Revisiting Democracy

There are various definitions of democracy I learned over my years as a student. I never paid much attention to any of them. Conversely they remained rather boring and ignored texts in my school books. On some occasions, I heard my friends debate over it and managed to discern some definitive features to the word. At another time, another day, I became helplessly forgetful. With worlds of beautiful things happening to my age then, it would have been foolish to attach more time to the understanding and defining of democracy. I wasted luxuriously in the company of women, music and dreams.
Fifteen years hence, at this age today, I learn of Barack Obama winning the US presidential elections. ‘Change has come to America’ one of the headlines flashes on a browser before me. My office buzzes with the breaking news as does the world, or so it seems. We start exchanging views, engage in speculations, get back to work. I think of ‘change’ and remember the word democracy.

Although a universally acceptable definition for the word is still contentious (and rightly so to be in the democratic spirit), there are a couple of principles inclusive to all its allied concepts. First that all members of the society have equal access to opportunities and second that all members enjoy universally accepted freedom and liberties. Fair enough, one must say because what’s more valid than a free society. That is to speak of a society where Mangal a sweeper sips his tea in the same hotel as Raghav a brahmin. Or Kaneez a girl studies in the same ranks as Omar a boy. Or in the same sense, Barrack Obama, a black becomes the president of America.

The change has certainly come in, I think before I write. My thoughts take me home, to that serpentine alley in Ganja Chowk, Raigarh. In the room facing the street, my daughter plays with her friends. Aged between 3-5 most of them belong to the same neighborhood. A heap of toys gathers at the center with children weaving their lives around it. At a distance, near the threshold stands Ria, our maidservant’s granddaughter. She reluctantly makes it to the swarm of children and manages to touch a plastic locomotive from the heap. A little later when all the kids are made to sit in a row to share the Puja Prasad, she involuntarily takes an obscure corner.
Born to a lower caste and relatively poorer family, Ria explains a different childhood to me. Once again I think of democratic rights.

This time the image is that of my student days. Back then in college, we generally noticed the scheduled tribe and scheduled caste students, making groups among themselves. It was noticeably rare that one of them shared time or space with us. Though theoretically we did possess the equality, but it usually felt as if we belonged to different worlds. I clearly remember the dementia of those times when during the anti-Mandal commission uproar, faces from the other world bore an expression of utter fear. Once when my girlfriend asked me about the Mandal commission and the entailing disturbance, I jokingly said – ‘it’s preventing that lovely black girl from snatching me from you’.

My girlfriend might just have supported the anti-reservation antics but coming back to my joke, I find it all the more serious. It remains a fact that for centuries the dominant class has fringed its binary, being both grossly exploitative in its intent and shrewdly manipulative in its approach. The past few decades of laissez faire have served well to widen the divide. Today in India we have fourth highest number of dollar billionaires in the planet and simultaneously we rank 126th in the Human Development Indicators which means its better to be a poor person in Bolivia (the poorest nation in South America). CEO salaries recorded an all time high last year while we have 836 million people living on less than Rs 20 a day. A new restaurant opens everyday in some city of the country, while in the last five years we added more newly hungry millions than the rest of the world. Our economic growth rate is said to attain envious proportions and yet farmer indebtedness has doubled in the last decade, from 26.2% in 1991 to 46.3% in 2001. Inequalities are bound to rise with unbridled capitalism and lack of a firm political will.
It’s as a result of this long-term uni-polarity of power that my maidservant’s granddaughter understands life from a window my daughter perhaps would never choose to peep through. Or in that case black girls would never ever snatch me from my girlfriends.

With Obama’s historic victory, the promise for a change has been agreed upon by many to arrive. My limited resources of intellectual capital prevent me to analyze the magnitude and nature of this deemed change. Secure within the laziness of a careless writer, I barely get to understand that he stops the misadventures like restoring democracy in Iraq and Afganistan and attends to rather urgent calls like re-structuring the American farm bill, where a reduction in subsidies to the cotton farmers alone could feed a million children more in Africa. Off late, sledging America on various grounds has been an order of the day in the developing world. May be the president takes account of such voices, and explores why in the first place did they arise? In short, he could re-visit the word democracy, and apply it with honesty.

As far as India is concerned, we have so many Americas within us; need to sort those out first. We need to ascertain that across the country in our homes, children like Ria have a stake, we need to gather that eyes of black women have dreams too.