Democracy and Majority Rule

In the housing society where I live, there was recently a question about the installation of some facilities. There were strongly held opinions on several sides, and as people looked to reach a decision, emotions were running quite high.

What no one seemed to question was that the issue would be resolved by a majority of the people voting. That's how decisions have been taken for a long time. But no one really wanted to be on the losing side, and therefore there was a lot of jockeying to induce people to switch sides or come over to one or the other side. There was little thought given to how the people on the losing side, whichever that might be, would feel after the decision was taken, and what that would do to the continuing relationships across the community.

Imagine that you have invited 50 people to dinner. Of these, 24 are vegetarian and 26 meat-eaters. Imagine that you, therefore, tell everyone that because the majority have chosen meat, that is what will be served to everyone.

We would never do it. It offends our sense of decency and respect. What we eat is foundational to our sense of who we are and what we value. Is it more foundational than how we feel our justice system, our social relationships and our economic structures should be organized? Do we really feel that a bare majority should decide how decisions that affect our lives on an everyday basis should be taken, regardless of how the substantial minority feels? Or is it that we have never really paid attention to the question?

The truth is that majority rule is a blunt weapon, which misses so many important nuances critical to the well-being of a community that democracy itself gets a bad name.

The first question is: majority over what demographic. The community of a village knows best whether the village pond should be fenced. It shouldn’t be OK for its wisdom to be over-ridden by that of three other villages, each one of which is acting from their own prejudices and self-interest. But it is. And as we scale that problem – to the tehsil, the district, the state, and the nation – we lose more and more in contextual knowledge and affection. We gain the ability to implement over a larger area, but that enhanced ability itself is the source of disenchantment, disenfranchisement and disorder.

The second question, related to the first, arises from the inherent coercive power of the state. The state needs to be invested with such power for the concept of a state to have any meaning at all, but it is such a violent attribute that its use must be attended by great circumspection. In particular, nothing that doesn't endanger another person ought to be subject to any coercive power of the state, unless that individual willingly, and without positive or negative inducements, surrenders it to the state. The question of inducements is important; in modern states, coercion rarely comes as a constable. It comes as a subsidy conditional on compliance, a license denied, a benefit withdrawn. That is coercion, if laundered just enough to not be a beating.

What we call representative democracy today is really autocratic majority rule plus a centralized coercive apparatus. When it works, it works because of a restraint that is nowhere written down. When that restraint erodes, as it has in the last several decades globally, the lack of respect becomes visible immediately: 51% can ban what 49% eat, wear, say, worship, and call it democracy. And in India, where the first-past-the post system can provide a parliamentary majority with barely 35% of the vote, it is the 35% that can implement the ban on the other 65%.

So, can a village be a truly self-governing unit? Can the coercive power of the state to be limited to that which has been explicitly ceded to it? Either of these modifications to what is called representative democracy these days is very far from any likely realisation. We have travelled so far along the path of investing the state with more and more powers to violate the smaller communities that it seems quixotic to even suggest a more community-based legal framework.

Bapu was probably the last leader of significance who advocated for it, but even he failed to persuade his colleagues, drunk with the idea of having power over half a billion people, to adopt it. It was interesting that that happened because, otherwise, all of them were patriotic, sincere people who had had a recent, first-hand experience of brutal disenfranchisement. They perhaps thought that it was enough that they wouldn't, couldn't be brutal. In the event, we know that it wasn't enough.

Bapu's alternative sounds soft, but it is structurally harder. It requires living with disagreement, not outvoting it. It empowers the panchayat, not just the parliament. It failed not because it was unworkable, but because it demanded a kind of moral stamina that newly independent elites, understandably, did not have after centuries of powerlessness.

But when we see the challenges and the torrid times not just democracies, but even the idea of democracy, have been having in the last few decades, we see the wisdom of that more consensual, more local, more dialogic, more affectionate approach to governance that Bapu believed in.