority is holding on to something that is ethically yours. In places where you are a majority, you are made to regret for your own hard work and success. True nations are not zero sum games. The law of average never applies to a nation. You do not have to snatch from the poor to enrich the rich and vice versa.

A true democracy has three functions – ensure education for all, ensure safety for all and ensure healthcare for all. A true democracy can function with one universal tax rate – for both direct and indirect taxes. A true universal state has to be a meritocracy in education where bright ideas are respected. It has to preach mediocrity in healthcare and ensure universality of safety and justice. This form of democracy where the nation comes first, may not fit many. But that is the flab that we need to cut out.

A representative democracy on the other hand is designed to serve the parts, not the sum. Imagine an engine where parts grow fatter than the whole. The engine cannot function. That is what happens in democracies as well. For example, it costs upwards of US$ 5000 for a day’s argument of a case in India’s supreme court. That is several multiples of an average Indian’s per capita income. It means that the institution in question is beyond the reach for a large population in this country – almost three fourth the people. Whom does it really represent? You may argue that every citizen doesn’t need to run into the supreme court every day. But are the lower courts any more inclusive? The idea here is not to blame the judiciary. Its ills are a subset of the structural ills of our democracy, or our perspective of it.

There are about 3 million elected representatives in India today. More than the rest of the world put together, probably. Each of them represents a piece of their constituency. That representation runs deeper in our society. We have to search for new identities to be part of that representation. Characteristics like caste, creed, race, religion, place of birth, language, wealth, land holding, parent’s education, parent’s income, parent’s occupation are all added to this representation in several layers. These are factors that the individual has absolutely no control of.

But are these the identities we want to be represented for? Is representational democracy what we signed up for? It true democracy a distant dream? How long do you think this system can pull together as one? If it will survive in the long-term, how do we make it more responsible, responsive, productive, functional and better? Is democracy mere representation, or something more than that? Think about it till the next elections.