Decoding democracy

Indian home minister Rajnath Singh has pronounced “secularism” as the most misused word in the political lexicon. The other word in our vocabulary, I would contend, which deserves scrutiny is the word “democracy”.

The idea of a democratic future for India was born when the captains and kings of the Indian mutiny were defeated by the colonial power and various forces garnered themselves for a renewed assault on the resulting Raj. This didn’t take the form of demands for the reinstatement of the Mughal dynasty or of monarchy in any form. Despite the fact that several “Maharajas” had, by licence from the empress and succeeding king-emperors, some ceremonial control over swathes of the subcontinent, the demand from the Indian National Congress was for more “democracy”. At the time it meant greater “native” representation. Later, under Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar, it meant swaraj of the people, by the people and for the people.

British and American democracies had been long established and, coming to the present day, one can see how the concept of democracy around the world is subject to various interpretations.

In America Donald Trump, exercising his right to free speech and democratic campaigning, calls for a ban on the entry of all Muslims, including returning citizens of the country, to the US. The President and other politicians denounce him in a “tut-tut” fashion. If a politician of any party had made a similar statement in India, he or she would have been seen, not simply as suggesting that this or that Muslim film star go and live in Pakistan, but as someone inciting religious hatred. No politician with the sort of support that Mr Trump can muster has ventured to say anything as incendiary in India, and if they did (we must hope) the full force of the state would see them in court. In the US, Mr Trump will go free and perhaps increase his red-neck following.

The principles of “by the people and of the people” in the definition of democracy have been variously interpreted in different systems boasting the same name. A survey of the incoming Cabinet of the newly-elected Nitish Kumar government in Bihar demonstrated that apart from Mr Kumar and possibly one or two others, none of Cabinet had even passed respectably through the matriculation exams of school, leave aside having Master’s degrees in economics or political administration from respectable universities. They are undoubtedly “of the people” and are now challenged to demonstrate that good democratic government doesn’t depend on the academic qualification of the governors.

Yet, the article setting out the results of this survey of the academic qualifications of Mr Kumar’s ministers seemed to bemoan the fact that they were not from the educated elite of Bihar. The debate or objections were set in train by the appointment of Tejaswi Yadav, Lalu Prasad Yadav’s son, to be deputy chief minister. It was pointed out that he had merely passed the ninth standard and was therefore not qualified to be partly in charge of the governance of Bihar.

Exactly the opposite attitude enlivens political debate in Britain. Commentators note that Prime Minister David Cameron, educated at Eton and Oxford, has surrounded himself with ministers and advisers who went to public, which means expensive fee-paying, schools and to Oxford or Cambridge. Only 7 per cent of Britain’s population goes to public schools and a much smaller percentage to Oxford and Cambridge. Mr Cameron’s Cabinet has 50 per cent of ministers who attended public schools and 50 per cent of those who went to Oxford or Cambridge. This is seen in Britain as unrepresentative of the population and so not quite in the spirit of democracy, though well within its operational rules.

The opposite attitude prevails through the challenge in India to Smriti Irani’s appointment to a ministry in charge of education. The objectors say her total lack of academic qualifications disqualifies her from this particular ministry.

In Singapore, the Constitution requires legislators and ministers to have passed a specified bar of academic qualification. In India, the democratic Constitution, which gives one adult person one vote, has facilitated the rule of the people by the very people who are ruled. Caste means democratic numbers and after the Nehru era, when India was ruled by an educated elite, the force of numbers has overtaken all consideration of “qualifications”.

This strength of numbers recently caused what I regard, and what most Brit commentators have missed, as a blip in British democratic development. In the city of Oldham there was a byelection in early December. The Labour candidate won by a landslide with an 11,000-vote majority. Seven thousand of these were postal votes. The commentators saw this as a triumph for the policies of the controversial Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. It was, but it wasn’t an endorsement of his domestic socialist policies.

Oldham has 15 per cent Bangladeshi and Pakistani population. Mr Corbyn has been a staunch opponent of the war in Iraq and now of bombing in Syria. He has been associated with pro-Palestinian anti-Israeli standpoints. He is reputed to have said Osama bin Laden shouldn’t have been shot by US commandos but should have been arrested to stand trial. He has communicated with Hamas and Hezbollah.

The turnout for the vote in Oldham was very low. The postal vote was almost universally the Muslim-ethnic vote which came out in favour of the candidate of Mr Corbyn’s party, whether the voters knew who the candidate was or what he stood for. The non-ethnic vote went to the anti-immigrant UK Independence Party candidate and the Tory and Lib Dem vote didn’t bother to sign a postal form or walk to the polling station. Oldham was not a test of

Mr Corbyn’s revolution. It was a triumph of international pro-Islamic attitudes over any domestic policy considerations.