Let me begin with a very famous joke from the end of the Cold War period. (Circa 1990; it may have been in currency even before that, but I read it in a publication from the said period.)
An American (yes, it always has to be an American, I don’t know why) and a Soviet were discussing the merits of their government systems. The American says, “Hey man, in the US we have got democracy, and hence freedom. For example, I can go to the center of the town square any day and yell, ‘President Bush is an asshole’, without any fear.” To this, the Soviet replied, “What’s the big deal about that? Even I can do that.”
Let me follow up with the disclaimers. First of all, I am no writer/ columnist/ journalist or whatever else one is required to be in order to have one’s works read and criticized. I am a simple Mechanical Engineering undergraduate, and by the nature of my trade, I am supposed to know absolutely nothing about how the ‘great minds’ which lead our nations (or businesses, colleges, or anything which can be ‘led’) work. I have had political science only till junior high school, so it might happen that I occasionally overstep my jurisdiction and mistakenly refer to one thing as another. So a handy reading tip would be that it is all about ideas- the terms may not mean what their classical definition means them to be. ‘What’s in a name? A rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.’ Secondly, I have not taken English after school- so just don’t expect what the highbrows call ‘classical writing’ to flow from my pen (or keypad). I had thought of rendering this piece in the best and the richest of language, going to my highest limits (which are very modest, relatively speaking). Then I had a second thought, and switched to common, layman’s parlance, for two reasons- firstly, I know as much about serious, formal, ‘inspiring’ writing as a eunuch would know about the Kamasutra. Secondly, I am posting it on a far corner of the great, big blogosphere, where it has to compete with many other, ostensibly more interesting blogs, like lonely girls and their lonely machinations, for attention. Let me explain mathematically (don’t think I know my maths?? You are so right..). At the time of writing, the web has got about 60 million blogs. If I give my blog a catch attention value of 2 out of 10, i.e 2 out of every 10 who come across it will have a peek at it (I know I overestimated!!), the chances are 1 to 120000000 that somebody will read this article. A highbrow writing will surely piss the poor guy off (a 99 to 100 chance), so I decide to stay clear of it. I forgot to mention that I am writing this piece when I am really bored up on a Sunday afternoon, and have seen all the movies and played all the games my PC has got. So the writing may go astray at points, winding up nowhere before returning to track. So forgive me as you would forgive your roommate/ girlfriend / boyfriend / spouse / boss / customer, or any other person who has had a bit too much of booze last night. With that we are over with the disclaimers, and we can get down to business, really serious business, business that would ruffle up feathers, business that would get people calling for a ban on the blog, business that would set people demanding my head. All this is expected, because I am going to present my ideas about democracy.
Abe Lincoln said, “Democracy is a government of the people, for the people, by the people.” Did he say that it was good for the people? No. Great men seldom give the complete ideas to lesser mortals, leaving us to guess for ourselves. Most guessed that it was good, so it became good, and those against it became bad, and thus began a classic good versus evil clash, and heads began to roll- Charles I, Louis XVI, Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein, to name a few. ( No points for spotting that a few of these heads had rolled before great Abe had uttered the magical formula) Did these heads necessarily have to roll? Is democracy worth the fuss being made about it? To put it mildly, is democracy the right thing for everybody?
