In 1959, after his early victories in the African-American freedom struggle, Martin Luther King Jr. visited India to learn more about Gandhian non-violence in its country of origin. At the end of that visit he made “an appeal to the people and government of India…to call for universal disarmament, and…declare itself for disarmament unilaterally”[1]. Unsurprisingly, his suggestion was not taken up, although India did take a leading role in the non-aligned movement. Notwithstanding an early stand against nuclear weapons, India was to test its own just fifteen years later. The nation that gained independence from its colonial masters through peaceful non-violent means was determined to preserve its freedom by building up a modern military that included nuclear weapons. Examining the moral choices that confront a modern state that wants to live in peace, both inside and outside its borders, as well as meet the economic aspirations of its citizens, we find that India partially made the correct choice when it failed to heed King’s advice. Developing nuclear weapons was correct, but building up a modern army, navy and air force with heavy weapons and almost a million personnel was a waste of valuable resources.
Disarmament Defined
As the word can have a wide range of meanings, first of all I need to define what I mean by disarmament. I do not intend it to mean that all offensive weapons of any kind are to be outlawed, and that even the police forces are not allowed to carry guns. That would open the state to being ruled by criminal gangs and thugs. Most reasonable persons will accept that small arms which allow the individual to defend herself, lawfully regulated and registered, would not be a violation of disarmament. As Teichman notes, Quakers who are otherwise against the violence of war are not against the need for armed police and the “violence of the magistrate”[2]. Small sea and aircraft such as coast guard cutters and helicopters needed to defend the state against pirates, smugglers and terrorists could also be used. Armored personnel carriers, protected bunkers at the borders and reinforced concrete shelters for essential services and civil servants would also be allowed. Heavy weapons, missiles, fighters, long-range bombers, artillery, battleships and frigates would be banned, as well as weapons of mass destruction of any kind. Thus the state would have a self-defense capability to a certain extent, but would be unable to take offensive action against other states. This is similar to the conditions imposed on Japan and Germany after World War II. In the Indian context, this would mean that while the army, navy and air force would need to be disbanded and its equipment disposed off, the paramilitary forces such as the Border Security Force, the Coast Guard, Central Reserve Police Force, and the state police and civil defense forces would be retained.
Threats to a Nation
We next need to examine the threats that a modern state such as India faces. These could be internal, such as armed insurrection or terrorism by a group that does not feel that the participative democratic processes have worked for them. Assuming that heavy weaponry could not have been brought into the country or seized by such a group, this threat could be dealt with by the police forces. For example, the past troubles in Punjab or the current problems with the Maoists need to be tackled with a combination of political and police action. Disarmament does not affect the outcome in these cases as bombing, strafing or use of heavy weapons would not be appropriate.
In the case of external threats, there are four possibilities. Firstly, countries that share a border with India, possibly along with their allies, could attempt to take control of border areas because they covet the resources available there. The best defense against an enemy being able to hold onto such an acquisition for too long would be the creation of participative democratic institutions and polity throughout the state. As Machiavelli notes, an invader would “always need the backing of the local people to take over a province”[3]. Holding on to the new acquisition, even if it was acquired through treachery, is difficult: “anyone who becomes master of a city accustomed to its freedom, and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it”[4]. In any case, the persons who helped the invader “in the hope of bettering themselves…find themselves deceived…when they discover that things have got worse…(as) a new prince must always harm those over whom he assumes authority, both with his soldiers and with a thousand other hardships that are entailed in a new conquest”[5]. Thus the best defense against acquisition is freedom, the rule of law and participative democracy.
This threat can be mounted in more subtle forms: aggressors could “under the cloak of economic, military and technical aid…dominate the economic and military structures of…nations”, or take over “by raising and manipulating puppet governments”[6]. In addition, corporations or criminal gangs could gain control of a state. These are once again threats that would not be fought using a modern army, but rather with participative democracy and the rule of law.
The second threat is blocking access to trade, especially essential resources from other countries. This could take several forms ranging from blocking participation in banking, transportation, or commercial transactions, and export controls etc. For example, it is illegal for persons and corporations in the US to trade with Cuba. Even travel is restricted, in spite of the presence of large numbers of Cuban immigrants in the US. While a blockade of this kind cannot be overcome by armed forces, a strong navy can prevent the blockade of ports and protect cargoes. India, Malaysia and Singapore cooperate to keep the Straits of Malacca safe for ships by combating piracy. However, as pirates seldom have access to large vessels, the navies of these countries don’t need battleships to fight them.
The third form of aggression is from terrorists who have an agenda to destroy the way of life or are against the ideology or theology of the state. Al Qaeda does not plan to invade and take over the US, but objects to its ideological positions and actions taken by the US to promote its interests in the world. However, as Al Qaeda has no large economic or physical structures that can be targeted and destroyed, but rather operates under cover within otherwise peaceful societies, the use of modern weaponry to target it is limited. On the contrary, in Afghanistan the civilian deaths that accompany NATO airstrikes blur the moral difference between the terrorists and the forces that fight them in the eyes of the populace.
Finally we have the case when a powerful nation wages war in support of its ideological stance, for access to resources, or to support an ally. The United States waged a war in Vietnam in order to prevent the free communist northern part of the country from freeing the southern part from French colonial rule, as it was afraid that this would trigger a series of communist takeovers of newly emerging nations all over the world; the so-called domino effect. Escalating from advisory and training missions established in 1954, the US was to participate in a rapidly escalating ground war, as well as use napalm, defoliants, high explosives and cluster bombs not only in the conflict, but also on the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia. The proceedings edited by Duffet catalog the illegal and immoral acts perpetrated by the US government on a people half-way around the world. The United States Air Force considers all military, economic, political and psychosocial components of a state as legitimate targets. The last includes “the moral strength of the people as manifested in their internal stability, unity, national will…this is often reduced in terms of morale”[7]. This is the justification for cluster bombing of civilian targets that include schools, hospitals, factories and farms, where defoliants were also used to destroy crops.
In three of the four possible threats that are sketched above, invasion, blockade and terrorism, a modern military with heavy weapons cannot be used as a defense. To defend itself from being divided up amongst its neighbors, a state could use such an army to guard its frontiers, but the best strategy is to ensure that its citizens could keep up a prolonged insurgency against the occupiers, and make it too expensive to hold onto. The most powerful military force in the world is finding that it needs political solutions in Iraq, rather than just more troops. However when subjected to an overwhelming force that seeks to destroy rather than acquire, there is only one defense: offense. If North Vietnam had nuclear weapons and long range missiles capable of reaching US population centers, the extensive bombing of its cities could never have been considered by the US.
So far we have discovered that most external and internal threats can be overcome without a large modern military force, except that the ability to strike a decisive blow against an enemy can act as a strategic deterrent. Thus we see that disarmament in terms of dismantling the modern heavy military forces is a moral choice as long as the following three specific measures are taken.
Three-step Disarmament Program
The first step is the creation of a free participative democracy with the rule of law and ensuring that the minimum social needs of food, shelter, health care and education are met. This provides channels for internal dissension to be resolved peacefully, and external parties have few wedge issues to use to divide the populace. The ultimate goal is a civilian populace involved in their government at local, state and federal levels, and united in their determination to preserve it. Even if external aggressors manage to take parts of the state for themselves, the next step that needs to be taken will help ensure that they fail.
The second measure that has to be taken is the development of police and paramilitary forces with light weaponry and armor well integrated with the populace. These forces can be used to patrol the border, against terrorists and criminals and also in case of natural disasters. By having short service commissions in these forces and creating a reserve force in the population, it provides a pool for a quick call-up in case of threat, or trained insurgents in case a resistance movement is needed against an occupier. This is the model followed by the Swiss and copied successfully by Israel. By focusing on self-defense by a trained citizenry, rather than creating a force capable of external aggression, the state has a mobile and flexible force that is useful in peacetime as well as during war.
