So, I think the idea of imperatives is a very important one, in which to understand the balance of possibilities. But since you are doing an indexing exercise, I would also say that there are two other angles from which one could pursue this exercise. We need to look at the assets for democracy. I’m not pessimistic at all. I was listening to the dialogue between Mr. Mintoo and Mr. Walliur Rahman. There is pessimism in the dialogue. I think one could also approach the idea of what assets do we actually have for democracy. For example, the electorates have not been cowed for the last couple of elections despite their absolutist inclination. They are no more seen as ‘vote banks’. They exercise their rights to vote. They can give power to a party and if necessary, get a party out of the power. This electoral behaviour is an important asset for democracy. This is a silent rising. This awareness is also a force that can act even in indirect ways. For example, there is a growing silent reluctance to hartals and bring about a psychological mood and that’s why the parties have to justify a hartal when they call it and it means the parties are under pressure.
I think one last point is that in countries like ours as well as in developed countries, we rush to formalize anything. Because of the notion of formal structures, we turn informal bodies into formal ones and thus fail to build the natural capacity of the informal institutions like ‘Gram Sarkar’ and tried to formalize the village court instead of the gram shalish. We think that it would work better but in reality it doesn’t. So, the interface of the formal and the informal bodies would be the design of democracy.
Prof. Muzaffar Ahmed (IBA, University of Dhaka): “My apologies for not being here for the substantive discussions that have gone so far. So my remarks may not be very pertinent. I’m intrigued by the idea of indexing democracy and that’s why I came here. Certain issues have come up. Do you index democracy by the western notions of the institutions of democracy? Or do you add to this or focus on practices of the institutions that are not necessarily classified according to those three or four arms of democracy that we talk about? And within the institutions there are different types of formal and informal units that play a role, which affects the functioning of the institutions such as those people have talked about police or the law and order. If we say that the law and order situation is bad and the perceptions of scoring, that Binayak has been talking about, and the scoring that has been practiced since the days of attempts made by social and democratic development, which was undertaken by the World Bank back in early 70s, if you do that, do we really look at indexation? For example, one of the criteria of better functioning of democracy or democratisation is national unity. It’s not an institution, it’s a notion. Do you measure it by the number of conflicts or riots that we have or do you measure it by differences that you have by the majority and the minority and the groups within the minority? So, there are issues of that kind, which need to be addressed”.
“The other notion that we are possibly facing in Bangladesh is that Bangladesh is a unitary state. Would canton-isation of Bangladesh make democracy work better? So, when we are indexing it, as Zillur said there are certain constraints, which have been built in by the continuation of laws from the colonial days and the constitution that we have framed. And within that boundary, when you index it, is it really comparable to the countries where these boundaries are not present? So, that comparability within South Asia, which is being attempted at, is also an issue, which methodologically has to be addressed. I think, India in a unique way different from other countries of South Asia. India has faced lots of problems, for example, sharing power with the states and within the states within the blocks. By changing the constitution and by changing boundaries, India has attempted to address such problems and come closer to the people. No such attempts are made elsewhere of which there have been problems. For example, problems in Sri Lanka, problems in Nepal, problems in Bangladesh, problems in Pakistan, problems in Maldives and problems in Bhutan. So, I think some more redefining of the issues and brainstorming will be needed before we can think of having a comparative study. Democracy is a culture, democracy is a process, democracy is an instrument of participation, and democracy is an outcome of the entire governmental process. So there are many ways to look at it. And when you want to index it, you have to be very clear about it”.
Ambassador Walliur Rahman: (Director, BILIA): “I’ll just clear myself lest I should be misunderstood. There might be some areas, which are not so constitutional, but at that time a constitution was given and it was absolutely necessary. Remember, we should not forget what happened in Pakistan. Had the constitution drafted by Sarwardi been allowed to continue, perhaps, things could have been different in Pakistan. So, we should not loose sight of that. In that context, I say that there is the book, which is perhaps, in my view, the best that has been given to Bangladesh. If we have not been able to use it, that is our misfortune”.