Let’s start by examining what democracy means to laymen like us (assuming a specialist won’t be wasting valuable time going through this). Since the days of grade one we are being taught that democracy is about liberty, equality and justice. The three hallowed pillars of democracy (may be there are more hallowed pillars of democracy, but they were not hallowed enough to register on my radar screen). The three great principles have guided the famous French revolutionaries, the American freedom fighters, the Nepalese anti monarchists, to name a few. Yet, it takes all but a cursory glance at the three words before one spots contradiction. Let’s set aside justice for a while, and examine equality and freedom. Aren’t the two mutually contradictory? If you have not got it, let me explain, in detail. Freedom means one’s guarantee to ‘life, liberty and pursuit of happiness’. In a free society, one cannot stop another from ‘pursuit of happiness’, as long as it is through legitimate, fair efforts. So far so good. Now another thing is that no two human beings are similar in all characteristics. So it is sure that one’s effort at ‘pursuit of happiness’ may be better than the others. Now let’s bring in justice. If there is justice, the person whose legitimate efforts in ‘pursuit of happiness’ are better than other’s is bound to get more of ‘happiness’- higher remunerations, higher grades, higher status. Concentrate on the word ‘higher’-‘higher’ implies that there has to be a ‘lower’ to be compared with. That screws up the equality. Now let’s begin with the equal, egalitarian society. In this society, everybody is equal, which means that all have equal wages, equal status. That means those putting in better efforts in ‘pursuit of happiness’are getting the same returns as those putting in feeble attempts. That screws up the justice part. Now let’s assume the third case. It is an egalitarian society, where every body has equal status and equal wages. Justice is taken care of by making everybody put equal efforts in the ‘pursuit of happiness’. Now, since the laggards cannot match the efforts of the frontrunners, it is front runners who have to come down to the level of the laggards. So the better part of the society is forced to under perform. That screws up the freedom part. This analysis, in a nutshell, is the difference between a capitalist democracy (e.g. the USA), a socialist democracy (e.g the Republic of India) and a communist state ( e.g. the USSR). Of course, there are many more ways to solve the problem. In place of reining in the frontrunners, one could just cleanse off the laggards - that screws up both freedom and justice, and the result is a fascist dictatorship (e.g. the Third German Reich). All I wanted to show by this long series of assumptions and hypotheses is that one cannot have all the three pillars of democracy standing under the same edifice, as long as the individual humans are unique. So that’s something similar to the second law of thermodynamics, as it defines an upper cap to the level we can achieve democracy in the real world. It was meant to simply show that there is nothing called an absolute democracy- we just have different blends of democracy. Don’t you commit the mistake of not counting the communists in the list of democracies, it’s just that they do not confirm to our ideals of the first kind of democracy. If everything else is discounted, the communists are the most fond of wearing democracy on their sleeves- the Red China styles itself ‘ Peoples’ Republic of China’ and the East Germany was also known as the ‘German Democratic Republic’ !! ( By the way, I just remembered that North Korea is also called something with ‘democratic’ in it)
Let’s get back to the Lincoln quote. Which one of these contenders for the title of ‘Democracy’ was he referring to? Since we do not have the means of accompanying Bill and Ted in their excellent adventure (if you do not get the last one, watch the movie by the same name- not related remotely to the topic, but a good entertainer), we must guess- and the obvious guess is the American form of democracy- which stays primarily on the posts of liberty and justice. Equality is confined to political one, and not force-fed down people’s throat as our leaders would have here in India. Obviously, the system has its merits and demerits. Merits are just hard to ignore- the country with hardly half a millennium of history is the world leader. Its military is the strongest ever assembled on the planet. Its economy continues to lead others by a huge margin. Its culture (yeah, the culture which has been developed in a short span of 100-200 years) is spreading throughout the world without any prodding, worrying all those swamis and mullahs all over the world over the ‘degrading’ western influence. It won’t be altogether wrong (although it will be politically incorrect) to state that today we are living in a sort of superstate led by the USA. Believe it or not, it is my view that world history has entered one of those long phases of relative large scale peace, e.g. Pax Romana, when large scale power struggles cease e.g. WW II, the Cold War, and one big power minds over the smaller ones. The journos have dubbed this phase as Pax Americana, and not wrongly so. There will continue to be small skirmishes, and Uncle Sam would be really irked by the way some of his recalcitrant nephews work, but one good hard spanking on the derriere would do the trick of putting them down, and none of them is really going to grab his collar and chuck him out of the house, at least in the foreseeable future. What the hell drives such huge machinery so efficiently? Liberty, for sure. People there are free- free to call Prez Bush an asshole, free to worship the God, or to spoof Him, or to have nothing to do with Him, free to decide if they want to watch sexy commercials or Tom n Jerry, free to take their girlfriends out to the city park if they want to. I may be getting a bit emotional here, counting the blessings of those Yanks, as most of these have been denied to us in the ‘world’s largest democracy’. Yet one cannot deny that nothing has been muzzled in the US. The industry is free to produce whatever it wants, and they may include death dealing machines like the F-16’s and the F/A-18’s- Uncle Sam will keep the large part, and for the rest, there is always some small scale conflict going on somewhere, isn’t it? Nobody is told what to do, what to make, what to sell, what to watch, what to eat, as long as it does not really cross the line .