India made a commitment to liberal constitutional democracy. The dominant paradigm of liberal constitutionalism has a basic set of ingredients: the entrenchment of individual rights to protect the basic freedom of individuals; the affirmation of the formal political equality of all citizens; the creation of institutional checks and balances; formally defined limitations on the power of government; and the preservation of institutions and practices that allow citizens to exercise political agency and engage in practices of political justification. All of these components together form the democratic fabric. They reinforce each other You take away one component: freedom, equality, institutional dispersal of power or the exercise of political agency, and the entire structure falls down.
But democracy is, at its core, fundamentally an ethical relationship. Even in its most elementary form, elections, democracy embodies rare values. It requires first of all a commitment to the peaceful transition of power. It therefore stems from a radical commitment to non-violence and the pacification of force. Democracy is the institutional form that facilitates peace. And any form of violence, therefore, violates its ethical character. The simple act of voting embodies deep ethical meanings. It is the only moment in our deeply hierarchical societies where we are truly equal: each vote counts for as much as any other vote. The “Majority” rule is the only form of selection system (other than lottery) that is compatible with political equality. The fact that the ballot is in secret, is an ethical nod to the fact that we are to be treated as independent agents. Space has to be given for each of us to independently make up our minds without fear. The constitutive conditions of a liberal morality and a democratic morality overlap. For instance, for a democracy to be free and fair, there has to be freedom of expression, freedom of association freedom to organize. These are also the constitutive conditions of liberalism. The rights that protect the individual are also the rights that enable a democracy to function as a democracy. There is no tension between democracy and liberalism. The process by which a genuine majority is constituted has to protect the rights of the individuals.
A commitment to elections has other ethical meanings. It means all authority is merely provisional. It rests on the possibility that that a point of view that has lost today might prevail tomorrow. It involves the possibility of living under policies one might not agree with. So even something as simple as elections requires deep moral values: commitment to equality, non-violence, respecting the intellectual independence of our fellow citizens, respect for their rights, openness to living with points of view we might not agree with. Elections are not merely elections. If we understood what elections entail, we would already have a clear moral compass.
But democracy is also more than a morality of elections. It is a way of being in the world. This powerful, brilliant, sensitive and timely meditation by Prof Apoorvanand captures the way in which it is a way of being in the world. It is a way of being in the world that, has at its centre, as respect for human dignity, the inviolability of every individual life. At the onset of the Age of Democracy, Alexis De Tocqueville mediated on the relationship between democracy and poetry. Her wrote:
“I am persuaded that in the end democracy diverts the imagination from all that is external to man and fixes it on man alone. Democratic nations may amuse themselves for a while with considering the productions of nature, but they are excited in reality only by a survey of themselves. Here, and here alone, the true sources of poetry among such nations are to be found…. Among a democratic people poetry will not be fed with legends or the memorials of old traditions. All these resources fail him; but Man remains, and the poet needs no more. The destinies of mankind, man himself taken aloof from his country and his age and standing in the presence of Nature and of God, with his passions, his doubts, his rare prosperities and inconceivable wretchednesses, will become the chief, if not the sole, theme of poetry among these nations.”
Democracy in this sense is centered on humanity. There is no cause, no religion, no God, no aesthetic interest for which humanity can be sacrificed. Democracy leaves us free to pursue the gods we want, the pleasures we seek, the challenges that give our life meaning. But the poetry of democracy, its moral centre is humanity, in all its concreteness. Since democracy is a way of being in the world, it needs grammar, poetry, moral psychology, an aesthetic, and even in the final analysis, faith. Every time we abridge any democratic value, we essentially express a basic lack of trust in the world. Every time we abridge someone’s freedom, we are signalling we do not trust them. Every time we deny someone dignity or equal standing, we are signalling we do not trust them. Violations of liberty or departures from equality are not just moral transgression. These violations tear the fabric of the world. They are essentially a way of saying: We cannot trust our fellow citizens. This is why any assault on freedom or dignity breaks our relationship with the world. It is not just a violation of a norm. It is also heartbreaking.