“Now, regarding the remarks of Hossain Zillur Rahman, I’d like to say in my remarks that I certainly did not try to underestimate the values of the assets of Bangladesh. Well, without the assets that we have, we would not sit here today. My reference to the GDP growth is the asset. A matter of fact, if I’m self-critical, we, the civil society have failed to flag and to tell the government that ‘Look, this is wrong, you cannot do that’. Certainly, we have assets. The process of democratisation is going on. We shall succeed. If we don’t believe that we’ll succeed, the alternative is absolutely inconceivable”.
Prof. Imtiaz Ahmed (Department of International Relations, University of Dhaka): “I want to focus on Tagore’s understanding, which is very important because people take his puro samaj for nagarik samaj, this is not correct, in fact. Nagarik Samaj means urban or civil society, which is of recent origin. So, the civil society even in the western understanding of it has a flavour of it. But when Tagore was referring to puro samaj, he was not, in fact, referring to the flavour of urbanity. For example, pukur, pathshala and other things have nothing to do with urban structures. So, I thought there was an interesting way of looking at that. But the 6 percent civil society is something that we need to talk about”.
“About language and symbols I’d like to say that this is very important. When we use the concept of democracy and it is not counter intuitive as such. I’ll give three examples. The first example that I have is of Napoleon. Napoleon seemed to be a bad guy to me because of the projection of Napoleon as a bad guy in ‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy. However, this notion of Napoleon was changed after I had been to Washington museum where I got another notion of Napoleon. So, the very concept of Napoleon can mean totally two different things. And we need to be very careful about what we are using. The second point is the word ‘poor people’. A researcher who studied Tippetano, a Mexican travel community, brought a Tippetano in the workshop and urged that Tippetanos are very poor and we need to help them. Then suddenly the Tippetano got up and said, ‘No, no, we are not poor people. We are Tippetanos.’ He said so because the word ‘poor’ was not in their dictionary. We faced the same thing when we went to Kishorganj. We asked them ‘Who are the poor people?’ They could not really understand what we were talking about. So, we can see that concepts can shift. Another empirical example that I’d like to share is that once the children from Dhanmondi and from the streets were asked about their notion of security. The children from the posh area said that they needed more police for security but at the same time a street girl said that, police are the last thing that they want. Police are the most dangerous thing. To me the police are still “the Thola Bahini”. So, the Police as a concept has changed. So, I think that the word ‘democracy’ could have different kinds of meanings to different people”.
“The last point that I’d like to discuss is the issue of structure and agent and here I bring Zillur Bhai in. I can see that if you are working with agents, people get uncomfortable for structures. Quayes was saying that we don’t need more MPs. But I’d like to draw his attention to Britain, one of the oldest democracies of the world. They have a limit of 40000 (forty thousand) people for an MP. If forty thousand goes up, they have a new MP. But we don’t have any such a limit. Now, I’ll differ a little bit on the point that people support the two major political parties to get rid of incumbency. I think this can be understood by doing mathematics of politics. This has to do more with how you play your part as a politician. Frankly speaking, if there were one or two ministers and one or two opposition leaders present in this dialogue, the whole room would have been brimmed with people. Now, we can say that those people would come here not for the sake of a workshop but just to show their faces to the leaders. So, just because the two political parties have lots of people coming into their campaigns does not reflect the reality. The reality could be totally different. So, winning an election or getting rid of incumbency is totally different altogether”.
