PERHAPS there is nothing all that special about age sixty in the life of a country. Individuals at that age might experience some angst that unfinished tasks might never be completed, simply because time is running out at a rather fast pace. India at age sixty is young, and youth breeds confidence that we, as Indians, have both time and energy to negotiate pressing issues, as well as confront new ones bravely and ably. Yet age sixty is as good a time as any other for reflecting on where the country has come from, where it is at present, where it is headed towards, what needs to be done, what needs to be undone, what we have achieved, and where we have lost out.

Certainly reflections on our immediate past, which is not all that distant and yet not all that proximate, and on our present, gives us occasion for joy. We have good reasons to pat our collective back: the economy seems to be booming, the stock market is set on a heady path, and India is poised, so many analysts tell us, to be a major power in the not so remote future. Above all we have reason to be proud of the success of electoral democracy in the country, particularly when we compare India to our neighbours in South Asia.

And electoral democracy is significant for at least two reasons. One, the process of circulation of elites is accomplished in a peaceful manner, and the losers are bound to accept the electoral verdict with good grace. Second, elections manifest, rather spectacularly sometimes, the discrimination and the competence of the political public. But there also have been times, recollect, when political parties have skilfully played ‘this’ or ‘that’ card (caste, religion, nationalism) to move public opinion in ‘this’ and not ‘that’ direction. And not all these directions have been desirable.

For instance, the BJP government in Gujarat was voted back into power in 2002, barely eight months after its party cadres had launched the most horrific pogrom of the Muslim minority in the state. Consider also how in and through political rhetoric marshalled for the noble purpose of winning votes, the politics of ideas easily slides into the politics of identity; how the discourse of rights slips into the privileges of majorities and the non-privileges of minorities, how democratic politics of contestation comes to be subordinated to narrow managerial notions of governance, and how citizens who should be playing an active role in the formation of political opinion, are reduced to consumers of services provided by the state.

 

For these very reasons, democracy theorists agree that though elections are an indispensable precondition of democracy, they are simply not enough. The politics of elections needs to be located in a context wider than that of numbers, and instrumental calculations of who will vote for whom, and for what reason. This context is that of a democratic civil society. Civil society, or the metaphorical space between households, the market and the state, is important for democracy for at least two reasons. First, it is in this space that citizens come together in order to deliberate on a variety of issues, both generic and specific, which deeply affect their individual and collective lives.

These issues range from distributive and social justice, to economic policies, to the agrarian distress, to violations of basic civil rights, to secularism and communalism, to the rights of marginal sections of society, to sexuality, to the environment, to the nuclearization of the country, to relations with India’s neighbours, to interpretations of the past, and to visions of a good future. Let us not mistake the matter. Civil society is not in the business of making policy; it is in the business of creating and fostering a public, open and accessible debate on what policies should be, and what ought not be.

 

Second, a vibrant and aware civil society is an indispensable prerequisite for a democratic state. States, howsoever democratic they may be, possess an inexorable tendency to accumulate and exercise awesome power over the most intimate aspects of our lives. The only way in which this tendency can be countered is through the making of an informed, critical, and even censorious public opinion in civil society. An essential precondition of democracy, held the famous theorist De Tocqueville, is an independent civil society; ‘there is no other dike to hold back tyranny’.

That India has a plural and a lively civil society, peopled by numerous campaigns, citizen groups, an active and free media, and numerous struggles, is not in question. Yet much remains to be done. For instance, what is the ability of civil society groups to directly address the state? Take the case of the many campaigns that have raised issues of social provisioning to the forefront of political debate. It is of some interest to note that most of the campaigns have succeeded in accomplishing their objectives only when the Supreme Court has intervened on their behalf. This is particularly evident in the case of the right to food campaign.

In response to the writ petition filed by the PUCL in 2001, the court in a series of interim orders directed the central and state governments to ensure nutritional security. Above all, the court ruled that the right to food directly emanates from article 21 of the Constitution, which protects the right to life, and from article 47 of the Directive Principles of State Policy, which inter alia provides that the state shall regard the raising of the level of nutrition and the standard of living of its people and the improvement of public health as among its primary duties.

In May 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that village self-government bodies shall frame employment generation proposals in accordance with the Sampoorna Gramin Rozgar Yojana. And earlier in 1993, the Supreme Court in the case of Unnikrishnan J.P. versus State of Andhra Pradesh had ruled that although the right to education is not stated expressly as a fundamental right, it is implicit in and flows from the right to life guaranteed under article 21. The court further declared that provisions of part III and IV of the Constitution are supplementary and complementary to each other.