The third and final measure is the development of long-range strategic weapons including nuclear weapons that can deter a potential aggressor. The stalemate of mutually assured destruction, and the negative moral consequences of threatening to use weapons of mass destruction against civilian targets notwithstanding, this is the most efficient way of assuring the safety of its populace. Is it really such a bad moral choice after all? Teichman[8] argues that a weak populace facing genocide can, if embarked in a just war, “do whatever is judged essential to win”.
One fundamental moral concern for a state is the safety and security of its citizens. Assuming that a state treats its citizens well, provides equal political and social opportunities for their advancement and does not provoke its neighbors, it should be able to live peacefully without external aggression. In the aftermath of the Japanese defeat in World War II, Ho Chi Minh was able to free Vietnam from centuries of foreign rule, first by the Chinese and then by the French and Japanese. But the country was divided and it took almost twenty years of fighting till it was reunited in 1975. During this time the government of the northern part was unable to fulfill its moral obligation to protect its citizenry from the attacks by the US, and in fact these attacks spread to Laos and Cambodia. The only defense against these attacks by a super-power would have been a strategic long-range weapon system capable of hitting targets in the US. This is the reason why the war was in Vietnam and not in China or the Soviet Union.
Objections
There can be at least three objections to this position on disarmament. The first argument is that of the pacifists: you can not make peace by preparing for war. According to Teichman, while there are many forms of pacifism which hold that war is intrinsically and essentially evil, they are wrong when they say that there are absolutely no situations in which taking up arms would be the lesser evil in a forced choice. Preparation for this forced choice is morally right. But this does not mean it is right to choose war when there is no forced choice[9].
Secondly, while national defense is the justification for developing the strategic weapon systems, a change in the political climate of the country could lead to it being used for offensive actions, both militarily and morally. Alternatively the weapons may be taken over by terrorists, hence it is better not to build them in the first place. This is a difficult argument to refute, but as long as adequate safeguards are built into the triggering systems and the control of the weapons is jointly held by the three branches of government, the executive, judiciary and legislature, it is a controllable risk.
Finally, it could be argued that the country could join into a mutual defense pact with other countries that would guarantee its safety in case of aggression. There are several arguments against this suggestion. The United Nations is supposed to provide this protection, but is too unwieldy and racked by the interests of the permanent members of the Security Council to be effective. Joining military pacts such as NATO require the country to take an ideological position that in fact can have the opposite effect: instead of guaranteeing peace, it will guarantee the addition of specific enemies to the roster of potential aggressors. A good example of a coalition coming to the rescue was the 1991 expulsion of Iraq from its invasion of Kuwait. It could however be argued that if Kuwait had been considered to be a prickly acquisition rather than a rich country with a small native population outnumbered by expatriate workers who would turn tail as soon as it was attacked, the attack would never have taken place in the first place.
While we have been exploring events and threats that a country may be subjected to, we haven’t as yet explored legitimate uses of aggression. We have recently had several examples where intervention was used and was somewhat effective, and others where it should be used. Bosnia, Sudan, Cambodia are all examples where external aggression was used to control internal oppression. Darfur, Myanmar, North Korea and possibly Zimbabwe are places where we would like to see external aggressors help free an oppressed people. But the mixed results in many of these interventions, even if they were UN sponsored and used peace keeping troops from member countries, as well as the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, mean that this cannot be a good reason to involve heavy military forces. For police actions and natural disasters, the light paramilitary approach proposed will work.
Conclusion
Teddy Roosevelt is credited with saying: “Carry a big stick, but tread softly”. While we should be wary of taking support for a moral position from the adventurer who built his political career on the fictional exploits of the Rough Riders in Cuba, there is much to be said for his advice. Countries that have neglected to build strong internal defenses but have relied on heavy fortifications, like the Maginot line, have often been surprised by an enemy more flexible or amoral than themselves; the Germans were willing to wage war on neutral Belgium to go around the strong defenses of the French in World War I. Those who have relied solely on the morale and fighting power of its citizenry, like North Vietnam have suffered unnecessarily from the aggression of a super-power.
I have proposed the use of a deterrent threat that if carried out may be considered to be morally wrong. It could be argued that even if it was not actually carried out, but it averted war, from a Utilitarian point of view, this is better. For an Absolutist both the threat and the preparation that is needed in order to effectively make it are as bad a performing the deed[10]. However, until war is abolished for ever, I have no choice but to support the Utilitarian position.
Works Referenced
Duffet, John, Ed., Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal. New York: O’Hare Books, 1968.
King, Martin Luther, Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.. Ed. Clayborne Carson. New York: Warner Books, 1998.
Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince. Tr. and Ed. Robert M. Adams. New York: Norton, 1992.
Teichman, Jenny, Pacifism and the Just War: A Study in Applied Psychology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
[1] King, pg. 129
[2] Teichman, pg 31 & 40
[3] Machiavelli, pg 5
[4] Machiavelli, pg 15
[5] Machiavelli, pg 5
[6] Duffet, pg 105
[7] Duffet, pg 243 quoting from ‘Fundamentals of Aerospace Weapons Systems’, USAF ROTC
[8] Teichman, pp 109-110
[9] Teichman, pg 100
[10] Teichman, pg 120
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Animesh Mukherjee
Chris Bobonich
MLA 252: Basic Issues in Philosophy
Final Paper
June 9, 2008
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Preserving Diversity in Democracy
In a democratic government the opinion of the demos, the citizens, is supposed to control decision-making. This can be through participation, as for example in ancient Athens where each citizen was required to serve the polis for a few weeks every year, actually sharing the burden of government. Alternatively, it can be through representation, where the citizens vote for candidates from amongst themselves, who then perform some of the work of government for a limited time. Democratic government has been in practice a mixture of these two forms, and a fundamental problem has been to preserve diversity of opinion and participation. Preventing dictatorship by the majority, or catering just to the needs of a powerful minority, is important in all branches of the government: executive, judicial and legislative. This can only be achieved by preserving diversity on a variety of dimensions, and taking active steps to make sure that every citizen has a chance to participate and be heard: we need a government that involves each individual.
Importance of Diversity
In the biological world, diversity invigorates life, as more variation in each of the interdependent life forms leads to natural selection from a wider range, and therefore a better chance to create an improved life form that survives in the struggle for existence. In social and political systems, we need to ensure that a wide variety of voices and opinions are heard, and all sections of society, no matter how small in number or diverse in their opinion, have a chance to prosper and thrive. Their actual fate should be based on natural selection, not the arbitrary actions of any dominant group or class. Political and social groups or classes can be considered as varieties of the same species, homo sapiens and their ability to utilize and adapt in the competition with all the other species on the planet is the key to their survival. Unchecked, individuals or groups would do all that is needed to propagate at the cost of the other varieties of humans, other species and even the planet.
Government is a tool used in this struggle for existence[1], invented because the long-term survival and prosperity of society requires a controlling authority. When this is taken over by a single ideology or class, all the varieties that arise as a natural response to changes in the physical environment and the biological ecosystem no longer have a voice in shaping the future. The societies that have stopped listening to the varieties in their midst eventually end up out-of-step with the nuances of the ground reality and are replaced, sometimes at great human and social cost, by a new structure that is more in tune with reality. Only political systems that ensure that every voice has the freedom to speak and participate are able to make the infinite course corrections needed over time to ensure that they are in tune with the rest of the planet.
The Purpose of Government
The fundamental purpose of government is to regulate and control man’s struggle for existence. It does this through the organizations that provide the defense, law and order, justice, financial, communication, health, education, welfare and other needs of the nation; this is true even in monarchies and dictatorships. In the case of democracies, there is an additional purpose: “increase the sum of good qualities in the governed, collectively and individually”[2]. This is to be done specifically to help meet the three criterion needed for a government to be successful: the people must be willing to accept its rule, be willing and able to do what is needed to keep it standing, and do what it needs of each of them to fulfill its purposes[3]. This requires the citizens to participate not just in electing their representatives, but engage in the work of government. The regular participation in this work by each and every citizen, not just leaving it to an “other” who runs the government[4], is the hallmark of democracy.
