Bharat,
Fascinating piece and full of interesting contradictions. For instance, a statement such as “‘corruption’ is the name by which a larger democratic principle is being enunciated quite clearly – the accountability of elected legislators to the people whom they represent” is something with which I would agree wholeheartedly.
But contrast it with the title – “If only there were no people, democracy would be fine…” As I may have said before and am happy to reiterate, democracies (plural signifying the constant fluctuations in both number and type and the refusal of reification) are an evolving recognition, implicit and explicit, of the messiness and corruption of humanity. We implement mass suffrage (however flawed) BECAUSE no one person or group of people can represent the experience of the masses; we implement laws (however flouted) BECAUSE a codified expression of rights is an overt recognition that (like an idea (Jose Marti)) once awakened, cannot be put to sleep again; we institute the separation of powers (however corruptible) BECAUSE we recognise that coalitions of the elite will corrupt the mechanisms of power but are less likely to be able to do so where the implementation of power is multivariate, fissiparous. We democratize, finally, because we recognise the frailties inherent in our gregarious nature, our tendency to hierarchize-through-organization and because we need protection against our own propensity to ‘leaderize’.
To a substantial degree therefore (as the other bloggers note) we are ourselves that corrupt thing against which we rail – democracy is driven by the search for protection from ourselves and our own weaknesses, not some absolute sense of communal morality. We subliminally understand the need to disseminate power away from the individual and towards the collective, set against our constant propensity to organize and set up hierarchies which must, sooner rather than later, corrupt.
I spent a reasonable amount of time at various European social for a discussing almost exactly such tendencies within what I’ll call the Institutionalized European Left and there was a remarkable degree of agreement on the need in the next iterations of democracies to be constantly on the watch against tyrannies of representation (which appear in this piece as the problem of religion, for instance), against the tyrannies of hierarchization and verticalism – parties themselves are archaic anti-democratic structures which have long outlived the 19th century rationale for their existence and serve, particularly in the era of terminal neoliberalism, as mere conduits of sycophancy.
So I agree again with the statement that “it is important to recognize that no practice is uncontested internally. Mere legal enactments that outlaw specific practices can produce just the opposite results – as they indeed have. They simply widen the gulf of incomprehension between the secular modernist and the believer.” Whereas this is obviously intended in the blog article to refer to religious belief in the context of the Indian socio-cultural environment, it can and should refer more widely to secular modernists who are critical democratic activists, as against religious believers who in this case would be believers in ‘western democracy’, ‘party politics’, ‘the rule of law’ and, perhaps above all, the ‘free market’.
Hope this makes sense!
Dr Jon Cloke
Lecturer/Research Associate
Geography Department
Loughborough University
Loughborough LE11 3TU
Office: 01509 228193
Mob: 07984 813681
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From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bharat Punjabi [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 22 August 2011 15:34
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Economist Pranab Bardhan critiques the Anna Hazare movement in India
Thanks, Jon for your insightful post. Further to Deb Ranjan Sinha's comment, Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam have written a column on kafila with a different opinion on the movement. There is an entire range of opinion on the anti corruption movement being published on websites, blogs and in the Indian and foreign media..
http://kafila.org/2011/08/22/if-only-there-were-no-people-democracy-would-be-fine/
Bharat
Bharat Punjabi
PhD Candidate
Department of Geography
Social Science Center
University of Western Ontario
1151, Richmond Street
London,Ontario
Canada
N6A 5C2
Visiting Doctoral Fellow
Cities Centre
University of Toronto
Weblink: http://www.citiescentre.utoronto.ca/people/office/Bharat_Punjabi.htm
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