The basic requirements of a good governance regime are its responsiveness to the concerns of its citizens, its holding officials to account for misconduct or poor performance, and most important, delivery of goods, services and justice expected of them. For the majority of the citizens, there is also the expectation of basic stability or predictability that allows them to go about with their professions and lives without disruption or fear. Its leaders also must not only be honest and not corrupt but also, in the memorable saying of Julius Caesar some 2000 years ago, they and their close relatives and friends must be above even any suspicion of corruption.

Much of South Asia fares poorly on these indicators, while its northern neighbour China does quite well, forcing South Asians to retrospect and revalue their system of governance inherited from their erstwhile colonial masters. (The Chinese shoot their corrupt officials, and have managed to uplift 400 million people out of poverty!) In Pakistan, a democratically elected prime minister has been removed by the army which has cobbled together an opposition group of old elites, using that veneer of democracy to legitimize its stranglehold on the country’s politics and economy since its very founding. Sri Lanka saw its Aragalaya movement that forced a president and his coterie widely perceived as corrupt to flee the country. In Bangladesh, a student revolt forced a long-ruling prime minister, so autocratic that the opposition had boycotted parliament and elections for the last decade and a half, to flee for refuge to India. In Nepal, something similar is brewing with people fed up of kleptocratic leaders and even clamouring for a return of constitutional monarchy.

It was against this background that the Social Scientists’ Association of Sri Lanka organized a Dialogue on Reclaiming Democracy in South Asia, which was held in Colombo on March 8 and 9 in partnership with the Global Forum on Democracy and Development of the Central European University’s Democracy Institute. The background was the decline in legitimacy of the conventional idea and practice of democracy with its capture by a corrupt elite here at home as well as its backsliding and dysfunction in Euro-American Collective West. It was not just the Trump Tandav seen in the US that is upending many old sacred cows, but also the electoral and policy rifts as well as misadventures in UK, France and Germany that has finally deprived them of the right to preach democracy at the rest of the world. South Asia has seen its imported liberal parliamentary democracy captured by its moneyed interests resulting in blatant crony capitalism that has robbed it of any pretense of emancipation or egalitarian equity. It has degenerated into veneration of its forms (parties, elections) and missed out on its substance highlighted in the first paragraph above.

The basic idea of the gathering was to reflect on the state of democracy in their respective countries and to explore ways in which the core values of that imported style could be rescued and melded with democracy’s richer forms of indigenous grassroots struggles happening all over South Asia. Our region has seen a plethora of such seminal emancipatory movements for economic and social justice, self-determination, and inclusion in the political and development processes. They range from the Chipko and Narmada movements in India, Orangi in Pakistan, microcredits in Bangladesh as well as community forestry, electricity, maternal health care and water supply in Nepal. The region, in its over three millennia history, has also seen excellent examples of its own civilizational forms of democracy, the gana-rajyas of Buddha’s time for instance, King Parakramabahu’s hydraulic civilization in Sri Lanka, or King Prithvi Narayan Shah’s “diverse flower garden nationalism where each group is to protect and maintain its own kul dharma”, an indigenous secularism already enshrined in the very foundation of the Nepali state in the 17th Century.

The tone was set by India’s Yogendra Yadav at an inaugural lecture entitled “Re-enchanting Democracy” at the Bandaranaike Center for International Studies. While it is true that among all South Asian countries, India has exhibited remarkable stability over the last 8 decades with its post-colonial political system, all is not well in “the world’s largest democracy”. Indeed, it too has seen politics increasingly degenerate in these decades from service to profession, with all its distortions and fall from democratic idealism. While the Nehruvian period saw most of the MPs coming from the voluntary service sector such as social workers or trade unionists, given how expensive elections have become, it is seeing the moneyed class as well as those who have made politics their income and wealth-generating profession that has captured the electoral form of democracy.

Yadav’s core point was that the term democracy has acquired ingrained moral power that is difficult to disengage from, even though it has three roles conflated into one big contradiction: the name, the idea and the mechanism are rolled into one. The word itself is much abused to garner legitimacy (think Ukraine’s Zelensky, a purported “democrat” even though he has banned 11 political parties, thrown the leader of the opposition in jail, nationalized five TV stations and hangs on to his office even though his term ran out almost a year ago!)

The idea of democracy has the incorrect idea of a neo-liberal market mapped onto it, implying that voters are consumers who can chose good or reject bad options while voting. In theory, yes; but hardly so in practice. It also fails to account for rampant “market cartels” that make entry for political alternatives impossibly high, presupposes an extraordinarily level playing field, and assumes voters vote for political values enshrined in a candidate and are held accountable by a free media and civil society. Yadav quotes Ambedkar to look for the best definition of radical democracy: “a form and method of bringing about revolutionary change in social life without bloodshed”. One ironically sees the best example of that in King Mahendra’s 1962 Panchayat reform of Jang Bahadur’s 1854 Mulki Ain (civil code) to legally abolish untouchability.

Yadav closed his lecture saying South Asian democracies will have to be works-in-progress with no easily available templates. He argues for moving away from a liberal democracy interpretation of democracy to one of “democratic republicanism”. In this, liberty has to be seen not a non-interference (lib-dem) to one of not dominating but foregrounding equality. Citizens must not be seen as atomized individuals (consumers) but as individuals embedded in their extended families and communities engaged in politically acting together. And formal institutions of elected bodies and their procedural shenanigans have to be replaced by civic campaigns and practices not codified in the constitution.

There were six panels that engaged in rich discussions of problems of democracy not just in South Asia but also Brazil, Uganda, and Kurdistan too that are impossible to summarize in one short essay. One on rethinking development as part and parcel of rethinking democracy, however, needs mentioning. As practiced over the last eight decades, development has degenerated into being “whatever it is Western development agencies are saying it is”. It has consisted mainly of ensuring (badly and failingly even at that) of GDP growth which has been the source of environmental degradation and increasing social impoverishment of a large section of society. It has stripped citizens of their cultural capital to turn them into labour, much as a living tree giving fruit, fodder and oxygen is cut into dead marketable lumber. Furthermore, it is the nation-state that is seen as the sole carrier of development when there have been other outfits both of civic movement and local markets that have shown more equitable and effective development results. The question remains: what is that political path to realizing a better and more relevant development?

I did talk about Nepal’s hijacked democracy at the gathering and how a Cultural Theory approach would help in re-imagining it anew. That, however, would demand a separate essay.