( You cannot really expect to assemble a nuke in your backyard and get away citing the right to freedom.) What happens next? All and sundry go on in their ‘pursuit of happiness’, and since happiness is something which is to be pursued very keenly, all go for their best chasing shoes. The best of efforts, statistically speaking, bring out the best of results. The results are out for every one to see. As we had previously derived quite mathematically, this total liberty has given rise to inequality- and definitely there are the poor guys out there, but then, they are not so poor as poor can be. While going through the Times of India a few weeks ago I read an article about poverty and came across an astonishing fact- the income level that determines the poverty line in the USA is what is considered middle class here. If that’s what poverty is, it is not so bad a poverty. It has been said that it’s better to rule in hell, than to slave in heaven, but I guess the guy who said this had not seen hell firsthand!!! What I mean to say is that in a whole perspective, most of the West’s poor are better than the middle classes of the third world. So why not take on this system and be done with it?? Did I hear you mutter Iraq? Or Afghanistan? Yeah, strangely, the Yanks and Brits type of democracy does not seem to function everywhere. The reason is simple- for a world class sophisticated machinery to be installed, one needs world class infrastructure. The western democracy is based on the strength of general education, a sense of nationhood and responsibility, and above all, a morbid fear of wars close home. The education makes one aware of one’s right- so that no one tramples them, and of other’s rights , so that they are not trampled by mistake. (Just another digression, but how many of you know that the cops who participated in the Meerut and Aligarh moral pogrom actually thought they were doing their legal duties!!) A sense of nationhood and responsibility is needed to allow for a bit for self policing, so that we do not cheat our fellow citizens, and the nation, and do our best for a positive growth. A fear of war will avoid daily brawls ending up as communal clashes. The last two together go into eliminating the need for eliminating a heavy policing- which means a true liberated society. Needless to say, Iraq hardly qualifies, and Afghanistan would be a poor joke if even compared on this scale. What about India? I think at least twenty more years are needed. That’s the least- I’ve not accounted for the socialists and moralists yet.
Let’s examine the third type of system at the second place, because the third one hits closer home, and shall have to be taken in detail at last. The communist model-all work equally, all earn equally and all rot equally. This type of model had a really short shelf life and has gone out of stock in 1990’s ( a few of them have been kept preserved in India, of course). I say this because China has left that communist market model at the time the communist edifices were going crashing down in Europe. Now it’s a case somewhat like the fourth minor form of ‘democracy’ I had described. Yeah, we do not have any parallel for Herr Fuehrer in the Chinese government, but essentially the system is same. The market is free, the governance is not. The government leaves the market alone as long as the market does not mess with the government. Symbiosis, anyone? Of course, we are digressing. I was writing about communism- not much to write in layman’s terms. It was an enforced equality at the expense of liberty, and may be sometimes even justice. The standard of living was low-across the linguistic, national or any other sort of boundary. e.g. the GDR was the most economically developed of the Warsaw Pact members. ( You must have guessed it why- because they were Krauts- really these guys have a thing for development.) Yet, the GDR economy did not even came close to comparison with FRG economy, and that economic polarization was so severe that even 17 years after the reunion, the west is pumping money into the east to bring it up to scratch. So that shows the difference between a free Kraut and a commy Kraut. Yeah, the commies were all equal, and all equally poor. Were they happy at their equality, at the thought that the neighbour next door, and the one next to him, were feeling as deprived as they were? If the records of the no. of persons who died trying to scale the Wall show any thing, the answer is a big no. The mere presence of the wall showed that the entire system was repulsive. Obviously its creators had got their priorities wrong. Now I haven’t read Marx’s ‘The Capital/ Das Kapital’, nor much about his ideas, but I’ve heard he thought communism was the next step in the evolutionary ladder, after feudalism and capitalism. Well, as history has shown us, it was not as much of an evolution, as that of a genetic engineering job, that too horribly botched up. Their intentions might have been good- they saw the proles starving, while the bourgeoisie swelled their bellies. So they thought, lets kill these fat GFN’s ( good for nothing- for the uninitiated- go learn the