 

Though court interventions have helped campaigns to achieve their goals, the need for the court to intervene between civil society and the state illustrates the paradox of civil society mobilization. In much of the literature, it is assumed that civil society groups have the capacity to oblige the state to heed demands made by these groups. However, the Indian state has in practice proved more responsive to court injunctions, encouraging more and more groups to resort to judicial activism. In part, the court may have adopted a proactive stance because the agenda of contemporary civil society mobilization is self-limiting and confined to the framework of the Constitution. Paradoxically, however, social movements that demand a radical restructuring of power relations in the country have failed to elicit the required response from the judiciary, most evident in the case of the Narmada Bachao Andolan.

In 1994, the NBA had approached the court and asked it to order the government to stop construction of the dam. In October 2000, however, the court permitted the height of the Sardar Sarovar dam be raised to 90 metres. The ruling not only resulted in the displacement of more families, it also constituted a serious setback to one of the most impressive movements that had challenged both iniquitous development planning, and the power of the state to deal with its people as it wills. In sum, the judiciary backs some demands, and refuses to back others, presumably because these movements have defied the power of the Indian state. So can we trust the judiciary to defend civil society in every instance?

 

If there is one feature of contemporary campaigns, it is that these campaigns concentrate on specific issues and leave the big story untouched – huge inequalities for instance. NGOs spearheading these campaigns would rather ensure that the state delivers what it has in theory promised, that policy be implemented effectively, that local authorities be made accountable, that the functioning of the government be made transparent, that midday meals be provided to children in primary schools, that the poor get jobs for at least 100 days a year, and that children are brought into school such that the quality of life for the ordinary Indian may just improve somewhat.

Yet all this may, and often does fail to ensure a transition from formal to substantive democracy. For the one fact that democrats have had to confront, and with some unease, is that social provisioning is not a monopoly of democratic states. Authoritarian regimes, in Singapore for instance, have enabled their citizens to access the basic preconditions of a life of dignity. But if democracy is much more than just elections, it is also more than the state providing for those sections of society who are not in a position to participate in market transactions. Of course the state is obliged to provide these basic prerequisites; this is the least we expect of the state. But there is more to democracy.

 

Substantive democracy is about enabling every citizen to stand up and demand what is due to her or him, about allowing citizens to make their own history, even if these are not the histories they intended to make in the first place, and about assuring that each citizen has voice in the collective life of the community. This aspect of democracy cannot be realized unless civil society gets together to press on the state its own agenda, compel the state to heed this agenda, and hold the state accountable for drifts in policy implementation. But this agenda can be realized only if various movements, campaigns, and struggles against caste, communalism, patriarchy and environmental degradation make common cause, and unless somewhere their paths intersect to generate collective energy and coherence.

The one movement that can conceivably provide a conceptual and a political umbrella to bring these discrete struggles together can be the civil rights movement, which is itself sadly divided, but which holds great potential to gather together energies, all too often exhausted in pursuing individual agendas. It is only then that struggles can demand more of the state than ritually doled out sops: an Ambedkar statue here, some reservations for various castes there, the setting up of a commission here, the institution of a judicial enquiry there, with just a nod towards pressing issues: such as poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, and disease. There are still very many tasks that confront civil society agents in the country, provided these agents wish to realize the promises offered by the state.

 

The second unfinished task of India’s democracy is what is euphemistically termed the ‘Kashmir problem’. Even as numerous works, in the celebratory mode on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of independence, hail the consolidation of democracy in the country, we seem to forget that the Indian state has lapsed seriously on its democratic credentials when it comes to J&K in general, and the Kashmir valley in particular. Though the Kashmir issue has by now been discussed, debated, and analyzed in great detail, much of this literature is tiresomely repetitive, focusing as it does on mainly two explanatory factors: the role of Pakistan in fomenting the armed revolt in the valley, and terrorism. To compound the confusion, periodic outbursts of violent nationalism prevent comprehension of the issue at stake; the grave injustice done to the people of the state.

