The State
of Democracy in South Asia project
is an attempt to answer the question: Is a South
Asian imagination of Democracy available for reconstruction?
It adopts an approach that integrates insights from
several worlds that of the academic as well as that
of the activist.
What
emerges is that democracy is part of the political
common sense of South Asia. The interpretative
challenge was there to see how it has become this
common sense. The study sees democracy not just
as an anti-colonial project but also as a modernizing
project of transforming societies in South Asia.
The nationalist and modernist lenses are thus
important for looking at democracy in South Asia.
The
project is thus an initiative to carry out a base-line
evaluation of the democratic enterprise in the
five South Asian countries of Bangladesh, India,
Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The project is
based at the Centre
for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi
and is funded by the
European Union Cross Cultural Programme, Ford
Foundation and the International
Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance
(IDEA), Stockholm.
The project seeks to answer the question: What
has democracy done to South Asia and South Asia
to democracy? It does not wish to suggest that
there is a distinctive South Asian conception
of democracy nor does it wish to accept uncritically
the idea that there is single universal conception
of democracy. The study recognizes that the working
of democracy across the globe has plural practices
yet these are connected through a set of core
principles. The study hopes to have South Asia
both illustrate the working of democratic institutions
as well as problematize our understanding of that
working. It uses four research pathways to do
this: survey, case studies, qualitative assessment
and dialogues on democracy.
The
project has developed a network of scholars interested
in an empirically grounded theory of democracy
in South Asia. It aims at collaborating with the
East Asia barometer to evolve an Asia Barometer
of democracy and finally a Global Barometer. These
Barometers seek to investigate democracies in
various parts of the world, by using the survey
methodology to compare them and arrive at an understanding
of the changing attitude to democracy in different
regions of the world. Through this initiative
we expect to make a serious intervention in global
debates about democracy.
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