Can Arvind Kejriwal Rescue Indian Democracy_ - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

4/20/2014 Can Arvind Kejriwal Rescue Indian Democracy? - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

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SUMMARY

Can Arvind Kejriwal Rescue IndianDemocracy?

Christophe Jaffrelot

ARTICLEMARCH 28, 2014

When in December 2013 Arvind Kejriwal, the leader of the Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man Party or AAP),which had been formed thirteen months earlier, became chief minister of Delhi, he achieved a rare feat.Only once before had the founder of a new party succeeded in forming a government after competing instate elections for the first time, when N. T. Rama Rao became chief minister of Andhra Pradesh in 1983.

The way Kejriwal has been catapulted to the center of the Indian political scene, and continues to occupy it,is revealing of his deep relevance. At a time when Indian society is reacting to pervasive corruption, Kejriwalembodies the anticorruption fight more convincingly than anybody else, including Narendra Modi, who hastried to use this battle cry against the ruling coalition.

In his forties, Kejriwal, who comes from a middle-class family but graduated from a prestigious IndianInstitute of Technology, began his career at the Indian Revenue Service. He resigned in 2006 after winningthe Ramon Magsaysay Award to devote his time to the causes for which he had won this prestigious prize,including right-to-information and anticorruption campaigns. This involvement in grassroots activismpeaked in 2011, when Kejriwal was the right-hand man of Anna Hazare, a senior Gandhian who mobilizedhuge crowds in Delhi in support of the Jan Lokpal Bill, which sought to introduce a citizens’ ombudsman.Kejriwal severed his links with Hazare one year later because Hazare, who does not believe in partypolitics, disapproved of the formation of the AAP. Yet Kejriwal capitalized on the mass mobilizations—notleast because the AAP, whose electoral symbol is the broom, was created with the aim of cleaning upIndian politics. AAP activists, who wear Gandhi’s topi, have continued to campaign on the sameanticorruption platform.

In the Delhi legislative assembly election of December 2013, the AAP won only 28 seats out of 70, butKejriwal was in a position to form a government with the support of the Indian National Congress. Heimmediately tabled a state version of the Jan Lokpal Bill, which was not passed in the Delhi assemblybecause the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) joined forces against the AAP. Kejriwal has

If anticorruption fighter Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party could force Indian officials to mend their ways, thecountry would be making real progress toward what it claims to be.

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attributed this negative coalition to the fact that his government had just registered a first information reportagainst Indian business magnate Mukesh Ambani, something nobody had dared to do before. Kejriwalresigned on February 14 and launched the AAP’s campaign for the 2014 Lok Sabha election.

While polls and surveys do not give the AAP much hope of winning more than a handful of seats, the partymay well be a real game changer and Kejriwal the man to watch in the coming years. However, except forhis fight against corruption, his political views have not been scrutinized much in the media. What does hestand for?

In 2012, Arvind Kejriwal published a book, Swaraj, that did not attract the attention it deserved. This 151-page essay focuses on the issues a reader might expect from a man who has played a key role in themass anticorruption movement led by Hazare (who wrote the book’s preface). Indeed, Swaraj targetscorruption as well as the influence of the corporate sector over the government’s decisionmaking process.“Some ministers and officers have become puppets in the hands of powerful industrial houses,” he writesin Swaraj. This sentiment is in tune with the themes of the 2011 demonstrations, which mobilized primarilythe urban middle class in Delhi and elsewhere. Like average middle-class protesters, Kejriwal resents theway the state misuses taxpayers’ money: “We pay taxes. . . . Our money runs their houses. Our moneyruns their air conditioners.”

But Swaraj is more interesting for the way it deals with village life in India, a theme with which the AamAadmi Party leader is not generally associated. This paradox is easy to explain. While India is transitioningfrom a rural to an urban society, and while the AAP is more the party of well-off town dwellers than of poorpeasants, nostalgia for village life is becoming more acute among India’s urban middle class.

Yet, Kejriwal’s book is more than an exercise in nostalgia. At a time when the main players in Indian politicshave removed villagers from their radar screen, as if 60 percent of Indian citizens were being taken forgranted, Kejriwal is looking to the countryside for solutions to the crisis of modern Indian politics. Thispassion for the village has something to do with an opposition to private companies: “God alone knows howmany people have lost their land under the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) scheme.” But it derives mostlyfrom the Gandhian utopia that B. R. Ambedkar lambasted as a romantic view—Kejriwal finds in the Indianvillage his model of democracy.