Consider for instance that though there is much debate on the ‘original sin’ of the Government of India when the Instrument of Accession was signed – whether it was signed under duress, and whether the Government of India defaulted on its own commitment to hold a plebiscite in the region – much of the political focus is misplaced. The issue of accession and the plebiscite cannot constitute the sole source of grievance, simply because historical complexities ruled out a plebiscite. A more grave matter is the transgression of the very conditions on which J&K was brought into the Indian Union – the political pact that ruled that only limited clauses of the Indian Constitution could apply to the state. J&K is an exception to the other constituent units of the federation, simply because the terms and conditions on which the state joined the Indian Union were contractual. And parties to any contract are honour-bound to implement them.

 

But within the space of a few years, the special status granted to J&K had been pruned drastically by the central government in collusion with the leaders of the state government. This is the ‘original sin’ that lies at the heart of the injustice wreaked upon the people of the state by the Government of India. If the Indian state wishes to recover its democratic credentials which have been compromised deeply when it comes to J&K, there is no way out, other than restoring the special conditions that governed the accession of the state to the Union. This may prove the starting point for a dialogue with discontented groups in the Kashmir valley.

Too much blood has been spilt in the valley, too much injustice has been visited on the people of the region, and too many civil liberties have been grievously violated. We have to accept that the region itself has been treated as an occupied territory. The Government of India is squarely responsible for the mess it has created in the state of J&K, and bears responsibility for remedying it. If it is time that the Government of India begins to address its own injustices in the region, it is also time that civil society groups begin to grapple with this injustice born out of the ‘original’ sin, rather than conveniently lay the blame on neighbours, or on terrorism. We should begin to think about how and why terrorism arose in the valley in the first instance, and begin to reverse these wrongs. The fault does not lie with external agents, it lies with us. We have to admit this.

Third, whatever happened to the cosmopolitanism of Nehru, and his commitment to the rest of the world, particularly to the countries of the South? Have we in India not become unnecessarily inward looking, far too preoccupied with ‘me’, ‘my’ and ‘mine’. Is it not time that we begin to think in terms larger than caste and sub-caste, religion and sub-religious sects. This does not mean that these issues do not have to be resolved; merely that after a resolution, howsoever tentative it may be, we should begin to think of solidarity with other people of at least the South Asian region. Today political philosophers in the West are speaking of global justice, of obligation to the oppressed and the discriminated in the world. The concern for global justice is not born solely out of compassion, guilt, or merely another avatar of the ‘white man’s burden’. The roots of cosmopolitanism run deep.

 

Consider for instance that in a globalized world, our lives are touched so deeply by people who we may never come to know, that we have an obligation to them. For these people make our individual and our collective projects realisable. Think of designer clothing, leather ware, and other valued goods, which we all too often forget, are churned out in the sweat shops of East Asia. Do we not owe the working poor who help us realise our consumer desires? Think of ideas, books, music, films, theatre, coming to us from other parts of the world which change our lives and our thinking. Think, for instance, of Orhan Pamuk who can help us ponder on the project of the nation state, and of the fate of secularism in our own country, through reflections on his country. Are we not obliged to extend solidarity to him when he is hounded out of his own home? Because, people in other worlds help us realise our desires, because they help us fine-tune our thoughts, because they help to broaden our horizons, they touch our lives in many ways. Therefore, we owe them both compassion and solidarity. We cannot distinguish between citizen and stranger any longer, because in an interconnected world, there are no such categories.

 

But we have sadly lost our capacity to connect with the rest of the world. We have waylaid the Nehruvian vision. This legacy of Nehru has been forgotten as much as we have forgotten his warnings about turning inwards, about our obsessions about our own personal rituals. ‘The day to day religion of the orthodox Hindu,’ wrote Nehru evocatively, ‘is more concerned with what to eat and what not to eat, who to eat with and from whom to keep away, than with spiritual values. The rules and regulations of the kitchen dominate his social life. The Moslem is fortunately free from these inhibitions, but he has his own narrow codes and ceremonials, a routine which he rigorously follows, forgetting the lessons of brotherhood which his religion taught him’.

Up till today, we continue to be fixated with who we should eat with, and who our children should or should not marry. If this is reason enough to despair, there is further despair at the way in which we have become indifferent to the plight of citizens in strife-torn countries, whether these countries be our neighbours such as Sri Lanka, or Rwanda, Sudan, Kosovo and Bosnia. We, in sum, have become far too self-referential. If we as Indians have pretensions to being a great civilization, it is time to understand that civilizations do not fold themselves inwards; they reach outwards to people who may not be like us, but with whom we share a common humanity, and to whom we owe solidarity, compassion and obligation.