Mill distinguishes between the normal educative task of the government, i.e. to provide a basic education to each citizen, and the “degree in which [political institutions] can promote the general mental advancement of the community… virtue, and in practical activity and efficiency”[5] through the engagement of every citizen. Personal participation in some aspect of government work by each citizen moves them from theoretical posturing to a deeper understanding of the practical difficulties involved in implementing policy in a complex world, making them better citizens. Mill claims that government has the most influence in taking the people to the next level of civilization, that a despotic rule creates a “mentally passive people”[6] and the “ideally best government… is that in which the sovereignty…is vested in the entire aggregate of the community; every citizen not only having a voice…but being…called on to take an actual part in the government, by the personal discharge of some public function”[7]. The problem is to design the political process so that it harnesses the diversity of that aggregate.
Dimensions of Diversity
In the social and political sphere, diversity takes many forms. There is gender, ethnicity, language, culture, level of education, religious belief or the lack of it, age, sexual orientation, political affiliation etc. These, and many other parameters, are important dimensions of diversity that any democracy has to serve, without letting any one voice drown out the others. Unfortunately the “one-man one-vote” model used in most democracies, as well as problems in financing participation and candidature have ensured that only a narrow slice of the “aggregate of the community” actually can participate. Most of the citizens are relegated to merely voting for their representatives every four or five years, unable to make their voices or ideas heard; only rarely do they participate, that too just at the local level.
Historically, participative democracy has only worked at the local level since the citizens have other responsibilities at work or on the farm to look after. Therefore, they can only devote part of their time to government work and cannot travel very far. If participation required them to spend days or weeks at a central location, it would limit the range of citizens who could take part. Increasing complexity of the job, and the professional training needed for most government positions have reduced the posts that can be effectively performed by citizen-participants. Hence, citizen participation in the actual work of the government in most countries is limited to the legislative branch, advisory positions, or jury-duty.
People’s representatives are chosen from a constituency to fulfill legislative functions. Diversity can sometimes be preserved by the choice of constituency and the number of seats allotted. For example in the United States Senate, there are two seats for each state of the Union, providing Vermont, a very small state in terms of land area and population with the same number of votes as California, which has a population, land and economy larger than most countries in the rest of the world. This balances the votes that California has in the Congress in which seats are allotted based on population. Thus, the opinion and diversity represented by Vermont is preserved[8].
Time is also an important dimension of diversity. A recent feeling amongst the citizenry, brought on by current events, should not completely take over the policies and programs of the government. The time dimension is used in various ways in the United States. First, elections in the US are on a fixed timetable, with Congress, the Executive and the Senate on two-, four- and six-year cycles respectively. Instead of elections being called when the timing is convenient to those in power or due to the pressure of current events, a rhythm is maintained. Second, all the positions are not offered up for election every cycle, but only a fraction. This preserves continuity, instead of a wholesale changeover. Third, there are term limits imposed on all offices, ensuring that new blood, and therefore new ideas are brought in regularly, another form of diversity.
Geography dominates most political entities. Apart from the fact that national or state governments are based on geographical entities, almost all democracies organize their political posts using geography. While this may make sense for the purposes of organizing a set of governmental functions, it makes less sense for political purposes. It emphasizes one dimension of diversity, geography, to the detriment of others such as sexual orientation. Assume, for example, that homosexuals are randomly distributed as ten percent of the population. In a system of representation based on geography, they would never be able to get a representative elected without support from other groups, yet on purely democratic principles, they should get ten percent of the representatives if the whole nation or state is considered. Mill describes and recommends a way to resolve this issue.
Mill’s Suggestion
Mill points out that while many consider democracy as the dictatorship of the majority, in reality it is that of the minority. Consider a purely representative government where the people elect their representatives to a Parliament, which is the legislative body. Suppose that the candidate with the most votes is elected, so at most she needs 51% of the vote, but usually a lot less[9]. Hence, the legislator is in practice chosen by a minority. Suppose further that the rules of the house require that bills be passed based on a simple majority. Once again, only 51% of the legislators need assent, each of whom represent a minority, therefore perpetuating control by the minority. In practice, legislators do not usually vote on their own conscience, but follow the party line. In addition, very few bills are simply a position on one side or another, but have many sometimes conflicting or unrelated parts in them. For example in the US Congress a few months ago, the Democratic Party added a clause requiring a timetable for withdrawal of the troops from Iraq, to the bill financing the war. Thus, Republicans who support the war and want to assent to the bill cannot do so. The solution being proposed to this is the line item veto: the President should be able to accept only parts of a bill that she finds acceptable. Thus, the link between the will of the people and the legislation that is implemented is in practice a very tenuous one in representative government.
Mill attempts to tackle the first problem, the quality of representation, by diversifying the geographical constituency to one based on interests. Based on suggestions by Hare and Fawcett, he proposes that in addition to the local candidates on the ballot, the voter should be able to choose or write-in others who are candidates in other constituencies. Additionally, in order to make sure that a person’s vote counts in all cases, he proposes that the voter express her order of preference on the ballot. For each seat in the ballot, the voter would not just put one vote, but give the names of candidates in order of preference. Once a candidate has received enough votes to be elected, the remaining ballots that have her as the first choice would be counted as per their second choice. Continuing this way through all the ballots, would result in a more diverse body than the system used currently[10].
It appears that this system has been adopted in a simplified form in some European countries as the system of proportional representation. However, in Mill’s United Kingdom, the US and many countries influenced by Anglo-Saxon concepts of law and politics, the system continues to be the flawed first-past-the post system. Of course, implementing this system of counting votes needs a centralized tallying center, or the use of technology to tally the preferences over the entire country. Thus, in the case of the US it goes against the bottom-up approach to political organization: here the county is the unit of organization for elections, not a federal body.
The American Way
Alexis de Tocqueville describes many aspects of the American political system in the early nineteenth century that support both diversity and participation. The first of this was the concept of the township. Settled by 2000-4000 persons, this was the lowest level of granularity in the political system where the “organization of the township preceded that of the county, the county that of the state, the state that of the Union”. For example, in New England, the body of voters appointed their fellow-citizens to various paid full- and part-time positions to carry out the work of governing, but for any action other than upholding the law, they would have to bring their proposals in front of the general assembly. No system of representation is required at the local level where “law and government are closer to those governed”. The administrative and technical skills needed for the nineteenth-century American township were well within the reach of its ordinary citizens and could be rotated amongst all who were willing and able. The township provided a minimal level of government, since the citizen was supposed to be “master in his own affairs where he is free and answerable only to God” [11], making it less intrusive and controlling than modern government.
At the next levels of government, the county, the state and the Union, the act of governing requires full-time application of skill and knowledge, but the citizen still has a participatory role as the “public, mainspring of the whole checking machinery”[12]. For example, in Massachusetts, Justices of the Peace appointed by the Governor form Sessions Courts where actions could be brought against public officials or even townships[13]. The decrees from these courts, while enforcing administrative rules, were judicial in nature and enforced by the county Sheriff. Thus, while the increasing complexity of public administration as we progress to the larger geographical units requires full-time professionals, but they are ultimately made answerable to the people at a local level. Not only does this provide participation, but increases diversity: the opinion of local citizens affected by the administration is placed as a check over what could become an over-professionalized bureaucracy.
Of course, from our modern point of view the diversity described by de Tocqueville is incomplete: women and African-Americans were denied their voice, as were most persons who did not fit into the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant mold. However, the systems and institutions created were easily extended to include these dimensions of diversity as societal changes forced the dominant class to accept them, as well as others, as equal.
Conclusion
We need to create stable systems of government that evolve naturally over time, adapting to the myriad changes in the political, social and physical environment by tuning into the many dimensions of diversity. Every individual citizen must be given a chance to participate and contribute, and this means using modern technology to change the way governments operate.