Democracy, indeed, is his goal. Kejriwal writes that “the basic problem in our country is that there is nodemocracy. We want democracy.” Like Gandhi, who wrote Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule in 1909,Kejriwal does not believe in representative democracy because the elected representatives are corrupt. ForKejriwal, “Democracy should mean that for the five years after the vote is cast, the government functionsaccording to the wishes of the people, and the views of the people are taken into account before makingdecisions.” He asks, “Is this possible?”

Kejriwal says it is possible because India has invented an alternative model of democracy that is, in fact,older than the West’s: “India has had democracy since the time of Buddha. In fact, it was much strongerthen.” He cites Vaishali, in the state of Bihar, as home to the first democracy in the world. “In those daysthere were no elections and the king’s son would be king, but he had no powers. All decisions were taken inthe village’s gram sabha.”

The gram sabha, the village assembly, is the cornerstone of Kejriwal’s project. He claims that villagersruled themselves until the nineteenth century; their “complete and direct control over organizational matterswent on till 1860.” By then, according to Kejriwal, the British had established a centralized bureaucracy thathas remained the same since the end of the Raj—oppressive, dysfunctional, and corrupt. “We removed aBritish collector and in his place installed an Indian one,” Kejriwal writes. India left “the rest of the Britishsystem intact.”

Kejriwal criticizes the way the state has dispossessed villagers of their autonomy, not only because thismove went against an old democratic pattern, but also because the new arrangement has beeneconomically inefficient and socially counterproductive. On the one hand, centralized schemes born in the

http://www.amazon.com/Swaraj-English-Arvind-Kejriwal/dp/935029544X



brains of urban bureaucrats have not resulted in an optimal allocation of resources because villagers wouldhave known where better to make investments. On the other hand, social programs including the NationalRural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) have deliberately “turned people into beggars” becausepoliticians use these programs in a clientelistic way “to garner more votes.”

Kejriwal’s ideal harks back to the Gandhian vision of the independent village, where self-help allegedlyprevailed to promote local development—a vision largely inherited from Henry Sumner Maine’s notion of theautarkic “village republic.” While the gram sabha has been resurrected by the 73rd amendment to theIndian Constitution, Kejriwal would like it to be given more power. His first article of faith is simple: “Thegram sabha should have the authority and right to decide about issues related to the village.” To those whomay object that this is pure romanticism, Kejriwal replies that there are already “examples of directdemocracy in our country at present.” To make this point, he cites the way Hazare changed the face ofRalegan Siddhi, a village in Ahmednagar District, Maharashtra State, by implementing swaraj there. Kejriwalalso describes the manner in which Popatrao Pawar did the same in Hiware Bazaar, another village inAhmedanagar District.

Concretely, the reform that Kejriwal has in mind implies that the sarpanch, the head of the gram sabha, hasto be liberated from the clutches of the collector and made answerable to the people. That means that thesarpanch would only be in charge of “implementing” the decisions of the gram sabha. In such a system,direct democracy would replace the idea of representation and would result in an advanced devolution ofpower at the local level. For instance, the gram sabha would be in charge of distributing all the money,which Kejriwal would like to see the village itself collect through a new taxation system:

We do not want any government scheme at all; we do not want old-age pension, widow pension, or NREGA,or Indira Awaas Yojna. It is better to give a village Rs 3 crore [$500,000] in untied funds than Rs 5 crore[$800,000] in tied funds. Let the people of the village meet in a gram sabha and decide how much moneywill be spent on irrigation, how much on education and how much on health. Let the village decide theamount to be spent under whichever head. Similarly, let the village people decide who falls in the BPL[Below Poverty Line] category. . . . The villagers should sit together and decide whether a man who doesn’thave a house will be given one.

