Democracy and Political Hope in South Asia

Often, in contemporary times, we hear the question, ‘have we failed our democracies in South Asia?’ ²

In my view, this question perhaps is not the best way to frame issues of democracy and political practice in the region. It attributes a negative agential role to ‘we’, the people of South Asian countries. I propose that we must approach our inquiry through a formulation that enables us to value democracy, because it is the only political game in town that promises substantive dreams of political emancipation to those majority of citizens—men, women, and youth—in South Asia who are oppressed, excluded, marginalised, and disempowered.

What kind of democracy it should be is, of course, a key question that also needs exploration. I will argue that there is indeed a South Asian version of democracy that awaits acknowledgement and theorisation.

Let me begin by sharing with you an anecdote. In 2004, a group of South Asian political scientists launched a study on the theme ‘state of democracy in South Asia’. It was the first South Asia-wide inquiry, undertaken by a team of South Asian scholars, to understand the status and future of democracy in South Asia. It was a time of political despair, when, like today, all South Asian democracies had been facing multiple crises.

The research team had a series of preparatory dialogues. One objective of these meetings was to agree on a central question that would guide the overall inquiry. It had to be one that would not take any assumption in the Western theory of comparative politics as its conceptual point of departure nor should it be trapped in the illiberal and xenophobic promise of Asian values. It also had to be rich enough to capture the stories of diverse histories and varied encounters between modern democracy and South Asian societies and cultures. It was not an easy exercise, given the initial unwillingness of some members of the team to think beyond the experiences of their individual country-specific democratic transitions and ‘mistransitions’.

The challenge before us was primarily ontological. It was about the validity or utility of our existing world views that had been shaped by the histories of our individual nation states. We tried, amid considerable debate within the team of scholars, to formulate a research problematic that would bring back to our agenda of critical reflection, the actual experience of the emancipatory potential, and of the varied biographies, of the modern democratic project in South Asia. At a final meeting held in Goa, we made our discovery. The central question of inquiry that fired the imagination of all involved in this study across the nation state loyalties, and set the terms for the study of the status of democracy in South Asia, was the following one: What has democracy done to South Asia? What has South Asia done to democracy?

The question we need to ask today is a somewhat similar one, like the following: Why do citizens in South Asia continue to value, and look up to, democracy in times of grave crisis amid its many setbacks, disappointments, and failures? Let me reformulate the question in relation to our own experience in Sri Lanka not so long ago. Since the last week of October 2018, why had so many ordinary citizens of Sri Lanka remained so disturbed, outraged, and angry and then found solace in democracy when the country suddenly fell into an unprecedented crisis? ³

The formulation of our question in this manner advances an assumption. People in South Asia continue to believe in democracy, despite its setbacks and failures to fulfil their collective expectations as political communities. That is because they have for over eight decades appropriated and South Asianised the democracy in specific ways. Contrary to its European and colonial origins, modern democracy has a specifically South Asian character and identity, evolved through people’s struggles for freedom, equality, and rights.

Let me quote from the first report of the State of Democracy in South Asia, which was published in 2008:

The idea of democracy has transformed South Asia as much as South Asia has transformed the idea of democracy itself. The language, the practice and the institutions of democracy have transformed popular common sense, everyday practices and relations of power. South Asia has reworked the idea of democracy by infusing it with meanings that spill over the received frame of the idea of democracy. These two influences have reinforced each other and helped create South Asian cultures of democracy, distinctly modern and specifically South Asian (State of Democracy in South Asia Team, 2008).

Why do people abide by democracy, and have continuing faith in it, despite their disappointments with its failures as a way of political life? There can be many answers to this question. The answer I advance is the following: The moment the modern representative democracy reached South Asia during the late colonial period, it was seized and appropriated by the oppressed, marginalised, and disempowered masses of South Asia. It is true that it had been appropriated, captured, and put to misuse by the elites. At the same time, it remained the framework of everyday political ontology of millions of ordinary and non-elite citizens living in poverty and encountering inequalities, injustices, and deprivations for generations. They were enabled by the representative, electoral, and participatory processes of modern democracy to play an agential role in making and unmaking governments. The principle of political equality, inherent in the doctrine of one-person-one-vote, coupled with the notion that it is the people, not the rulers, who are sovereign, is what has made democracy the most attractive political choice to South Asian citizens among several available options.

