Is it to begin with some very well defined terms, citizen, audit and

democratic state. Is it to talk of my encounter with one of its institutions

made up into a story followed by an analysis of how much have we
deviated from what was written and compiled in a book painstakingly
assembled by people who gave us this form of nation. I would talk about
my experiences with various setups, much of it shaped and reshaped
everyday.

A modern state has institutions build around insecurities and in

the country we live in, where we go by the book in most of the cases
(where it is convenient for the state to go by the book often by the
letter or by its interpretation), we have judiciary we have police and
in some cases ,army and we also have people who run small nodes
of their own governance. Do these institutions reflect the fact that
we were not prepared for democracy when we got it or that democracy
is a trial and error process which matures with the passage of time.

Citizen’s audit of democratic state

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The idea of democracy is an interesting thing, it asks for opinion
of every participant and then whatever majority decides, prevails.
How is this opinion generated, which are tools of opinion generation,
do people always decide on their own, is it a clear yes, no or a big
ambiguous and beautiful maybe, how do you create a state out of
this maybe and is state an entity in itself or is it a club of likeminded
(slightly) people provided with power to decide the destiny of so many of us
with insecurities directly proportional to the powers provided..and then
the dangerous one, have we built a network of machineries which
functional around this insecurity making the rule of many actually a rule
of very few where you cannot burn but you can boil.

I take you to my standard 3b in a private school in a small town in

Jharkhand . This school had very paradoxically attached words
like Public and Delhi to its name making it the stuff that mass
manufactured realities are made of.....so when you don’t know where
will your kid go twenty years down the line and you look up to
a panoptic kind god who sits on a hill and sees everything, you see
Delhi and then a word Public (come all) , you see centralised
decentralization.
Somewhere in the middle of the second month ,my classteacher decided
that we should get a monitor as we made a lot of noise(the cause and
the effect, logic of installing control) and we had to elect this person.
We tore off the last page from my notebook and voted for our best
friends.16 years past that we voted in a similar way for student
representatives for placements in my postgraduation. We vote for
this best friend not necessarily because she can manage or synchronise
well...but because she is your best friend. What would have happened if
India was the size of a classroom, if there were no manifestoes, how
would the opinion be generated and what changes when the classroom
is scaled to a nation. Probably sensitivity. Being a big nation also means
being reduced to numbers and being treated as one. Being a big nation also
means feeling insignificant as one unit. There is this conceptual democracy
and then there is this applied democracy , the democracy which comes
out of the book and translates itself into institutions, the democracy of
mass manipulation, the democracy of suppression with police and army
the democracy of everyday ignorance of the common man in a sarkari
office, the democracy of control, the democracy of shut up and go your

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way, the democracy of mediocrity, the democracy of i cannot see beyond
my nose and how is it related,the democracy of bigger is better, the
democracy which has become an end to itself, you want to get elected so
that you could be elected again and again and again. This leads us
to a club of people who have become organised with the sole intention
to win making democracy more like a 100 meter sprint.

Perhaps the essence of power lies in realization its worthlessness and

the democracy of the book thinks about this when it wants to create a
state dedicated to th welfare of its people. This state is not a chair or a
book or a statue, it is a human being or a set of them which are likely
to change after every 5 years and they take decisions based on who
they are and what they think should or should’nt happen. Probably this
is why and where we can never get the right flavour out of this recipe
of a kind ruler, a lot of it boils down to individuals, the rulers and the ruled
and generalization is dangerous. What adds punch to it is the shelf life
of five years. The need to comeback again doing whatever it takes from
creating a popular idea be it development or hindutwa, aligning all
institutions in this direction and getting a ten out of ten at the end.
Manufacturing a vision and making it popular has some institutions
aligned to it which churns out statistics to please ones who believe
in numbers and symbols of ones who cannot quantify. Governance
happens on its own , masquerading an agenda of control of a nation
and its resources to be appropriated in a way decided by the need to
be in power.