In modern manufacturing there has been a move away from the “large batch step process” in which a factory was organized to perform many small manufacturing steps on a large batch of parts. The diverse demands of the consumers coupled with better flow of information between all participants in the process have led to the redesign of manufacturing processes so that smaller batches are processed and the final product individualized for each consumer. Companies such as Toyota now claim to have achieved an “economic order quantity”[14] of just one car, meaning that their manufacturing processes are agile enough to build each vehicle to order. This raises the question: can we build political and social systems that involve each individual? During the last century we have seen the failure of mass movements on the left and the right, and the totalitarianism that results when we stop engaging the individual, albeit a confused, opinionated, diverse person, in politics. Fortunately, just as in manufacturing, we now have technology that promotes the communication paths between the individuals that belong to each dimension of diversity and the institutions that govern them. Just as retailing is being re-oriented to service the “long tail”[15], politics and government needs to re-configure itself to serve all the dimensions of diversity.
While the technology required to create a government based on each individual is advancing every day with the development of social networks, the political and administrative frameworks needed for this lag way behind. The US has the technology to enable these changes, but its dependence for its constitution on the exact thoughts of the Founding Fathers, make it unlikely to take political diversity to the next stage. Countries that joined the democratic club after being liberated from colonialism may be better suited to the changes needed, but most lack the access to technology needed to pull it off. This leaves countries like Russia, China, India, and Brazil that are grappling with the problems of diversity while enjoying explosive economic growth. These are the new frontiers where we need more diversity in democracy.
Animesh Mukherjee
Paul Robinson
MLA 9: European Thought & Culture
Final Paper
December 16, 2008
Works Referenced
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. In Darwin, selected and edited by Philip Appleman. New York: Norton, 2001.
De Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Tr. Gerald E. Bevan. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
Liker, Jeffrey K. The Toyota Way. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004.
Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951.
[1] Darwin defines the term: “…including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny” on pg. 108.
[2] Mill, pg. 259. While he quotes Bentham, the text and the reference to Bentham’s classification of man’s qualities as moral, intellectual and active, evoke Plato’s The Republic.
[3] Mill, pg. 237
[4] It is common in most democracies to forget that democracy is “government of the people, by the people and for the people”, and concentrate on what “they”, the government being outside the people, can do “for the people”.
[5] Mill, pg. 262
[6] Mill, pg. 272.
[7] Mill, pg. 278, emphasis added.
[8] The example is from de Tocqueville.
[9] If there are two candidates, one of them needs at least 51% to win. However, if there are three, four or five candidates, the minimum percentage needed to win becomes 34%, 26% or 21%.
[10] Mill, pp 344-370.
[11] De Tocqueville, pg. 52, pg. 74.
[12] Mill, pg. 261
[13] De Tocqueville, pp. 89-92
[14] Defined as the number of parts that have to be produced in a batch in order to minimize the production costs. This used to be based on just the setup cost and the per piece processing cost, but is now based on the entire cost chain starting with customer acquisition cost, inventory and costs for disposing of excess parts produced, as well as loss of business due to inability to meet the customer’s specific need in time.
[15] The concept that if we were to plot a graph of consumer preferences with the number of persons who want a specific product or configuration, it typically has a sharp drop off after the commonly sold set of characteristics, and then a long line (tail) where there is just a little demand for each of many different variants. The internet has made it possible for the consumers who require these diverse versions of the product meet up with their producers in a way that traditional brick-and-mortar cannot. Take for example a musical genre that has little demand and therefore cannot get a mainstream label to produce and market its CDs. The internet allows these artists to sell the music directly as downloads to its aficionados, creating a diverse market.
Importance of Diversity
In the biological world, diversity invigorates life, as more variation in each of the interdependent life forms leads to natural selection from a wider range, and therefore a better chance to create an improved life form that survives in the struggle for existence. In social and political systems, we need to ensure that a wide variety of voices and opinions are heard, and all sections of society, no matter how small in number or diverse in their opinion, have a chance to prosper and thrive. Their actual fate should be based on natural selection, not the arbitrary actions of any dominant group or class. Political and social groups or classes can be considered as varieties of the same species, homo sapiens and their ability to utilize and adapt in the competition with all the other species on the planet is the key to their survival. Unchecked, individuals or groups would do all that is needed to propagate at the cost of the other varieties of humans, other species and even the planet.
Government is a tool used in this struggle for existence[1], invented because the long-term survival and prosperity of society requires a controlling authority. When this is taken over by a single ideology or class, all the varieties that arise as a natural response to changes in the physical environment and the biological ecosystem no longer have a voice in shaping the future. The societies that have stopped listening to the varieties in their midst eventually end up out-of-step with the nuances of the ground reality and are replaced, sometimes at great human and social cost, by a new structure that is more in tune with reality. Only political systems that ensure that every voice has the freedom to speak and participate are able to make the infinite course corrections needed over time to ensure that they are in tune with the rest of the planet.
The Purpose of Government
The fundamental purpose of government is to regulate and control man’s struggle for existence. It does this through the organizations that provide the defense, law and order, justice, financial, communication, health, education, welfare and other needs of the nation; this is true even in monarchies and dictatorships. In the case of democracies, there is an additional purpose: “increase the sum of good qualities in the governed, collectively and individually”[2]. This is to be done specifically to help meet the three criterion needed for a government to be successful: the people must be willing to accept its rule, be willing and able to do what is needed to keep it standing, and do what it needs of each of them to fulfill its purposes[3]. This requires the citizens to participate not just in electing their representatives, but engage in the work of government. The regular participation in this work by each and every citizen, not just leaving it to an “other” who runs the government[4], is the hallmark of democracy.
Mill distinguishes between the normal educative task of the government, i.e. to provide a basic education to each citizen, and the “degree in which [political institutions] can promote the general mental advancement of the community… virtue, and in practical activity and efficiency”[5] through the engagement of every citizen. Personal participation in some aspect of government work by each citizen moves them from theoretical posturing to a deeper understanding of the practical difficulties involved in implementing policy in a complex world, making them better citizens. Mill claims that government has the most influence in taking the people to the next level of civilization, that a despotic rule creates a “mentally passive people”[6] and the “ideally best government… is that in which the sovereignty…is vested in the entire aggregate of the community; every citizen not only having a voice…but being…called on to take an actual part in the government, by the personal discharge of some public function”[7]. The problem is to design the political process so that it harnesses the diversity of that aggregate.
Dimensions of Diversity
In the social and political sphere, diversity takes many forms. There is gender, ethnicity, language, culture, level of education, religious belief or the lack of it, age, sexual orientation, political affiliation etc. These, and many other parameters, are important dimensions of diversity that any democracy has to serve, without letting any one voice drown out the others. Unfortunately the “one-man one-vote” model used in most democracies, as well as problems in financing participation and candidature have ensured that only a narrow slice of the “aggregate of the community” actually can participate. Most of the citizens are relegated to merely voting for their representatives every four or five years, unable to make their voices or ideas heard; only rarely do they participate, that too just at the local level.
Historically, participative democracy has only worked at the local level since the citizens have other responsibilities at work or on the farm to look after. Therefore, they can only devote part of their time to government work and cannot travel very far. If participation required them to spend days or weeks at a central location, it would limit the range of citizens who could take part. Increasing complexity of the job, and the professional training needed for most government positions have reduced the posts that can be effectively performed by citizen-participants. Hence, citizen participation in the actual work of the government in most countries is limited to the legislative branch, advisory positions, or jury-duty.
People’s representatives are chosen from a constituency to fulfill legislative functions. Diversity can sometimes be preserved by the choice of constituency and the number of seats allotted. For example in the United States Senate, there are two seats for each state of the Union, providing Vermont, a very small state in terms of land area and population with the same number of votes as California, which has a population, land and economy larger than most countries in the rest of the world. This balances the votes that California has in the Congress in which seats are allotted based on population. Thus, the opinion and diversity represented by Vermont is preserved[8].
Time is also an important dimension of diversity. A recent feeling amongst the citizenry, brought on by current events, should not completely take over the policies and programs of the government. The time dimension is used in various ways in the United States. First, elections in the US are on a fixed timetable, with Congress, the Executive and the Senate on two-, four- and six-year cycles respectively. Instead of elections being called when the timing is convenient to those in power or due to the pressure of current events, a rhythm is maintained. Second, all the positions are not offered up for election every cycle, but only a fraction. This preserves continuity, instead of a wholesale changeover. Third, there are term limits imposed on all offices, ensuring that new blood, and therefore new ideas are brought in regularly, another form of diversity.