Mr. Mijarul Quayes (Director General, Ministry of Foreign Affairs): “I think I’ll pick up that threat about incumbency. I’m not sure there is a pattern, we want to trace about incumbency because it’s not really a question of who’s coming and forming the government. I think the figure would give a better analysis if we were to see if there has been a shift in the percentage of people voting. That is not the case. I mean there have been more people voting for the opposition now than when they were voted into power. Obviously, there is a problem there. I was wondering about absolutism, authoritarianism, and democracy. Are we getting into a trap of a democracy that we consider being ideal in terms of governance and social engineering? The general discourse that we have at this stage is between democracy in the super structure scene and being democratic in the sense of having a democratic polity more to do with western capitalism vis-à-vis socialism. In Cuba they would say, we have a more democratic society than the USA and on other hand the USA would say that we have our democratic governance, elections etc. I think that is why we should have certain parameters for indexing. So, Bangladesh’s performance can be rated vis-à-vis the parameters set by it. We need not talk about how Bangladesh performs on capital punishment according to the European standard. Of course, there is a possibility of talking about the gaps in these parameters that each state may have in its constitution and in its basic construct. If the signals that we are getting in terms of the ground reality is that people tend to behave or look for absolutism in governance, are we missing something? What values have been internalised, by our constitution making process, in our political process? When people look at the whole idea of governance, and the people who govern and rule us, do they seek in their face absolute monarchic personalities? Is that the departure point for us to aspire democracy? These are issues that play in my mind as I was listening to the discussion here. On the question of a federation, I’d like to give an example, if you look at the cantons and republics in Switzerland and the broader confederation, the Russian federation and the Soviet Union, there are already certain structures and I think those can be looked up. On the question of ‘freedom from fear and want’ I’d like to say let’s not confuse it with democracy. ‘Freedom from fear and want’, is the concern of the Human Rights Declaration. Promotion of HRD (Human Resourse Development) is a part of democratic polity. Democracy is more an institution that promotes HRD and stops violations and aberrations. So, this distinction must be noted. Much of what we are talking about is miscarriages, which are points to a potential limitation of the nation-state. If we look at the European experience, we are looking toward democratic heartland that moves with democratic deficit. This is interesting to look at because a democratic Europe is curving out with a democratic deficit in case of delivering on the social as well as political fronts with high objectives of democracy. How do you index that as we go about looking at our performance? Now, even in terms of the evolution of the state and evolution of the communities in South Asia, is there an aspirational progression towards what Europe has done? I can tell you that a group of eminent persons have dared to dream a South Asian Union from SAPTA to SAFTA and ultimately to a union. I think these are interesting elements that are to be examined for indexing”.
The Design of Democracy
Dr. Binayak Sen (Senior Research Fellow, BIDS): “I’d like to say, first of all that the objective of the study seems that it is to decide whether it will bring new meaning to the concept of the whole indexation industry of democracy. At the ideational level, the global discourse on democracy and our national discourse focus on only one aspect of democracy that is the representative or electoral democracy. It might want to bring what notions of democracy are considered to be important for the people living in South Asia and in particular to Bangladesh. So, I think that would be a major contribution if the project could be come up with it. Ask people what aspects of democracy do they think to be important? And this is the notion what I referred to in the previous discussion as social justice. John Rawls is in opposition to the concept of ‘community’ because he thinks that a modern day democracy cannot be based on community perception about citizenship because community can be divided and might have opposing cultural idioms. So, it’s better to conceptualise persons as ‘political citizens’ than to see a person as a representative of his/her community. So, the first block of ideas, I think, is to give a new meaning to democracy as opposed to the global and national discourse as seen by the common people and here social justice can be an important consideration. Here, again the poor people should be asked what notion they have regarding social justice, equality of opportunity and what are the benefits that must be reserved for the least advanced section of the people. Unless it is done, democracy will be meaningless”.
“The second block of ideas in which the study might look into is that the qualitative assessment or the audit of existing democratic institutions and practices. Assessment can be done through a qualitative method. In our study of chronic poverty, we did not have structured questionnaires rather we asked them some lead questions. For example, what they think is constitutive of social justice?”
“The third point is that we have to think whether we are talking about democracy of the political institutions or the developmental institutions or democratisation of the society. I’d like to add a module to the study and that is to find out how far the cultures are democratic to understand the post-9/11 non-democratic behaviour of democratic actors or democratic institutions. In Foucoulian framework, every other power fields another power field and this sense the family, the society, the civil society, the developmental institutions how it influences the political culture”.