This collection is a profound meditation on this heartbreak. In a society like India which is deeply hierarchical, poor and oppressive such a heartbreak is a daily occurrence. In fact, it is so ubiquitous that we avoid confronting our realities. We can carry through the formalities of democracy only by developing an almost heartless relationship with the world around us. It is not heartless in the sense that it means to be deliberately cruel. It is heartless in a subtler sense. We stop paying attention. We stop empathizing. We stop noticing the daily violations of dignity that surround us. We subvert even the very modest attempts at justice our society produces. This is because the spectre of democratic betrayal is so overwhelming, that we deal with it through a form of denial. We unsee what is in front of our eyes.
This book then takes us through the poetry of heartbreak in a democracy. Through a profoundly moving series of readings of some of the best voices in modern poetry such as Dhumil. Raghuveer Sahay, Vijaydeva Narain Sahi, Mahamood Darvesh, Srikant Varma, Kunwar Narain, Nagarjuna, Gyanendrapati, Om Prakash Valmiki and others, Apoorvanad makes us see what we unsee.
The collection begins with a poem by Raghuveer Sahay with the promise of democracy, its magnificent conceit that: Anyone has the right to be Prime Minister. The peculiar dignity of democracy is that anyone can claim a stake to be Prime Minister. To use Tocqueville’s words where someone is going is more important than where someone comes from. But this turns out to be a monumental conceit. We know that literally this is not true: claims to political power are always mediated by other forms of privilege: connections, wealth, individual charisma, social position and so on. And certainly, many modern democracies have afforded just that form of mobility: men (mostly men) of humble origins have ascended to the highest office. Democracy in this limited sense seems to dissolve the burdens of social identity.
But does it do so for everyone? A democracy is in part constituted by representation: the representatives and rulers that we select are ours. They reflect us. They gain legitimacy in part because we see ourselves, or perhaps our alienated selves in them. But democracies can sometimes also make some groups invisible. The conceit that in a democracy anyone can become Prime Minsiter is suddenly punctured by the thought: are there groups and communities who we would not even tolerate as representatives, let alone as Prime Minister? The question of representation becomes a poetic route into the ways in which democracy betrays its promise by marginalising minorities. Minorities cannot see their own faces in the faces of representatives. If Muslims become an object of suspicion, such that they are made invisible in representative spaces, how can this democracy be theirs?
There is a subtle distinction here that needs to introduced in seeing this injustice. According to one picture of representation, I should see my face, as it were, in my representative. The representative assembly should mirror the nation. It should reflect exactly all those social divisions that mark society, by caste or religion. But there is another conception of justice here, which centres not on representation but on discrimination. Are we the kind of democracy where some candidates will not be selected simply because of who they are, simply because of their identity? Are people being marginalized simply because of their “faces” or as Prime Minister Modi once insidiously put it, because of what they wear? I myself lean toward prioritising the second form of injustice. Singling out people for exclusion simply on account of their identity is one of the worst sins a democracy can commit. No, in our democracy not everyone can be Prime Minister.
But the demand that I see my face – where my face is identified according to some identity – in the representative assembly is also to valorise the politics of identity. In an ideal democracy even my own face is not fixed, how can it be represented? The idea that representation should mirror society often privileges certain cleavages and identities. The identities should matter to people in their private and social lives. They also have to be taken into account if these identities are the basis of exclusion. But ultimately the romantic promise of democracy is that it frees politics from the burdens of these identities, and lets a full individuality flourish. That identity may be an aspect of our individuality. But the purpose of politics is not to mirror our identity.
But this haunting question: who has the authority to become Prime Minister, is merely a prelude to asking profound and pointed questions about our way of being. What else do we need to be democratic agents? In one lovely meditation Apoorvanand asks the question: sometimes democratic energy seems overwhelming. The game of numbers reduces the individual to a tiny entity, often one lost in the larger mass to which it belongs. Under such conditions, is a withdrawal from voting, a reclaiming of our quiet act of solitude, itself a form of moral and political agency. In another meditation, he poses this mystery at the heart of democracy. How can a politics of hate become attractive? What is it about a demagoguery full of hate, that it is able to mobilise people? How can hate become aesthetically attractive? In another meditation, he reflects on the material conditions of political agency. What does it mean to live democratically under conditions of extreme material deprivation? Why does a democracy, which promises freedom confine so many to a life of brute necessity? After all, the opposite of freedom is necessity. How do we find dignity and agency under such circumstances?