Going back to my school story i recollect that when the votes were counted
there were no clear outcomes and then the teacher installed one of her
favorite students as the monitor. So whose monitor was he supposed to be
class’ or teacher’s. In a democracy when you talk of state being a fragment
of the masses this is what creeps in. Who created the vision, who created
the framework which places you the minister there, and even though you
are voted into the chair by masses you don't exactly answer to them
because you feel obliged and committed somewhere else. Parties have
become bigger than what they set out to be, they are no more an
amalgamation of like minded people striving to promote certain ideology
in the public domain nor the symbols of thought, they function like
companies, extremely organized and seen as career option where you
have an hierarchy and you tow the line set out by the CEO who says

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that you are supposed to sell to the masses, not belong to them. This is
the cleavage point between the thought democracy and the executed
democracy. Its like a series of concentric circles where you are placed
in the innermost circle near the centre. You can see where you are placed
and all you see is one circle around you, you cannot see why are you
placed there and who made those circles in the first place and why did he
make them. In this setup supposed to be of the people for the people
and by the people there are three different sets of people with very less
in common, probably just a common geographical definition.

Can this democracy reach where it set out for....not when I see someone
being dragged in the middle of the night from Jantar Mantar to paliament
street police station by police because she was protesting against the
increase in a Dam’s height from 112 meters to more than 120 meters
without ensuring the settlement of people affected. When i was a kid
i was told that you were arrested when you committed a crime. So was
protesting against a move which would jeopardize people’s living and their
relationships and protesting non violently by telling people what was the
situation a crime. It becomes a crime when you have a bigger audience.
When you come in a position to undo that control, when you force people
to think than assume that the government is meant for doing good things
to its people, to protect your dwellings, your occupation, your social setup
and your beliefs, to offer you a decent situation to live in. These are the
active crimes that a democratic state commits. Welcome to my school
which taught me that i have to secure the best marks to go anywhere, that
i have to question less and mug more, that if my teacher doesn't know
answer to a question then that answer is not meant to be received. It told
me that i could either become doctor or an engineer because we had only
physical sciences and biological sciences faculties, and yes it’s compulsory
to be a graduate to prove to people that you anything and even if you aren’t
interested in proving anything ,you still have to, to make a living. This is a
passive crime that the state commits ,to make people live in fear, to make
them unimaginative and mechanical and to pay for short term reactionary
thinking
School is an important institution because it is where tomorrow is
conceived, so are research setups which architect tomorrow yet teachers
remain the worst paid people and research scholars compete with
struggling actors and painters to gain second position. Strength of a
democracy is decided by its priorities and the way it handles them and

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though we are talking of institutions(which are limbs of democratic setup)
we are also asking of the purpose that these institutions serve. Its not just
the’ why education and health are way down in government’s things to do’
but also the fact that schools are not necessarily education and hospital not
necessarily healing. These are important questions for a democracy.
In 1947 we started with an experiment and we have more or less settled
down with the idea of voting and choosing our representatives, but
having a setup where everyone participates in the way country is run,
having a room for multiple believes to exist and be practiced, nurturing
lives and beauty of living achieving harmony and peace in thought and
action of people and not some 10 % increase in a figure conceived as a
wellness quotient by someone dead long back.

Winding up with my school where we recited ‘into that heaven of freedom

let my country awake’ we never went beyond reciting it, it somhow struck
me that it is never about the processes but about the reason that a thought
is based. Democracy doesn’t rest in the idea of voting or with supreme
court and constitution, it rests with where do we want to, how we are
getting there and who is coming along with us.
Contributed by

anand k jha

born on 1981, jha is a postgraduate student

persuing industrial design at Indian Institute of Technology,Delhi
He has worked briefly with Cadbury, HCL and Narmada bachao andolan
after graduating in Mechanical engineering from Tumkur,Karnataka.
Dividing his time between Delhi and Dhanbad(where he is based) he likes
to travel ,read, write and take up creative projects.