“The last point is that, sometimes there are debates between the procedural and substantive reasons. So, whether it should be the procedure or the outcome that should be focused? Habermaus focused mostly on procedure of public reason not on outcome of public reason while Rawls says process matters but its outcome has to be also taken into account. So, I think in the design of the questionnaire the focus would be given on procedural aspects of democratic institutions as well as on the outcome of them as they affect the livelihood of the poor. And I think, in any indexing you have the problem of weighting. While asking, you may also ask the weights. People must be asked whether they would give much emphasis on their security dimension or to other dimensions of their well being. People can be asked how much they would give to the periodic elections as opposed to democratisation of the police. This kind of weighting is necessary in a democratic exercise. So, there must be some questions to capture democracy from above and some question to capture it from below. At the end, we can aggregate them to get an aggregate index of democracy. Weighting can be done through the voting mechanism, for example, if we have hundred respondents and 60 respondents give more weight to the national democratic election, that 60 percent is weighted. Thus, indexing will be of much more significance.
Prof. Nazmul Ahsan Kalimullah (Department of Public Administration, University of Dhaka): “I’d like to start with reference to hartal, the country has given a serious try to the tactics such as padajatra and also some western tactics such as standing with a placard”.
“With reference to the system of elections, I’d like to say that the method we are still following is the ‘first pass the post’ method in our election process. Here, the financing of the campaigns is very important and money and muscle dominate the scenario. It is a matter of hope that instead of the ‘first past the post’ method, the country introduces the PR or proportional representative system”.
Prof. Imtiaz Ahmed (Department of International Relations, University of Dhaka): “I want to talk about hartal a little bit more because people are having this idea that hartal is a mood of protest by the opposition it’s not necessarily so in Bangladesh. Even the party in power calls hartals. Mongla is a good example of it. Hartal is basically aimed at paralysing the normal activities of the country. The first hartal called by the party in power dates back to 1973 against the Vietnam War. We have now reached a stage where even the ruling party can call hartals. So, we should think of this hartalotics. There are five critical elements in hartalotics. These are:
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It is very much leader-centric and the slogans are like fascist ones.
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It is mastan centric. Without mastans one can’t run hartals. |
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It is very street centric. Parliament is absolutely an insignificant point in this context. |
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The role of the media is very important. With private media it becomes even more important because the scope of censoring has become limited.
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It is highly government centric.
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The hartals have become very pathetic in today’s context though it had an appeal in the post-Liberation War period”.
Dr. Hossain Zillur Rahman (Executive Chairman, Power and Participation Research Centre – (PPRC)): “Since you are doing a perception survey, and Binayak has already mentioned some of the points that such a survey could bring about. I think, in order to understand the aspirational directions of the participants, questions such as ‘What do you understand by democracy?’ are asked. Along with this, I think, you could add two additional focuses. One, I think Binaik has already mentioned, is that ‘What do people understand by good democratic outcomes as if they were given?’ A second is, I think, which normally we don’t use in perception survey. But I think it would be very useful, as I’m just sitting here since morning, I felt that people’s demands also have a lot of contradictions. Take the case of an MP and the need for him or her to be in legislature. The MPs will come up with arguments in their defence that people have contradictory demands. On the high point of democracy what MPs should be doing is that they are expected to devote their time being a legislature, if they only do that they ensure that they won’t be elected next time because people have equal urges and demands on them. They expect them to do developmental tasks. So, they (MPs) point the contradictory demands within people. I think it might be useful to look into those contradictions because around those the real tension emerges”.
“My last point is about the instruments of protest as Kalimullah said ‘let’s stand with placards etc’. If it is a question of tapping into people’s grievances and trying to represent people’s grievances, certain instruments can come into play. But there are some issues that have nothing to do with the people rather they are political fights per se about power and about control. There is the only thing that matters, which can make an impact. So, placards etc. may not be very relevant issues because I want to force my opposition to back down or to concede something. So, I think when we are trying to understand democracy, we need to keep in mind that there are so many issues on which people agreed upon. If genuinely some parties or forces came up to represent them tomorrow, they would vote them to power with absolute majority. But the problem is that we are not finding those champions, who would really represent our interests etc. So, one part of the political space is the political fight per se about power and on the other hand, there is a larger space about representing people’s interests. So, the choice of instruments and their discussion is also to be understood from the point whether it’s a pure fight per se or it is about larger representations of people’s interests.
