Cellphones, ATMs, flyovers, the Metro, a new airport. Delhi’s citizens have them all. Yet they voted out their Government. Citizens seem to want something else. They want institutions who respond to their needs, and less corrupt institutions. The new Aam Admi Party’s Government in Delhi is trying to change institutions in new ways with citizens’ darbars and dharnas by the Chief Minister. The AAP’s challenge to the established political order has generated support from a surprisingly wide spectrum of society, from rikshaw-drivers to CEOs. However, the methods used have caused some to pause. The President of India too has called for better governance not anarchy.
Institutions provide order in our lives. Institutions are also the vehicles which enable societies to progress. Changing institutions to redirect progress is a risky exercise, like redesigning the aircraft in which we are flying. When people lose trust in established institutions, they must be reformed. How should this be done? This was the question that Edmund Burke, the British statesman, and Thomas Paine, the American thought-leader, who had come together to support the American Revolution, debated in the eighteenth century when they took opposite sides in the French Revolution.
Both agreed that institutions must be reformed for society’s betterment. They disagreed about methods. Burke recommended a gradual process of evolution modeled on the way nature makes change. Paine preferred revolution, which displaces the old order entirely to make space for new institutions. According to Burke what is permanent about nature is change. Natural systems have the ability to change because they keep something constant, as an anchor, while the rest changes. The anchor that gives stability to society and prevents change becoming chaos, in his view was the monarchy and the peerage around which elected governments could make change. Paine saw Burke’s case for preservation and his prescription of acceptable processes for reforming institutions as arguments to protect the Establishment’s vested interests.
Burke and Paine laid out the positions of the political Right and Left that have permeated democratic societies since then. The Right is conservative in its approach to institutional change, the Left revolutionary. Right and Left are terms applied mostly to economic ideologies today. Whereas political parties offer choices in their political ideologies too. Though its revolutionary methods have caused some to waver, the AAP’s stand against the established political order seems to be supported across a wide spectrum of society,
Both Burke and Paine were champions of democracy: of governments of the people, for the people, and by the people. Both believed that governments must be formed by elected representatives. Both believed that governments must be accountable to the people. Burke supported the American Revolution because the British Government had failed the American people on both these counts. Both also believed that Governments must be by the people too: that people must participate in shaping policies and decisions that govern their lives. In fact, Burke insisted that politics is not a matter of individual genius but is a matter of joint activity directed to a common cause.
The two men differed in their views about how deliberations about the common cause and joint activities should be conducted. Since beliefs are shaped by individual experiences, and each person can only know a part of a complex reality, Burke said that partisanship can never be argued out of existence. Burke was a pragmatist. He recommended that the difficult deliberations about the common cause and joint activities should be conducted by a small number of elected persons. On the other hand, Paine, the revolutionary, believed that the equality of man dictates that in a legitimate government, everything must be open for discussion and analysis by all. He wrote, ‘In a representative system, the reason for everything must publicly appear’.
250 years have passed since the great debate between Burke and Paine. The 21st century has commenced with a noticeable decline of trust in elected governments in India and in the West too. The demand for governments by the people, not only for them, is higher than ever before. Democratic institutions must evolve.
Modern communication technologies seem to provide the means to listen to the masses. Millions can express themselves in tweets and posts on social media platforms. However, as policy-makers using these mediums of communication have realized, these mediums’ vast reach and speed may make democratic communication more difficult, not less. What is the signal emerging from all that chatter and noise on social media platforms? And, how does one ensure that democratic principles are at work when obtaining inputs electronically? Are some technology-savvy people ‘stuffing the ballot boxes’ with multiple responses, whereas the views of many not so savvy are not being counted at all?
A modern radar system must be designed for democracy’s airplane. Democratic processes for wide public deliberation are required. Several new methods, facilitated by technology, are being developed, such as Deliberative Polling in the USA, and Consensus Conferences in Denmark. India, the world’s largest democracy, facing an upsurge of demand for citizens’ participation in governance, must be a leader in these innovations, keeping in mind the digital divide yet to be bridged in India.