The democratic political process in India is broken

All traditional sites of consensus-building — public discourse, civil society, and political parties — have evolved to structurally impede dialectical cooperation

Published in The Hindu

The democratic political process in India is broken. It is not just that the institutional machinery has been captured by those who seek self-enrichment instead of representation but that it is becoming impossible to alter the balance of power on any issue to chart a new way forward. At its heart, democratic political process is not about regime change, nor is it about "resistance". The purpose of democratic politics is to facilitate constructive collaboration, of which capturing power and regime change is one part. Seen thus, democratic politics is about building normative consensus, constructing majorities in favour of certain paths and providing platforms for collective action. However all traditional sites of consensus-building - public discourse, civil society, political parties - have evolved to structurally impede dialectical cooperation imperative for consensus building and collaboration. 

This issue is different from the issue of institutional capture because institutions of the state are downstream of the political process. Such institutions can neither be in the business of facilitating collectives nor mooting alternatives but instead derive their credibility from procedural integrity.  What is at stake here is more fundamental to our polity and speaks to our inability to coalesce and collaborate. Consequently even on issues which have deep public resonance, as a polity we are unable to move beyond outrage, protest or resignation towards constructive action. It is important to identify the pathologies affecting each of these sites in India if  we are to restore the democratic potential of our political process.

In a democracy, the public discourse provides the dialectical space for the back and forth necessary to evolve consensus to renew or build new normative frameworks. However, three connected developments have rendered our public discourse unable to facilitate iterative dialogue required to develop consensus. First, institutional news media has lost credibility due to which it is unable to establish a baseline of facts or exercise narrative control. Second, the rise of social media has decentralised the manufacture and propagation of content. Since the consumer is both the producer and propagator, virality instead of substance has become the primary determinant of value. Consequently, engagement is prioritised over quality or veracity. Third, the loss of mainstream media’s credibility has seen a concomitant rise in hyper-partisanship wherein people are no longer interested in dialogue or deliberation and news/content is primarily a tool to promote factional interests. Finally, the proliferation of media - news and social - has led to the fragmentation of our collective attention while the steady stream of “content” has made all issues transient. In this backdrop, gaining visibility and capturing attention is more important than dialogue or reason. Consequently, the public discourse has become a site for a million individual battles to capture attention and reinforce tribal affiliation instead of dialogue and consensus building.

Civil society plays an important role as the voice of conscience in any polity and is the natural site to moot alternatives. However for various reasons, the locus of liberal civil society action in India has increasingly moved towards the State and its institutional intermediaries. Consequently, civil society has become dependent on a permissive State to be able to function. Moreover, in this model, civil society derives legitimacy from normative purity instead of drawing strength from its representativeness. Civil society in India is thus suited more to single-issue campaigns than its ability to reconcile multiple viewpoints through negotiation and compromise. While civil society organizations around the world tend to be single-issue, civil society organizations in India are marked by the proclivity to bypass the political process in favour of institutional processes - such as judicial or bureaucratic interventions - to advance their agenda.  

Finally, political parties have their own pathologies which shift focus to internal issues and reduce space for deliberation and coalition-building. Conceptually, one aspect of the role of the elected representative is to extrapolate constituency issues into a policy agenda. This would entail a mix of issue aggregation, deliberation, negotiation and coalition building. However, the average elected representative does not have the power - and often even the inclination - within the party setup to be able to make these connections. There is also uncertain electoral payoff from influencing the policy agenda versus directly intervening on behalf of the constituents for delivery of various services. Moreover, elections - even at the constituency level - involve a complex and variable mix of "representation" of constituency, state and national issues and social grouping. Consequently, all candidates except the local strongman derive a decisive fraction of votes from the party symbol. This tilts the balance of power heavily towards decision-makers for party tickets within the Party. This is further compounded by the fact that institutional positions of power in any political party are a fraction of the actual aspirants leading to a preoccupation with internal machinations and sycophancy while impeding dialogue and collaboration.  

The pathologies identified above don’t exist independent of each other but feed off each other to fracture our ability to come together and collaborate. Media may highlight issues but moving forward requires organisation by civil society and political parties. On the other hand, the dysfunction in media has mainstreamed misinformation and powered the rise of deeply unserious individuals into positions of influence. The top-down nature of political parties has altered the structure of civil society by raising the bar for grassroots mobilisation to an untenable height, leading civil society organizations to direct their energies into lobbying through intermediary institutions or becoming agents for execution of bureaucratic projects. This has depleted the organisational strength of civil society and reduced its ability to intervene in the political process for correctives. The dialectical nature of these pathologies resists easy fixes but for a country which prides itself on being the world’s largest democracy, the complexity of the issue at hand is not reason enough to not try. 

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