Prof. Suhas Palshikar (SDSA Principal Investigator, Lokniti-CSDS): “Actually, I wanted to say one very specific thing that has been referred to again and again since the pre-lunch session about indexing. I believe there has been some slight confusion by the use of the word ‘indexing’. Let me be very clear that the project does not at all aim at placing either Bangladesh or India at number 1, number 2 etc like the various indexes that has been made nor does the project intend to develop any positivist indices for measuring people’s responses and people’s democratic attitudes. We are not going to say, for example that these people in Bangladesh are probably less democratic than those people in Bangladesh; the literate people are more democratic than the illiterate. That is not at all the purpose of the project. We can look at the quantitative aspect of democracy or we can look at democracy by quantifying people’s attitudes. It is just a good old cross-sectional survey, which Peter mentioned in his morning presentation as one of the components of the project. So, what we would be doing basically is to conduct a cross-sectional survey sometime during this calendar year in five participant countries i.e. Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. This survey would be governed by operational grids namely, the promise grid, the design, the working, the outcomes and the futures grid. So, the questionnaire will include the questions on people’s understanding of the term ‘democracy’ but it would also include what people would expect from democracy. And there would be two places at which the culture question would come in. One would be the qualitative assessment in which there would be a separate discussion of the socio-economic and cultural domain of the given society and an assessment would be done by the experts, on the other hand, in the same domain there would be questions in the survey questionnaire, for example, what is the people’s cultural baggage that they carry and how do they relate their attitudes to democracy, to politics, to participation. Thirdly, when we come to the report, we plan to have a multiple strategy for reporting all the findings. One strategy would be publication of a report of all the five or four activities undertaken during the project period in terms of a people’s report on the state of democracy in South Asia where the effort would be not given to either criticize or appreciate democracy in one country or the other rather to complicate the whole experience of democracy and point out what has been the net result of democracy over the last few decades. We would like to publish this report simultaneously at least in some South Asian languages so that people would have direct access to the report and then more scholarly and academic publications can follow. So, I think you can help us in developing the questionnaires. Besides, I appreciate the point that has been discussed here that is; there has been some kind of robust appreciation of the political process while making criticisms of democracy. We must also accept the fact that the political space is occupied actually by the political players in a given society and they have certain significance to the political processes of that society, the point which was being made earlier that 80 percent of the people actually vote for either this or that party and that is true not only for Bangladesh but also for many other societies of South Asia. Thank you”.
Prof. Peter R deSouza (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi): “As I’ve listened to the discussion going on here, I’d like to say there is a lament that the constitutional order, somehow, has taken very flimsy routes. The constitution as a regulative document is very weak and through that much of the miscarriages can be understood. This question is a complex one. It’s not sufficient to say that the constitution is weak or deficient or it is undermined, which we normally say. We produce complex sociology, political economy to explain why this order is functioning in a deficient manner. Perhaps one may look at the constitutional design itself to find out major gaps in the system. What we need is to consider whether this constitutional order itself can be more finely tuned. I’m saying it because a point has come up about the support-base of the two political parties and a suggestion has come that people support them because they want to resist some kind of absolutism and they think that these parties have the power to resist absolutism. If this is the line of argument, does it point to the fact that there are no other institutional sides and therefore the parties become the major institutional side for democratic politics to work? And we can look at other institutional sides, which could be designated into the system. Literature on federalism, for example or literature on devolution of power could suggest that we may be looking at other institutional sides so that other sides can emerge as places for resistance from absolutism. Maybe they are there. But my sense of trying to read these two positions seem to suggest that, we should come up with the question of various pillars. For example, ‘What are the mechanisms within the parties to contain the rise of absolutism within parties?’ Hence, the miscarriages presented here are the result of something, in other words, the illness lies somewhere else. I’m saying that to suggest that we may increase our institutional density not just get into political sociology, political economy but actually get back to constitutionalism. So, we may increase our institutional density. I think that may be a very important line of investigation”.