We also need to rewrite the genealogies of modern democracy in South Asia by contextualising it with struggles of resistance that had taken religious as well as secular forms. The inauguration of modern democracy in South Asia also coincided with the progressive phase of nationalist mobilisations and socialist struggles. Modern representative and electoral democracy, in conjunction with progressive nationalisms and visions of social justice, also awakened in the masses hopes and visions of social and political emancipation. That vision was sustained by three normative potentials of democracy: freedom, equality, and popular authorisation of political power.

From this thesis of South Asianisation of democracy, we can make an argument relevant to the contemporary validation of democracy as the best political choice available: Ordinary citizens in South Asia understand and make sense of democracy in ways that are quite different from how the elites relate themselves to democracy. While the elites approach democracy from primarily an instrumentalist perspective, the ordinary citizens see democracy as the only mode of political participation that offers them political agency, not only to make and unmake rulers, but also to punish tyrannical regimes.

While academic political theorists and constitutional lawyers see the meaning of democracy in its passionate commitment to procedural sanctity and institutional autonomy, ordinary citizens value democracy rather differently. They abide by democracy, despite its abuse by elites for predatory agendas, because of its promise of substantive social goods such as equality, social justice, social welfare, access to means of redistributing social wealth, political participation, the right to be free from domination, and marginalisation. A political theorist would be fascinated to see how the popular constructions of democracy in South Asia have by now gone beyond its classical, liberal paradigm and indeed fused it with republicanist as well as social democratic visions and desires.

Let me elaborate this point in relation to the struggle for defending democracy in Sri Lanka during the three months beginning in late October 2018. In the spontaneous resistance to the political crisis that suddenly broke out in Sri Lanka on 26 October due to the arbitrary dismissal of the president of the sitting prime minister and the dissolution of his government in violation of the Constitution, there were two strands. The first can be called liberal-constitutionalist. The second is popular-republicanist.

The liberal-constitutionalist strand of resistance sought to restore constitutional governance through procedural-institutional means by exploring remedies available through parliament and the judiciary. The popular-participatory strand mobilised citizens to reclaim the normative ideal of political freedom—from arbitrary, tyrannical, and illegitimate exercise of state power by the head of the executive branch of the state. It saw the citizens reasserting their agency as alert and active citizens with capacity for critical political debate and sustained political communication in defence of freedom. That was its republicanist spirit. It is the confluence of these two strands of resistance that sustained and gave political meaning to what we witnessed in Sri Lanka as a revival of democratic activism since 26 October 2018.

This second, popular-republicanist strand of resistance is a theme that continues to be ignored by political theorists in South Asia, although it animates activist communities. It is now time for political theorists to recognise that there is a popular conceptualisation of democracy in South Asia, which has gone beyond, and transcended the limits and the frame of liberal democracy, both classical and neo-classical. If we have not seen this, it is our fault, the fault of our categories of political understanding and theorising. The two surveys by the State of Democracy in South Asia ⁴

consistently pointed to a crucial discovery. That is, the majority of South Asian citizens’ understanding of democracy as substantive political promise exceeds the paradigm of individual-centric freedom, liberty, equality, and procedural justice as conceptualised in a liberal democracy. We may also add that in South Asia, as elsewhere, the democratic experience has not just been a story of electoral participation alone; it has also been many stories of popular resistance.

It is this substantivist reconceptualisation democracy in South Asia that continues to constitute its magic of social attraction as well as political hope amid illiberal and authoritarian alternatives. To transform that hope into a concrete political programme of defence, survival, and consolidation of democracy requires a qualitatively new political agency. Its absence is obviously the reason why there is so much political pessimism in South Asia. A key aspect of the political landscape in South Asia today is the crisis of political agency for sustained democratic resistance. Those of us who are sensitive to the possibilities of a new and violent phase of democratic retreat across South Asia often feel disheartened.

However, human beings as political agents do not live by despair alone. They live by political hope as well. Sustaining political hopes for democracy is also crucially needed to combat the emerging and new forms of hidden fascism that are evident in South Asia’s political horizon. Let me conclude by pointing to the urgent need for building anew transformative political coalitions in South Asia that forge organic links among secular-democratic political parties, civil society movements, and democratic communities of resistance.