In my month-long Legislative Fellowship with the US Department of State, I interned with the House of Representatives and the Senate at Columbus, Ohio. The delegation to the US had members from India and Pakistan, briefly joined by a delegation from Kosovo. As a political entrepreneur, it was interesting for me to learn that despite the gap in citizens’ expectations from their states and the states’ response to these demands, the democracies are similar in how they engage with various questions of citizen representation.
A nation-state in its very inception is about asserting an identity; and identity is never uniform for people, systems, organisations or institutions. Therefore, nations that choose to be democratic willingly sign up for interrogating questions of competing identities within their territory.
In the US and India, competing claims of nationalities, and the building of sub-nationalities within the nation, introduce an interesting comparison between the two nations.
Akram Elias, an expert in international business and cultural-political networking, briefed us on the American system and said, “The US is not a nation in the way ‘nation’ is conceived when we speak of India. The US has 50 states and each state is a nation in itself, if you see how independently they work with respect to the federal government.”
This kind of autonomy for individual states is unheard of in India.
The US model of democracy is fundamentally rooted in individualism, as opposed to Indian collectivism. While India is a union of states, the US is a federation of states. In the US, each citizen, like each state, places his/her expectations above anything else in order to fulfil the expectations of the ‘Great American Dream’. In India, Indian-ness precedes any other declaration to a great extent. Socially and culturally, emotions, feelings and priorities of the self are preceded by the collective will of society. This philosophical premise may be the reason why the Presidential model in the US and the Parliamentary model in India have been successful in impacting politics and policies in their respective democracies.
Policymaking in large democracies is mediated, as against some democracies with smaller population sizes: a referendum ensures citizens’ engagement in the policy cycle. The conduits between citizens and state work differently in the US and India. While in the US, lobbyists create, deliberate and advocate policy concerns and pitch political communication on behalf of people and institutions (commercial and/or non-profit), in India lobbying is looked down as capitalist, corrupt and dirty.
This is not to say that lobbying does not happen in India. On the contrary, the subtle culture of ‘contacts’ and ‘jugaad’ in our country has given a cultural credence to the non-recognised but wide practice of lobbying in the most misleading of ways. Since networks and relationship-building define the contours of lobbying, professional ethics and personal interests often clash; the common good is sometimes obscured.
However, it is also interesting to learn how this form of issue-based advocacy (the garb of which shrouds lobbying) is flawed even in the US. As Ryan Lehman, the policy advisor of the Republican caucus, expressed, “Despite having run a successful model of legal lobbying, the US has institutionalised corruption in the political and policy set-up through very subtle and entrenched ways — often away from the prying eyes of the public and the media.”
It was insightful to learn, therefore, from my Kosovo counterparts, that transparency and access to open public records is the priority concern on the basis of which Kosovo is trying to legitimise and authenticate its struggle for sovereignty and democracy. While interacting with Catherine Turcer, policy analyst with Common Cause, on the challenges of making open records a norm in democracy, we learnt that, gradually, citizens are not only showing an increasing intolerance to prim narratives but are also becoming more demanding in laying bare a nation’s claim to being accountable.
After this rich socio-cultural, political and legislative masterclass, I have come back hopeful on two counts:
The ‘unity in diversity’ model of the Indian identity has safely averted the risk of a bitter cultural clash. On the eve of the Presidential elections in the US, the way in which the identity question is being negotiated with, one wonders if the ‘melting pot of cultures’ model of the US has really worked. Because, the casualty of homogeneity over heterogeneity is visible when one finds not an American but an African-American, Indian-American, Canadian-American, Ukrainian-American, Russian-American and so on, advocating their larger chunks in the ‘Great American Dream’. I am hopeful that we, in India, have perhaps cracked the model of defining equality and secularism beyond religion, as peaceful coexistence over ‘tolerance’.
The Parliamentary form of democracy in India has given us an intellectual privilege of prolonged and, therefore, sustained ideological exchange.
Because ideology has been institutionalised in the party system and commercialisation of the political space is a new and fluid phenomenon for us, we have the historical advantage of not letting politics become market products and voters become consumers.
The casual test of a working democracy is the peaceful switch of power between hands seven consecutive times.
I believe, in India, we have perfected this theoretical premise of democracy.
(Shubhrastha is a political entrepreneur and independent columnist based in New Delhi)