“The second line of investigation that came up is Popular Culture, which is not translated into political culture. That again is the diagnosis. What is the cause? I think, that’s a complex question because you eloquently describe the popular culture as syncretistic and inclusive. If the representation is correct, then I can’t understand why it is not translated. And could the answer again lie in the institutional density that there is actually such a distance between popular culture and political culture that the key elements of popular culture, which define everyday practice, don’t travel to the political culture? Therefore, the political culture emerges in a new space; it doesn’t have to be constrained by the parameters of the popular culture. Why the political culture is not constrained by the parameters of the popular culture? This may be a very complex question. Ambassador Walliur Rahman made a statement saying, ‘We are not a failed democracy. Bengalis will not allow it to fail’. This is very interesting because this is linked to the other points of popular culture and political culture. Is there something about Bengali public culture that we need to look at here? I’m saying this because when the story of Bangladesh travels to the other countries of South Asia, this syncretistic culture doesn’t travel. What we get to see is a majoritarian impression of culture. So, I’m saying this as it gets reported in South Asian presses; what gets reported is not inclusive or syncretistic story but the other story, which is an exclusive and authoritarian story”.
“I think, another important question of regulatory institutions also came up. It has been said that the major problems are with regulatory institution such as the police, not with developmental institutions. I think it is presented as a kind of binary. What is actually being said there – ‘Is law and order more important?’ This is something that is faced in various parts of South Asia. We have just had elections in Madhya Pradesh, where the investment went not into the roads, power and the government, hence, was voted out. So, we are not sure how to prioritise the demands, whether law and order is demanded or the roads, power are demanded more”.
“Finally, I’d like to say something about the two points that have been raised a little earlier about the relationship between the formal and informal. I think that gives us a lot of space for innovative interventions in the global debate. It is true that we rush into formalization because we think that makes us fair and just and impartial and impersonal. But obviously when you are suggesting the informal, you are suggesting the enlightened informal. It is a road-less travel. So, is there any road map that we can think of?”
“Another point is the asset of Bangladesh. I think you need to elaborate on this question. I think this is a very important word. What are the assets of Bangladesh democracy that we are ignoring? You may focus on this elaborately so that we can construct our story more elaborately”.
Prof. Anwar Hossain (Department of History, University of Dhaka): “I’d like to add historical information to the hartalotics of Prof. Imtiaz. The kind of hartal that we see today is different from what it used to be in the past. The Guru of hartals was Mahatma Gandhi. He called the first hartal on Sunday, a weekly holiday in 1921. Now, we see hartals called on weekdays. My second point is about the cultural component of democracy. What I meant to suggest is that if we look at the popular cultural level, we do see elements of tolerance, accommodation and cooperation etc. But if we look at our political realm or the political sphere, we see just a different scenario where there is no element of cooperation, compromise and tolerance. Why is this happening? Normally, cultural studies in the context of any other developed country emphasize the fact that popular culture graduates into political culture. The positive elements of popular culture are translated into political culture and that’s how a constructive political culture gets into shape. In other words, what I mean to suggest is a sort of nexus between syncretistic, tolerant popular culture and political culture. And that has not happened in the case of Bangladesh. There are a lot of historical explanations for that. At the same time when I say that, I must also add here that not everything was rosy even at the popular level. There have been instances of conflicts as well, mostly at different stages of history. For example, during the reign of Sultan Nasir Uddin in the 14th century a treaty named ‘Tabakat-e-Nasiri’ was published in which a term was used and that was ‘Balagakhana’ which meant ‘ a land of conflict’. This term was used to describe Bengal. Actually, it was a conflict among the political stakeholders. Even in that treaty it was mentioned that people at the grassroots level were not prone to conflict. So, these are the points that we should look at while trying to analyse the conflictual scenario that obtains in our political realm bearing very much on our democratic aspiration”.
