None-of-the-above-option and what is Increasingly Non-Hijackable Discontent (NHD) ? (September 2013) Which political movement, campaign and reform does not start with the promise of abolishing the distance between individual and State ? Between community and the State ? We want better governance, rule of law, responsive democracy, social justice, equality of opportunity, transparency, accountability, equal participation in decision-making bodies, real democracy, authentic democracy etc. Finally, our own laws, own representatives and even our own State. Our Independence in 1947 was a culmination of more than a hundred years of struggle for more democracy and more participation in the highest-decision making bodies of the Sub-continent. After 64 years of Independence we know that it is not only about the abolition of the distance between individual and State. Or, between us and the State. It can not be anything other than about something more than that. Should we demand and fight for more transparent democracy, grassroot democracy, online/digital democracy ? All these attempts and more could not save the polling booths in Britain and USA in the general elections of last decades. Only some real showdown like Barack Obama could restore the lost legitimacy of the system : only for a while. The growing voter apathy all over the world, in (medium and ) long-term it seems, is unstoppable. All people´s political parties are increasingly deserted by their people. In the last elections we needed Bollywood stars and campaigns by the shopping malls to seduce the largest section of urban middlewage class back to the polling booth. Few popular chief ministers and NGOs ( for example, Janagrah) are for introduction of compulsory voting in India. Was it imaginable in the India few decades ago , for example in 50s or 70s ? The point is : the more often we have seen the elections, the more often we tend to avoid the path to the polling booth. New sectors of population joining Accumulation recently go for their representatives more readily. Among the old sectors of population, who have already joined Accumulation and democracy earlier: they do not tend to click open the website to vote for the dear representative without any imposed showdowns (or a crisis). There, too, an increasing passive resistance is to be noticed. Search for an ideal representative is proving counterproductive. Be it representatives of people or worker or an identity. It comes out clealy in the history of mass practice of last deacades. It culminated recently in the global gathering shoe-storm against the representatives: be they old or new, regional or global. It was just one of many manifestations. In the 60s, 70s or 80s any core team of a movement against corruption was unthinkable without established politicians and their parties like Lohia or Advani or VP Singh. Today any core-team against corruption with any established politicians shall do so at its own risk. The radicals of Chartist movement (1838-1850 ) thought : with the introduction of universal suffrage all that we shall need will be intelligent legislators. With the hindsight of more than 150 years we can see again that the discontent can not be contained only in the name of the search for some ideal representation reforms and and ideal governance. Our discontent is not about not being able to get our ideal ruler, party or prince for the ideal subjects like us. The all-pervasive, diffused and increasingly non-hijackable social discontent, be it in the name of development or nation or identity, is in fact about our discontent from our status as subject itself. The historically accumulated and learning anger, we believe, is less about new form of State, than about our abolition as subjects of any State. The increasing non-hijackablity of discontent and the measures to contain them have taken infinte forms in the recent decades : direct (shoe-throwing), indirect (growing voter pathy), piecemeal ( growing people-lessness of the people´s parties), rapid ( exponential growth in the surveillance industries, CCTVs, hidden cameras, opinion survery institutes, approval rates, ID cards a la Nilekani for closer monitoring of our movements etc.), active and passive ( growth of a rent-a-crowd industry from the outskirts/slums of the capital cities for political rallys in India after 50´s; its growth is in direct proportion to the growing gap between masses and their representatives ) and semi-passive ( increasing dependence on production of pseudo-events only for the media ) and various combinations thereof . We view, at the moment, this trend as something positive. You do not have only differences among various political parties that matter. More significant is the unbridgeable gap between all the various political parties/mass representatives with their portable audiences on the one side and their masses -- on the other side. First published as second comment to the article on populism by Saroj Giri at kafila.org/2011/09/10/which-populism-saroj-giri/
Posted on: Sat, 28 Sep 2013 03:02:59 +0000