SMS lingo, that’s what we will speak in late 21st century) Then these GFN’s wealth could be divided amongst the proles, who would now get their daily bread, and would be happy. Unfortunately, they did not see beyond this point while planning their system. They did not see that once the proles got their daily bread, they would try to have bit of butter too. May be some cocoa or red wine. Why not meat? Unfortunately , the system was already built, to ensure that each of the prole- the hard working prole, the lazy prole, the pious prole, the drunkard prole, the eastern prole and the western prole, the prole who has the potential to rule, and the prole who is surviving on grace- in short each of the prole, could get the bread- whether their efforts were bread worthy or not. Well, the breads do not rain, they are made by efforts- one bread per one bread worthy efforts, two for a ‘bread-n butter’ worthy effort, three for a ‘bread, butter and cheese’ worthy effort, and so on. Initially, all worked to their full strength, and on an average, the non bread worthy attempts were cancelled out by ‘bread and butter’ worthy attempts- and in the end, all had bread-but just the bread. The writing on the wall was clear- YOU GET JUST THE BREAD. So the one’s capable of ‘bread and butter’ worthy attempts moderated their efforts to match the yields. In the aggregate, this meant lesser no. of breads, and hence all got less than one bread-even those who had made the ‘full bread’ worthy attempts. This led to gradual resentment. Some capable of ‘bread and butter’ worthy attempts fled, others were shot while fleeing. The result- continuously lesser and lesser number of breads-until an implosion occurred- the reaction time was approximately 70 years, a wink in the long history. Communist system, though the best in theory, has failed most miserably in all the places it took roots. Worker’s took just 20 odd years to get disenchanted with the Worker’s paradise, and 50 more years to overthrow it for the humble ‘earthy’ freedom. Communism is best when everybody is very poor and hardly gets a subsistence, because then any sort of help from the government will be welcome. Life is definitely more important than standard of living. Yet, once the life attains a certain degree of security with respect to food and shelter, a man craves for more- and this ‘more’ cannot be achieved in the shackled communist regimes. Kudos to the comrades for lifting the czarist Russia and the largely underdeveloped China of 1949 to the present level of standing. However, the roads further cannot be traversed by muzzling the human free will, but by channelizing it properly in a free market.
Just for the moment imagine what would have happened if the writing on the wall had not been so damning. What if it had said- YOU GET THE BREAD, AND YOU MIGHT GET THE BUTTER. This is the second form of democracy, the socialist model- welcome to India. In this system, you can get the butter, at least theoretically so. So the people do not try to flee the system as much as in the communist system- they hang on to that hope of butter. Sometimes, they feel frustrated at the bread they are receiving in lieu of ‘bread and butter’ worthy efforts, and rein in their efforts. The number of breads goes down, and all get less than usual share of bread. However, in the long run, the optimists win, and again efforts are made to get to that fleeting butter. Meanwhile, such system evolves such people who subsist only on the butter, some who denounce the butter as evil- against the morality of frugality our forefathers have been teaching. In the end, some of the lucky ones do get the butter, but majority get less than the required share of even bread. However, the writing on the wall remains unchanged. While living under this sort of system is less torturous physically as compared to that under the communist regimes, it can be argued that it is much more frustrating mentally. So I cannot clearly say which form of democracy falls behind. The commies were bad, but so are ones running the show called ‘world’s largest democracy’. In the words of the great KS, the politicians here are congested with too much of power and often let out puffs of malodorous gases. In my opinion, this ‘socialist democracy’ is the worst form of democracy after the demise of the Nazi state and the communist bloc. Time and again, history has shown us how people have risen against tyrants and tyrannies to put in a better system. However, these socialists are no tyrants in the sense of the word, but they are killing the country. Don’t think of a stab or a gunshot wound- think gangrene or consumption, or in words of Lyngdoh, a cancer. One can either run away from the tiger, or fight it with all one's strength, or get mauled by it; but one faced with a barrage of mosquitoes often gives up after a few swats here and there. Same is the condition here. No great stalinist purges, no tsarist pogroms, but quite obviously, the State is at a battle against its own people, with the help of its own people. It has happened before- white colonists have done it before, and now the brown colonists are doing it. Yes, we still have some examples of a few exceptions, who dare challenge this system and get their bread, butter and cheese despite the system, but the majority is still like the horse on blinkers. If this is democracy, then God help us!
[P.S. This one article has been written over a cumulative period of many damned hot holiday afternoons, when one does not have just anything to do. So there may seem to be really big chasms in various ideas put out there. The problem is that I really have so much to say about all this (yeah, I just love yakking) that I cannot put them serial wise one at a time. If you do care to read this one and want to know more, just contact me.]
No comments:
Post a Comment