Geography dominates most political entities. Apart from the fact that national or state governments are based on geographical entities, almost all democracies organize their political posts using geography. While this may make sense for the purposes of organizing a set of governmental functions, it makes less sense for political purposes. It emphasizes one dimension of diversity, geography, to the detriment of others such as sexual orientation. Assume, for example, that homosexuals are randomly distributed as ten percent of the population. In a system of representation based on geography, they would never be able to get a representative elected without support from other groups, yet on purely democratic principles, they should get ten percent of the representatives if the whole nation or state is considered. Mill describes and recommends a way to resolve this issue.
Mill’s Suggestion
Mill points out that while many consider democracy as the dictatorship of the majority, in reality it is that of the minority. Consider a purely representative government where the people elect their representatives to a Parliament, which is the legislative body. Suppose that the candidate with the most votes is elected, so at most she needs 51% of the vote, but usually a lot less[9]. Hence, the legislator is in practice chosen by a minority. Suppose further that the rules of the house require that bills be passed based on a simple majority. Once again, only 51% of the legislators need assent, each of whom represent a minority, therefore perpetuating control by the minority. In practice, legislators do not usually vote on their own conscience, but follow the party line. In addition, very few bills are simply a position on one side or another, but have many sometimes conflicting or unrelated parts in them. For example in the US Congress a few months ago, the Democratic Party added a clause requiring a timetable for withdrawal of the troops from Iraq, to the bill financing the war. Thus, Republicans who support the war and want to assent to the bill cannot do so. The solution being proposed to this is the line item veto: the President should be able to accept only parts of a bill that she finds acceptable. Thus, the link between the will of the people and the legislation that is implemented is in practice a very tenuous one in representative government.
Mill attempts to tackle the first problem, the quality of representation, by diversifying the geographical constituency to one based on interests. Based on suggestions by Hare and Fawcett, he proposes that in addition to the local candidates on the ballot, the voter should be able to choose or write-in others who are candidates in other constituencies. Additionally, in order to make sure that a person’s vote counts in all cases, he proposes that the voter express her order of preference on the ballot. For each seat in the ballot, the voter would not just put one vote, but give the names of candidates in order of preference. Once a candidate has received enough votes to be elected, the remaining ballots that have her as the first choice would be counted as per their second choice. Continuing this way through all the ballots, would result in a more diverse body than the system used currently[10].
It appears that this system has been adopted in a simplified form in some European countries as the system of proportional representation. However, in Mill’s United Kingdom, the US and many countries influenced by Anglo-Saxon concepts of law and politics, the system continues to be the flawed first-past-the post system. Of course, implementing this system of counting votes needs a centralized tallying center, or the use of technology to tally the preferences over the entire country. Thus, in the case of the US it goes against the bottom-up approach to political organization: here the county is the unit of organization for elections, not a federal body.
The American Way
Alexis de Tocqueville describes many aspects of the American political system in the early nineteenth century that support both diversity and participation. The first of this was the concept of the township. Settled by 2000-4000 persons, this was the lowest level of granularity in the political system where the “organization of the township preceded that of the county, the county that of the state, the state that of the Union”. For example, in New England, the body of voters appointed their fellow-citizens to various paid full- and part-time positions to carry out the work of governing, but for any action other than upholding the law, they would have to bring their proposals in front of the general assembly. No system of representation is required at the local level where “law and government are closer to those governed”. The administrative and technical skills needed for the nineteenth-century American township were well within the reach of its ordinary citizens and could be rotated amongst all who were willing and able. The township provided a minimal level of government, since the citizen was supposed to be “master in his own affairs where he is free and answerable only to God” [11], making it less intrusive and controlling than modern government.
At the next levels of government, the county, the state and the Union, the act of governing requires full-time application of skill and knowledge, but the citizen still has a participatory role as the “public, mainspring of the whole checking machinery”[12]. For example, in Massachusetts, Justices of the Peace appointed by the Governor form Sessions Courts where actions could be brought against public officials or even townships[13]. The decrees from these courts, while enforcing administrative rules, were judicial in nature and enforced by the county Sheriff. Thus, while the increasing complexity of public administration as we progress to the larger geographical units requires full-time professionals, but they are ultimately made answerable to the people at a local level. Not only does this provide participation, but increases diversity: the opinion of local citizens affected by the administration is placed as a check over what could become an over-professionalized bureaucracy.
Of course, from our modern point of view the diversity described by de Tocqueville is incomplete: women and African-Americans were denied their voice, as were most persons who did not fit into the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant mold. However, the systems and institutions created were easily extended to include these dimensions of diversity as societal changes forced the dominant class to accept them, as well as others, as equal.
Conclusion
We need to create stable systems of government that evolve naturally over time, adapting to the myriad changes in the political, social and physical environment by tuning into the many dimensions of diversity. Every individual citizen must be given a chance to participate and contribute, and this means using modern technology to change the way governments operate.
In modern manufacturing there has been a move away from the “large batch step process” in which a factory was organized to perform many small manufacturing steps on a large batch of parts. The diverse demands of the consumers coupled with better flow of information between all participants in the process have led to the redesign of manufacturing processes so that smaller batches are processed and the final product individualized for each consumer. Companies such as Toyota now claim to have achieved an “economic order quantity”[14] of just one car, meaning that their manufacturing processes are agile enough to build each vehicle to order. This raises the question: can we build political and social systems that involve each individual? During the last century we have seen the failure of mass movements on the left and the right, and the totalitarianism that results when we stop engaging the individual, albeit a confused, opinionated, diverse person, in politics. Fortunately, just as in manufacturing, we now have technology that promotes the communication paths between the individuals that belong to each dimension of diversity and the institutions that govern them. Just as retailing is being re-oriented to service the “long tail”[15], politics and government needs to re-configure itself to serve all the dimensions of diversity.
While the technology required to create a government based on each individual is advancing every day with the development of social networks, the political and administrative frameworks needed for this lag way behind. The US has the technology to enable these changes, but its dependence for its constitution on the exact thoughts of the Founding Fathers, make it unlikely to take political diversity to the next stage. Countries that joined the democratic club after being liberated from colonialism may be better suited to the changes needed, but most lack the access to technology needed to pull it off. This leaves countries like Russia, China, India, and Brazil that are grappling with the problems of diversity while enjoying explosive economic growth. These are the new frontiers where we need more diversity in democracy.
Animesh Mukherjee
Paul Robinson
MLA 9: European Thought & Culture
Final Paper
December 16, 2008
Works Referenced
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. In Darwin, selected and edited by Philip Appleman. New York: Norton, 2001.
De Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Tr. Gerald E. Bevan. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
Liker, Jeffrey K. The Toyota Way. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004.
Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951.
[1] Darwin defines the term: “…including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny” on pg. 108.
[2] Mill, pg. 259. While he quotes Bentham, the text and the reference to Bentham’s classification of man’s qualities as moral, intellectual and active, evoke Plato’s The Republic.
[3] Mill, pg. 237
[4] It is common in most democracies to forget that democracy is “government of the people, by the people and for the people”, and concentrate on what “they”, the government being outside the people, can do “for the people”.
[5] Mill, pg. 262
[6] Mill, pg. 272.
[7] Mill, pg. 278, emphasis added.
[8] The example is from de Tocqueville.
[9] If there are two candidates, one of them needs at least 51% to win. However, if there are three, four or five candidates, the minimum percentage needed to win becomes 34%, 26% or 21%.
[10] Mill, pp 344-370.
[11] De Tocqueville, pg. 52, pg. 74.
[12] Mill, pg. 261
[13] De Tocqueville, pp. 89-92
[14] Defined as the number of parts that have to be produced in a batch in order to minimize the production costs. This used to be based on just the setup cost and the per piece processing cost, but is now based on the entire cost chain starting with customer acquisition cost, inventory and costs for disposing of excess parts produced, as well as loss of business due to inability to meet the customer’s specific need in time.