Another poem gestures at the lack of democratic courage. A democracy, and especially a liberal democracy gives us legal freedoms. But how many of us are courageous enough to exercise this freedom? In an ideal democracy, the one sentiment we would not experience is fear. As the historian Alan Kahan has written in his wonderful history of liberalism, there is a profound connection between human dignity and freedom from fear. The sources of fear can change, but a democracy has to tackle all of them: we need freedom from fear, from totalitarian government, from poverty, from religious fanaticism, from collectivism of nationalism. But often, the poets remind us, we are more comfortable living in fear. The most powerful and privileged cannot muster the slightest civic courage to challenge power or fanaticism. No democracy can survive without a minimal degree of civic courage.
Another poem, more controversially, points out that capitalism is a threat to democracy; and that genuine freedom will require the end of capitalism. There is much in this critique of capitalism. Capitalism, especially if unregulated, can mutilate human possibilities. But the challenge for democracy is that this has been even more true of all existing socialisms. The truth is that the market can both enable freedom, and also threaten it. The state can also enable freedom and threaten it. A democratic morality has to struggle with both threats. It is a tragedy for modern democracy that it has not yet found the right answer. But dogmatic critiques of capitalism can sometimes underestimate the liberating power of markets. Does a democracy then require revolution as one poem suggests? This history of revolution is not reassuring.
At one level revolution ushers in the fantasy of a world we have collectively made through our agency, one where a few do not exercise the power over the many. But on the other hand, the history of revolution is a history of violence? Does that violence lead to better outcomes than the structural violence of contemporary society? Does the assumption of omniscience that a revolution makes – that we can make a society from scratch in a way in which everyone can agree carry anti-democratic overtones? This is not the place to settle this question. But it is a tribute to Prof. Apporvanand’s brilliance that meditation brings this question to the surface. Is it a democratic sensibility and reformist or a revolutionary one?
I could go on. The list of deep questions this series of reflections raises is long and impressive. In addition to political questions, Prof Apoorvanand constantly returns to democracy as a way of being. For instance, does democracy require a self-awareness of our own incompleteness? In this perspective, we see our fellow citizens as completing us, in some sense. It is a cure for our narcissism. What form of social cooperation does a democracy require? It does not have the virtue of collectivity, which always threatens to erase individuality. Rather it requires reciprocity and equal regard for each other. Once you are done reading through this book, you will have a sense of what a democratic soul looks like, in all its pulsating rhythms. It will leave you profoundly changed.
This book, through a series of remarkable reflections, makes us see, what is around us. It touches on our politics. But it reaches a place far more difficult to reach: our own souls. It causes disquiet. I must confess that reading all the poems collected in this volume leaves you with an abiding sense of disappointment with democracy. Almost all the poets in this collection convey a sense of being betrayed. Some are angry, some resentful, some deeply disappointed. They all have an instinctive sense of injustice that powerfully comes through, they powerfully perform the role of democracy’s conscience keepers. But the relationship between poetry and democracy need not be one of only disappointment, anger at an unfulfilled promise. It need only be a catalogue of vices or virtues not exercised.
The poetry of democracy also needs romance. It struck me reading this collection, that India has produced extraordinary poets who have catalogued the betrayal of democracy. But it is still awaiting its Walt Whitman, the poet who can express in all its glory and fulness what a democratic sensibility looks like. Some of these poets come close. But we need a poet who can capture the incandescence of democracy, who can not only shout “darkness” but spread new light. But what these essays do prove is that the Hindi Language now has one of the foremost thinkers of democracy in the world in the form of Prof Apoorvanand. He is democracy personified in all its glorious romance and courage.
Excerpted with permission from Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s Preface to Kavita Mein Jantantra, Apoorvanand, Rajkamal Prakashan.