Kejriwal is Gandhian not only because he wants villages to be the building blocks of the nation-state; healso follows in the footsteps of the Mahatma because he believes in the fundamental goodness andmorality of man. Gandhi wanted to “change the heart” of India’s oppressors; Kejriwal wants villagers tobehave similarly—and claims that it is possible, as is apparent from one of the anecdotes in his book. Hedescribes how, in a village in Madhya Pradesh, elders who could have had an absentee anganwadidismissed told the worker that “their aim was not to remove her.” Instead, he writes, “They wanted her tochange.” Morality-based character building—a phrase the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh also uses but ina different sense, as a synonym of samskars—is a fundamental aspect of Kejriwal’s project: “To walk on arighteous path and fight for justice and help in the formation of a just system are the highest goals of humanlife. By attaining such goals, character building becomes stronger.”

Kejriwal’s discourse is clearly imbued with the philosophy of satyagraha of Mahatma Gandhi, a manobsessed with “truth” (satya). He is also perfectly in tune with the conflict-free approach to society that theMahatma cultivated. For Kejriwal, the village is virtually harmonious. Caste- or class-based divisions aresimply not mentioned. He urges people to come together: “The most important thing is that people shouldconnect with one another and there should be a social relationship.” But the Mahatma claimed that Indiacould and should remain a rural country, whereas Kejriwal is realistic enough to acknowledge India’sgrowing urbanization and to adapt his model accordingly.

Kejriwal’s belief that direct democracy is important not only for village India is evident from the foreignexamples that he cites rather schematically, if not naively—the United States, Brazil, and, moreconvincingly, Switzerland—but in the last chapter of his book, he returns to his core constituency: the city.He argues that in the urban context, mohalla sabhas or community meetings—which have been officially



recognized in law by the Nagar Raj Act in the same way as the gram sabhas—should be developed asurban equivalents to the gram sabhas. He points out that in Delhi, initiatives have already been launched inthat vein in the municipal corporation wards of Trilokpuri and Sunder Nagri.

According to Kejriwal, a mohalla sabha should be created “by putting together 3,000 people of a particulararea” and should follow the same modus operandi as the villages. He argues that all decisions of themohalla sabha should be made collectively in the community meetings. The elected representative of themohalla sabha and the local officials should be responsible for implementing these decisions.

Swaraj is an important book because it emphasizes the major part that rural India has to play in thecountry’s development at a time when India’s middle class and bureaucracy, as well as its mainstreampolitical parties, conveniently tend to ignore the fact that a majority of India’s citizens live in villages—andthat the future of the country lies there too. The book is also important because it suggests that to solve theacute crisis Indian cities are experiencing, solutions should be sought only in the traditions of village life. It isironic that Kejriwal, who has enjoyed his most significant electoral success in the metropolis of Delhi,advocates that village India should be prioritized and its democratic tradition and potential emulated.

Swaraj is also a refreshing book because of its intransigent plea for an ideal form of democracy, free ofcorruption and based on self-ruling local bodies—the gram sabha and the mohalla sabha—to return to thesources of Indian democracy before it was affected by Western notions of representation and statecentralization. This discourse may sound utopian. But Gandhi’s worldview was also a utopia. And, whileGandhi’s vision has never been fulfilled, India has achieved marvels in its name.

This rosy picture needs to be qualified on two counts. First, the Indian village is not as harmonious asGandhians would like observers to believe. B. R. Ambedkar, during the debates that led to the creation ofIndia’s Constituent Assembly, argued that:

The love of the intellectual Indians for the village community is of course infinite if not pathetic. . . . What isthe village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism? I am glad

that the Draft Constitution has discarded the village and adopted the individual as its unit.1

The second caveat is that the Gandhian predicament is not good at providing guidelines for those whogovern. In fact, during his forty-nine days as chief minister, Kejriwal had a tough time, primarily because hissupporters were undisciplined and because he had difficulties in becoming a member of the establishment(Should he live in large official building or not? Should he travel by bus like the “common man”?). There wasa contradiction between his new position and his claim to be “an anarchist.”

But the Gandhian ideology has never been a source of inspiration for rulers. It is an opposition repertoire parexcellence, as is evident from its use by Jayaprakash Narayan in the 1970s. There is no better value-baseddiscourse or technique—including nonviolent demonstrations and fasts—for mobilizing citizens in thestreet. If Kejriwal’s AAP could at least force those in office to mend their ways without going as far as directdemocracy, India would be making progress toward what it claims to be.

Notes

1 Constituent Assembly Debates, vol. 7, New Delhi, Lok Sabha Secretariat, 1989, pp. 38–39.

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Can Arvind Kejriwal Rescue Indian Democracy_ - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

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