[15] The concept that if we were to plot a graph of consumer preferences with the number of persons who want a specific product or configuration, it typically has a sharp drop off after the commonly sold set of characteristics, and then a long line (tail) where there is just a little demand for each of many different variants. The internet has made it possible for the consumers who require these diverse versions of the product meet up with their producers in a way that traditional brick-and-mortar cannot. Take for example a musical genre that has little demand and therefore cannot get a mainstream label to produce and market its CDs. The internet allows these artists to sell the music directly as downloads to its aficionados, creating a diverse market.
Monday, December 8, 2008
Re-thinking Indian Democracy
Watching the news on Indian TV these last weeks as we collectively analyze the carnage in Mumbai leads to soul-searching in so many ways. It takes an effort to get over the shock and horror of the terror acts committed, to mourn the dead and honour the brave, but we need also to think deeply about what we have seen and heard and understand what India needs to do so that the nation can get back on track.
Everyone has to participate
The first step is that we need to take our nation back. Take it back from those to whom we have entrusted it for over 60 years, and give it to the people, all the citizens who deserve far, far better. Shake off the colonialism of the mind, the attitude that there is a “they” that is the government, that they are the “mai-baap” of us all and control our collective destiny. It is time for the second freedom struggle.
What does it mean to be free? Rabindranath Tagore defined it in terms of knowledge, unity, truth, striving for perfection and above all, holding our heads high at all times. Unfortunately, we have lost all of these in the political institutions we have created in the last sixty years. Not a single political party in the country practices transparency in its leadership, its internal organization or its accounts. The people have no knowledge of what really happens inside them, or inside the government. Steps like the Right To Information Act have given us some reactive oversight after the fact, but there is no proactive participation in decision making by the people.
Truth is usually the first casualty once a politician or an officer takes charge. Sometimes this is a strategic need, but in most cases it is used to hide something that pampers some interest that the public shouldn’t get to know about. Fortunately we have a courageous press that probes and reveals much more than those in power want us to know about. But truth shouldn’t be something we have to extract as if we were a nation of dentists, it should be offered up to us as the partners that we are in this undertaking, as our right. This means that not only should the press probe and discover, but every government agency should openly offer everything it knows to its citizens. We don’t want the sound bites of seasoned politicians, we want the hard facts from professionals who can participate in discussions that help us understand what is being done in our name. And be willing to change their plans based on our feedback.
In India we have a billion people who each day have to fight for survival, fight to get ahead and keep the place that they have carved for themselves. Everyone strives for perfection in their own way, but we see that many of those we have given privileged positions, to carry out the work that we have delegated to them, forget that they have to continually strive for perfection too. A position of power and responsibility in the public or private sector, in a corporation or a NGO or even in the family carries with it the expectation that the person holding the position is in a daily struggle to do a better job, anticipate what might go wrong, and help the nation succeed.
As a nation, each one of us has to hold our head high and look the politician, the officer, the manager, the organizer and the patriarch in the eye and demand competence and truth, action and participation, or ask them to abdicate and let someone better do the job. But this cannot be a one-way street: each of us have to do our part in taking this nation to greatness. For too long we have each considered our civic duty consists in paying our taxes and turning up to vote. We need to take part: this is how we do it.
Home and Around
Like everything else, it begins at home. We cannot be a great nation until each one of us takes care of the part that has been entrusted to us. Once we do that, we need to look outside our boundaries and see what help our neighbours need. Not just the neighbours who live in the adjoining flat, but those who live in the adjoining slum. Join or form a neighbourhood association and work together to improve the collective lives of all who live around you. Make sure that you reach out to the adjacent neighbourhoods and coordinate with them to make your part of the city or town secure, clean, with good roads and drinking water. Reach out to the incumbent politicians and local officers and make it clear to them who the boss is. Help them get rid of crime in the neighbourhood, and make sure that they are supportive. Else they will lose your support in the next election.
Prepare for disasters: not just terror attacks, but fire, heavy rain, earthquake or flood. Organize community meetings to get everyone involved, make sure that there are people trained in first aid, keep essential supplies, create maps/plans of your neighbourhood that would help in case of emergency and choose and train volunteers to organize a response should anything happen. Hold drills and refresher training from time to time. This is not just at home, but at work and in the school. Don’t wait for someone else to ensure your safety, do it yourself.
Once we have an involved citizenry looking after their homes, workplaces and neighbourhoods, we need to take the next step: we need to transform the existing government setup into something that is geared up to meet the people’s needs. The first step is to create elective posts of local representatives for each department that is directly concerned with the people. For example, at an annual general meeting of all the neighbour associations that fall under a police thana, two representatives should be chosen who have the right to supervise the actions of the police in these neighbourhoods. They would have the right to visit the lockup at any time of the day of night, accompany the police on any raids they make, and also help anyone in their neighbourhood with the police. In order to give them teeth, they need to have access to officers higher in the chain of command. Some remuneration has to be provided and some reimbursement for expenses, by the association and there should be a limit that no one can hold this position twice in succession.
Similar representatives should be chosen for water, public health, electricity, gas, roads, garbage etc and we need to make sure that procedures of these department recognize the supervision by these local citizens. By making the parts of the administration that interact directly with the people part of the community, and making the members of the community part of them we will improve efficiency, reduce corruption and ensure the right prioritization of resources that meets local needs. This will go a long way to making everyone’s immediate lives better. It will also make us all better citizens as we better understand what it takes to run a neighbourhood, a ward, and a part of a city.
For the larger units of administration like the entire city, district, state or the nation, other changes are needed to make them more responsive to the citizens and for the citizen to participate fully in their operations. But in the meantime, if the citizens use the neighbourhood groups to educate themselves about the issues faced in the larger units, discuss the pros and cons of the policy and legislation and invite participation in these deliberations from the elected representatives and political parties, they can participate more completely in the elections. Not base their votes on a little knowledge gleaned in the campaigning period, but through a better understanding of the issues and the players.
Gathering Intelligence and Working with the Community
There are calls now for new legislation to counter terror, for a centralised force to fight terror, to get politics and law and order out of the mix, and concentrate on this new enemy we have. These are all misguided attempts: the answer is to look within for the solution, to act locally, to understand how terror works and be able to detect it before the attack.
We will never conquer terror until we conquer smuggling. We will never conquer smuggling until we defeat drug dealers and petty crimes. We will never defeat drug dealers until we have a clean police force that focuses on really being a part of the neighbourhood and fighting all the types of crime that occurs. This will happen when the people work with the police, not fear them. This means that police must be professional, and paid well and trained well. Recruitment should be open and transparent and the feedback of the neighbourhood associations must be taken into account for appointment to the top posts. Instead of a colonial police that enforces the raj of the state or the local politician, we must have a police that is with the people. Then the people will be with the police.
People should feel encouraged to look to the police to solve their problems, and they will bring the intelligence that will stop terror. The newcomer to the locality, the theft of materials that may be used in bomb-making, the presence of arms and ammunition, are all sights that may be noticed, especially by those who live on the margins of our society. If they feel that reporting these things bring more trouble than it is worth, we will never have the intelligence that we need.
The same goes for the health services: unless the people trust that they will be helped, and not put in greater hardship, they will not go for treatment. This could delay the detection of a biological attack, as patterns of illness and outbreaks need to be correlated to understand if an attack is in progress.
The information and tips that the police get needs to be analysed centrally so each and every police person should use SMS to send in reports to their local thana, which are automatically relayed onto state and central servers for immediate correlation. This should be expanded to include health services, neighbourhood associations, the press and other sources so that enough data is available for correlation.
This is of course the place for the central forces: to analyse the intelligence in time, or when the terrorist has been stealthy enough, and when the warning signs are too many and confusing. A central agency can help in three ways. First of all, by correlating the information from all over the country, matching the patterns with information gained from other intelligence agencies, and applying the knowledge and experience of those who have been fighting terror for many years. Secondly, by training first responders in detecting and fighting terrorists and ensuring that they have the equipment and procedures that ensure they can work together with the central forces. Finally, the central forces can step into the breach to backup the local forces.
