Is Democracy just a mirage?

Last year a friend had forwarded me the following news of September 29, 2009 from Geneva reported in the English Internet edition of Kerala Kaumudi:

The United Nations Human Rights Council, meeting in Geneva, is expected to ratify draft principles, which will recognize India's caste system as a human rights abuse. The UN will condemn the persecution suffered by 65 million 'untouchables' or 'Dalits' who carry out the most menial and degrading work. The UN draft, which has been opposed by India, pledges to work for the "effective elimination of discrimination based on work and descent". The Indian government had lobbied heavily for the Human Rights Council to remove the word 'caste' from a draft earlier this year. India's opposition was undermined however by Nepal, the former Hindu Kingdom, which has supported the move. Its foreign minister Jeet Bahadur Darjee Gautam said Nepal welcomes UN and international support for its attempts to tackle caste discrimination.

My initial reaction was that of surprise, because ‘untouchability’ has already been abolished under the Indian Constitution, and failed to understand the rationale of the Indian Government to oppose the UN initiative . But the story of Dalits in the Uthapuram village of Madurai district in Tamil Nadu quite eloquently explains the inherent contradictions of the world’s largest democracy. In Uthapuram village, for the last two decades a ten foot high wall segregated the upper-castes from the Dalits. This wall was built to deny access to Dalits of Uthapuram to public places and facilities frequented by the upper-castes on the other side. At one point, even a live electric wire was attached to some iron scaffoldings in the wall to deter any attempt to scale the wall. This fact was brought to the Public Attention by the Tamil Nadu Untouchability Elimination Forum (TNUEF).

Over the period matters came to a head, and to the credit of the CPI(M), the Karunanidhi government succeeded in demolishing some 150 ft. of the wall in April, 2008. It is interesting that Tamil Nadu is governed by a largely OBC-led formation (intermediate social castes) who vanquished the caste oppression of the Tamil Brahmins during the social reform agitations led by Periyar and Annadurai (mentors of the current leadership). Yet those who fought and defeated Brahminism seem quite lukewarm in defeating the caste oppression of the Pillai OBCs in Uthapuram against the fellow dalits.

A glance into the history of Indian National Congress will help understand the inherent contradiction within India’s ruling establishment. The inception of the Congress party in 1885 was accompanied by the establishment of the "Social Conference", but political reform was always given precedence over social reform. Here is what W.C.Bonnerjee had to say in 1892 at the 8th session of the Congress:

I for one have no patience with those who say we shall not be fit for political reform until we reform our social system. I fail to see any connection between the two. That by and large had remained the position of the Congress on the issue, until Gandhi was pressured by the Ambedkarite movement in the 1930s to launch his movement for the eradication of untouchability.

The irony of the modern-day state formation anywhere and anytime is that it tends to be accompanied by the desire of the dominant to hold the balance of class/caste forces in an equilibrium that best suits them. This is best described by Lassalle in 1862 to a Prussian audience:

The Constitutional questions are in the first instance not questions of right
but questions of might. The actual constitution of a country has its existence
only in the actual condition of force which exists in the country; hence
political constitutions have value and permanence only when they accurately
express those conditions of force which exist in practice within a society. The
Dalits in Uthapuram and rest of the country need to be made aware of the fact
that in order for a shakeup of the India’s political arrangement, India's social
reform movement need to acquire a clout forceful enough to make a dent on that
arrangement. And, however difficult is the task, democracy tends to carry within
it the logic that allows the downtrodden to harbour the hope of achieving that
shakeup.

If we shift attention from World’s largest Democracy to World’s most powerful Democracy, the scenario is far from encouraging. Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, echoes the feelings of many progressives in his recent writings in The New York Times. He is dismayed over the success of right-wing ideologues in undercutting Obama's health care bill, and in mobilizing enormous public support against almost any reform aimed at rolling back the economic, political, and social conditions that have created the economic recession and the legacy of enormous suffering and hardship for millions of Americans over the last 30 years.

Arundhati Roy the famous activist and author in her scathing criticism of the current Indian Military occupation of Kashmir raises some valid questions about democracy in general:

Is there a life after Democracy? What have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been
hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions
has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and
the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin,
constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of
maximizing profit?

We need today leaders like Gandhi with a long-term vision for the sake of the survival of this planet. The present day democratic governments for their sheer survival are dependant on immediate, extractive and short-term gains. The democracy today tends to only respond to our short-term hopes and prayers, protect our individual freedoms and nurture our greed by endangering the survival of the human race? The fact is that democracy is a big hit with modern humans precisely because it reflects our nearsightedness.

One sincerely hopes that conferring of the Nobel Peace prize to Obama will enable the average Americans reject the deceptions and lies of the zombie market politics. The zombie market politics from the Reagan days is seeking to reject the public option in Obama's health plan, fighting efforts to strengthen bank regulations, resisting caps on CEO bonuses, preventing climate-control legislation, and refusing to limit military spending. Time is indeed running out as leaders of the world's governments move toward the Dec. 7-18 international meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark to try coming up with a stronger climate treaty than the Kyoto Protocol. As I write, things do not look good at all.