Mr. Mijarul Quayes (Director General, Ministry of Foreign Affairs): “I recall that when Mr. Galbrith, who served as an US ambassador to India, was leaving India after his assignment. He was asked about his impression of India and he said, ‘India is a functioning anarchy.’ The state doesn’t touch the lives of most of the people. In our part of the world, I think there is perhaps not one republic; the divide between republics within the nation are very deep in terms of culture, in terms of value systems. The churning of democracy, what we are talking about, takes place in one of the republics and therefore the values that are internalised in the constitutional process, in the formal face of the movements, tend to connect with the body proper but only tangentially. Let me give you an example, one of the emotive events shaping Bengali nationalism is our movement for language in 1952. It meant the demand for recognition of Bengali as a state language of Pakistan. It connected with the message because Bengali was the mother tongue i.e. the recognition of mother tongue. More specifically, it meant that the Bengalis who went to Bengali schools would have a space to link on to the centres of power in Pakistan. There were two levels at which the whole movement was operating. Now, to make that universal the necessary corollary to the demand - ‘Want Bengal as a state language’, has been demand for ‘education for all’ and also other demands. Therefore the whole arguments for recognition of Bengali as a state language carried through and it carried the message on the tangential note of ‘your mother tongue’- the emotive part of it. And these gaps are endemic and it is basically the packaging of an issue wilfully or by an accident, which builds on some of the popular emotive appeals with a thrust that may be restricted to the eluded political elite. And when we translate this into the political electoral process, we find that the representative structure or the process of representation again is absolute because as Kalimullah mentioned, we have a ‘first pass the post’ system, which literary means that we do not have majority assuming power but the major minority. All of these are minorities because all fell below 50 percent and the major minority is the victor. Therefore, at any given point in time the victor has more out of who never voted for them. And therefore interestingly, the opposition’s voice is always louder and more convincing because the coalition of dissent is larger than the coalition of the treasury bench. How to democratise the representative process? I think that is something we need to look at. Whether we talk about proportional representation or second, third rounds, that is something to be looked at”.
“Regarding the issue of women, I’d like to say that affirmative action for women is recognized in our constitution. How do you go about translating affirmative action? Do you look at affirmative action as a goal or do you look at it as a tool of empowerment? There have been suggestions about direct election for women seats. Personally I think, to democratise the electoral process, each party should think of a gender balance in their nomination and this would mean the real empowerment of gender”.
“Coming to this hartal issue, over the years especially during the Pakistani period, hartal has tremendously been a potent political tool. Hartal was more powerful than a demonstration. Hartals, in essence, aim to paralyse and we need to understand that. Now, the question is that ‘Is this still a potent political tool?’”
“On the question of diverging expectations from public representatives, I fully agree with Mr. Zillur Rahman. People expect because we have legislatures being confused as the only representatives. Decentralization is an important mantra but more important than this is the need for devolution. Decentralization through D.C and T.N.O is not the answer. Devolution to representative local government, which is not the continuum of the centre, can be the answer. A local government would ensure participatory budgeting, taxing and perhaps there might be a mechanism through which it can contribute part of its revenue to the centre. This devolution would mean that at the local level those who are elected would have a tremendous way with how they deliver on the ground. The expectation from them would be different from the expectation from the MPs and there would be no confusion. Any one, who is not happy with the legislature, would go to the District Council Chairman. Do the MPs not have a role? Yes, they do. I was privileged to study politics on Shirley William. She would tell us that she would go to her constituency to organize the surgery. People came to her and she took note of their identity and what local fixes need to be done. She brought the attention of the local bodies to those issues. If this cannot be done locally, perhaps the centre would do those. It is only when there is an institutional failure and she raises that in the parliament. But she doesn’t go and bomb the county Mayor or the local government authority. The lines are very clear. But legislatures do not only shape laws but also index priorities. They are in a position to convey that at the end of the day they have a bigger decisive power. It may not be visible in the form of local interventions and that sort of a legislative oversight, MPs do retain but to confuse that with developments or funds detracts from both legislature and functional efficiency of whatever local government arrangements we have. Thank you”.