The final step is to appoint the spokesman. During these chaotic events when everyone is looking for information, there has to be an authoritative source that can reach out through the media, the internet, through localized SMS to inform the affected people and the rest of the country and even the world about what has happened and what action is being taken. It is at these times that keeping quiet does a lot of harm and allows rumours to circulate. Every city, every state and the centre should have a single source for information which has intimate knowledge of what is happening, but divulges only that part of it that wont harm operational activities, yet keep the right amount of information flowing. A quick initial briefing, and then hourly updates would not only keep morale up, but could be used to enlist the help of the people to apprehend the culprits.
The responses to the heart-rending events need to be thought through carefully. Lets us all work together to build a better India from the ashes of our naïveté, getting involved and participating in democracy.
Everyone has to participate
The first step is that we need to take our nation back. Take it back from those to whom we have entrusted it for over 60 years, and give it to the people, all the citizens who deserve far, far better. Shake off the colonialism of the mind, the attitude that there is a “they” that is the government, that they are the “mai-baap” of us all and control our collective destiny. It is time for the second freedom struggle.
What does it mean to be free? Rabindranath Tagore defined it in terms of knowledge, unity, truth, striving for perfection and above all, holding our heads high at all times. Unfortunately, we have lost all of these in the political institutions we have created in the last sixty years. Not a single political party in the country practices transparency in its leadership, its internal organization or its accounts. The people have no knowledge of what really happens inside them, or inside the government. Steps like the Right To Information Act have given us some reactive oversight after the fact, but there is no proactive participation in decision making by the people.
Truth is usually the first casualty once a politician or an officer takes charge. Sometimes this is a strategic need, but in most cases it is used to hide something that pampers some interest that the public shouldn’t get to know about. Fortunately we have a courageous press that probes and reveals much more than those in power want us to know about. But truth shouldn’t be something we have to extract as if we were a nation of dentists, it should be offered up to us as the partners that we are in this undertaking, as our right. This means that not only should the press probe and discover, but every government agency should openly offer everything it knows to its citizens. We don’t want the sound bites of seasoned politicians, we want the hard facts from professionals who can participate in discussions that help us understand what is being done in our name. And be willing to change their plans based on our feedback.
In India we have a billion people who each day have to fight for survival, fight to get ahead and keep the place that they have carved for themselves. Everyone strives for perfection in their own way, but we see that many of those we have given privileged positions, to carry out the work that we have delegated to them, forget that they have to continually strive for perfection too. A position of power and responsibility in the public or private sector, in a corporation or a NGO or even in the family carries with it the expectation that the person holding the position is in a daily struggle to do a better job, anticipate what might go wrong, and help the nation succeed.
As a nation, each one of us has to hold our head high and look the politician, the officer, the manager, the organizer and the patriarch in the eye and demand competence and truth, action and participation, or ask them to abdicate and let someone better do the job. But this cannot be a one-way street: each of us have to do our part in taking this nation to greatness. For too long we have each considered our civic duty consists in paying our taxes and turning up to vote. We need to take part: this is how we do it.
Home and Around
Like everything else, it begins at home. We cannot be a great nation until each one of us takes care of the part that has been entrusted to us. Once we do that, we need to look outside our boundaries and see what help our neighbours need. Not just the neighbours who live in the adjoining flat, but those who live in the adjoining slum. Join or form a neighbourhood association and work together to improve the collective lives of all who live around you. Make sure that you reach out to the adjacent neighbourhoods and coordinate with them to make your part of the city or town secure, clean, with good roads and drinking water. Reach out to the incumbent politicians and local officers and make it clear to them who the boss is. Help them get rid of crime in the neighbourhood, and make sure that they are supportive. Else they will lose your support in the next election.
Prepare for disasters: not just terror attacks, but fire, heavy rain, earthquake or flood. Organize community meetings to get everyone involved, make sure that there are people trained in first aid, keep essential supplies, create maps/plans of your neighbourhood that would help in case of emergency and choose and train volunteers to organize a response should anything happen. Hold drills and refresher training from time to time. This is not just at home, but at work and in the school. Don’t wait for someone else to ensure your safety, do it yourself.
Once we have an involved citizenry looking after their homes, workplaces and neighbourhoods, we need to take the next step: we need to transform the existing government setup into something that is geared up to meet the people’s needs. The first step is to create elective posts of local representatives for each department that is directly concerned with the people. For example, at an annual general meeting of all the neighbour associations that fall under a police thana, two representatives should be chosen who have the right to supervise the actions of the police in these neighbourhoods. They would have the right to visit the lockup at any time of the day of night, accompany the police on any raids they make, and also help anyone in their neighbourhood with the police. In order to give them teeth, they need to have access to officers higher in the chain of command. Some remuneration has to be provided and some reimbursement for expenses, by the association and there should be a limit that no one can hold this position twice in succession.
Similar representatives should be chosen for water, public health, electricity, gas, roads, garbage etc and we need to make sure that procedures of these department recognize the supervision by these local citizens. By making the parts of the administration that interact directly with the people part of the community, and making the members of the community part of them we will improve efficiency, reduce corruption and ensure the right prioritization of resources that meets local needs. This will go a long way to making everyone’s immediate lives better. It will also make us all better citizens as we better understand what it takes to run a neighbourhood, a ward, and a part of a city.
For the larger units of administration like the entire city, district, state or the nation, other changes are needed to make them more responsive to the citizens and for the citizen to participate fully in their operations. But in the meantime, if the citizens use the neighbourhood groups to educate themselves about the issues faced in the larger units, discuss the pros and cons of the policy and legislation and invite participation in these deliberations from the elected representatives and political parties, they can participate more completely in the elections. Not base their votes on a little knowledge gleaned in the campaigning period, but through a better understanding of the issues and the players.
Gathering Intelligence and Working with the Community
There are calls now for new legislation to counter terror, for a centralised force to fight terror, to get politics and law and order out of the mix, and concentrate on this new enemy we have. These are all misguided attempts: the answer is to look within for the solution, to act locally, to understand how terror works and be able to detect it before the attack.
We will never conquer terror until we conquer smuggling. We will never conquer smuggling until we defeat drug dealers and petty crimes. We will never defeat drug dealers until we have a clean police force that focuses on really being a part of the neighbourhood and fighting all the types of crime that occurs. This will happen when the people work with the police, not fear them. This means that police must be professional, and paid well and trained well. Recruitment should be open and transparent and the feedback of the neighbourhood associations must be taken into account for appointment to the top posts. Instead of a colonial police that enforces the raj of the state or the local politician, we must have a police that is with the people. Then the people will be with the police.
People should feel encouraged to look to the police to solve their problems, and they will bring the intelligence that will stop terror. The newcomer to the locality, the theft of materials that may be used in bomb-making, the presence of arms and ammunition, are all sights that may be noticed, especially by those who live on the margins of our society. If they feel that reporting these things bring more trouble than it is worth, we will never have the intelligence that we need.
The same goes for the health services: unless the people trust that they will be helped, and not put in greater hardship, they will not go for treatment. This could delay the detection of a biological attack, as patterns of illness and outbreaks need to be correlated to understand if an attack is in progress.
The information and tips that the police get needs to be analysed centrally so each and every police person should use SMS to send in reports to their local thana, which are automatically relayed onto state and central servers for immediate correlation. This should be expanded to include health services, neighbourhood associations, the press and other sources so that enough data is available for correlation.
This is of course the place for the central forces: to analyse the intelligence in time, or when the terrorist has been stealthy enough, and when the warning signs are too many and confusing. A central agency can help in three ways. First of all, by correlating the information from all over the country, matching the patterns with information gained from other intelligence agencies, and applying the knowledge and experience of those who have been fighting terror for many years. Secondly, by training first responders in detecting and fighting terrorists and ensuring that they have the equipment and procedures that ensure they can work together with the central forces. Finally, the central forces can step into the breach to backup the local forces.
The final step is to appoint the spokesman. During these chaotic events when everyone is looking for information, there has to be an authoritative source that can reach out through the media, the internet, through localized SMS to inform the affected people and the rest of the country and even the world about what has happened and what action is being taken. It is at these times that keeping quiet does a lot of harm and allows rumours to circulate. Every city, every state and the centre should have a single source for information which has intimate knowledge of what is happening, but divulges only that part of it that wont harm operational activities, yet keep the right amount of information flowing. A quick initial briefing, and then hourly updates would not only keep morale up, but could be used to enlist the help of the people to apprehend the culprits.
The responses to the heart-rending events need to be thought through carefully. Lets us all work together to build a better India from the ashes of our naïveté, getting involved and participating in democracy.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Oriental Renaissance
A few weeks ago, in a post, someone asked the question: "what has India contributed to the West in intellectual terms?". What are the ideas from India that have become part of the mainstream Western intellectual tradition?
This question intrigued me and I went looking. Didn't have to look too far before I found Raymond Schwab's "The Oriental Renaissance". First published in French in 1950 and translated into English in 1984, by Patterson-Black and Reinking with an excellent foreword by Edward Said, the book is subtitled "Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880" (Columbia University Press). His basic thesis is that the exploration and conquests in the Middle East and India during the establishment of imperialism inspired a vanguard of scholars like Anqueteil (translated Persian and Sanskrit to French), Jones (translated Sanskrit to English), Prinsep and others who brought Indian philosophy and religious concepts to the West. The conquest of Bengal in 1773 and the establishment of the East India company in what is now known as Kolkata led to a couple of decades of the export of ideas. It was only by about 1820 that English ideology changed from a reverence of Indian ideas and philosophies to a revulsion for anything native.
But, as Schwab points out, the "damage" was done. He details the influence that ideas from India had on the intellectuals of the period in France, Germany and England including Lamartine, Hugo, Wordsworth, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Nietzche and Wagner. It is truly eye-opening to read his quote from Wordsworth:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused...
A motion anda spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things
("Tintern Abbey")
This needs further attention, especially the reason for the change of the British viewpoint early in the nineteenth century.
This question intrigued me and I went looking. Didn't have to look too far before I found Raymond Schwab's "The Oriental Renaissance". First published in French in 1950 and translated into English in 1984, by Patterson-Black and Reinking with an excellent foreword by Edward Said, the book is subtitled "Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880" (Columbia University Press). His basic thesis is that the exploration and conquests in the Middle East and India during the establishment of imperialism inspired a vanguard of scholars like Anqueteil (translated Persian and Sanskrit to French), Jones (translated Sanskrit to English), Prinsep and others who brought Indian philosophy and religious concepts to the West. The conquest of Bengal in 1773 and the establishment of the East India company in what is now known as Kolkata led to a couple of decades of the export of ideas. It was only by about 1820 that English ideology changed from a reverence of Indian ideas and philosophies to a revulsion for anything native.
But, as Schwab points out, the "damage" was done. He details the influence that ideas from India had on the intellectuals of the period in France, Germany and England including Lamartine, Hugo, Wordsworth, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Nietzche and Wagner. It is truly eye-opening to read his quote from Wordsworth:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused...
A motion anda spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things
("Tintern Abbey")
This needs further attention, especially the reason for the change of the British viewpoint early in the nineteenth century.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Understanding Jihad
In the past few years, especially after 9/11, we have all been more aware of the word 'jihad' and the various meanings it has. The most innocuous, as defined by my teacher when we were studying the Koran, is "struggle" which can mean an inner struggle to find Allah. The most dangerous is the jihad being waged by Al-Qaeda. Between these two extremes, what is the reality?
Last night I read portions of 'The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of non-Muslims' edited by Andrew Bostom. It was an eye-opener to see that the Koran, the Hadith and the interpretations of Islamic scholars through the centuries were much closer to the Al-Qaeda vision of jihad than the gentler, softer inner search for peace. I use this word as it is also very common to hear that Islam is a search for peace.
This is not just what the Muslim religious leaders think, but it has influenced how the religion has spread, how the political and military leaders have acted from the time of Mohammed, and explains why Islam was able to in a mere 70 years after Mohammed's death rule from Spain to the border of India. It was the duty of Muslims to participate in razzia (raids) at least once a year and kill the able bodied infidels who would not convert and enslave their women and children. Others, especially the people of the Book (Jews, Christians) were sometimes allowed to keep their religious practices, but had to pay a poll-tax (jizaya) in order to do so. Even then, they were second class citizens: for example, a Muslim could kill one of them and it would not be a capital offence.
The only bulwark in the East against this Islamic expansion was India. Muhammad bin Qasim (715 CE) was the first to achieve success, but was recalled after 3 years. It took almost 300 years before Mahmud of Ghazni attacked in 1000 CE. In between there were raids as well as some expansion of Islam from those left behind by Qasim, but India largely held out for 300 years after Spain and the nearby regions of France succumbed. But the enormous wealth that India possessed at the time was a magnet for adventurers for the next 600 years. Eventually some of them settled and ruled, but for the majority it was the loot, the killing of infidels and the expansion of Islam that were the goals.
It can be argued that this was the way of the world in the medieval period, and not just Muslims, but Christians and others behaved in the same way. That is true, but in the modern period they have all at least changed their philosophy to that of peace. Again, it might be argued that this is hypocritical, taking just the history of the 20th century as an example: states and peoples have looted, killed, invaded, enslaved and destroyed more effectively than at any other time in the past. Tamurlane is charged with killing 100,000 people in Delhi alone. The fire-bombing of Dresden killed as many in one night during World War II, not to mention the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So, to understand Jihad, we need to understand civilization too, and understand the violence inside Man. Maybe my teacher was right after all: it is this inner struggle to find God that all of mankind has to succeed at, that we all have to change from external aggression to an internal search for truth, to change our pattern of behavior so that we find Peace and Love. It is this jihad that we all have to undertake, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, if we are to change the world.
Last night I read portions of 'The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of non-Muslims' edited by Andrew Bostom. It was an eye-opener to see that the Koran, the Hadith and the interpretations of Islamic scholars through the centuries were much closer to the Al-Qaeda vision of jihad than the gentler, softer inner search for peace. I use this word as it is also very common to hear that Islam is a search for peace.
This is not just what the Muslim religious leaders think, but it has influenced how the religion has spread, how the political and military leaders have acted from the time of Mohammed, and explains why Islam was able to in a mere 70 years after Mohammed's death rule from Spain to the border of India. It was the duty of Muslims to participate in razzia (raids) at least once a year and kill the able bodied infidels who would not convert and enslave their women and children. Others, especially the people of the Book (Jews, Christians) were sometimes allowed to keep their religious practices, but had to pay a poll-tax (jizaya) in order to do so. Even then, they were second class citizens: for example, a Muslim could kill one of them and it would not be a capital offence.
The only bulwark in the East against this Islamic expansion was India. Muhammad bin Qasim (715 CE) was the first to achieve success, but was recalled after 3 years. It took almost 300 years before Mahmud of Ghazni attacked in 1000 CE. In between there were raids as well as some expansion of Islam from those left behind by Qasim, but India largely held out for 300 years after Spain and the nearby regions of France succumbed. But the enormous wealth that India possessed at the time was a magnet for adventurers for the next 600 years. Eventually some of them settled and ruled, but for the majority it was the loot, the killing of infidels and the expansion of Islam that were the goals.
It can be argued that this was the way of the world in the medieval period, and not just Muslims, but Christians and others behaved in the same way. That is true, but in the modern period they have all at least changed their philosophy to that of peace. Again, it might be argued that this is hypocritical, taking just the history of the 20th century as an example: states and peoples have looted, killed, invaded, enslaved and destroyed more effectively than at any other time in the past. Tamurlane is charged with killing 100,000 people in Delhi alone. The fire-bombing of Dresden killed as many in one night during World War II, not to mention the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So, to understand Jihad, we need to understand civilization too, and understand the violence inside Man. Maybe my teacher was right after all: it is this inner struggle to find God that all of mankind has to succeed at, that we all have to change from external aggression to an internal search for truth, to change our pattern of behavior so that we find Peace and Love. It is this jihad that we all have to undertake, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, if we are to change the world.
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