Are we really listening?
The capability for consensus building through dialogue amongst discordant stakeholders is necessary to accelerate Indias development democratically, says Arun Maira
WHAT do Srinagar, Singur, and the late Minoo Rustumji have in common? The answer: disruptive break-downs of dialogue within Indian democracy. Minoo Rustumji was the chief financial controller in the 1970s of the Jamshedpur factory of Tata Motors (then called Telco). Gheraos were tools workmen used those days to press their demands on management. One day, Rustumji was gheraoed in his office. He was delighted! He was an ardent advocate of family planning and had been having a hard time gathering workmen to listen to his speeches. He now had a large captive crowd and he began his best speech. The crowd soon melted away.
When Mamata Banerjees supporters gheraoed Tata Motors factory at Singur in August, Ratan Tata did not give a speech on family planning. He declared a walkout from Bengal to the dismay of Budhadev Bhattacharjee, the chief minister who had invited him to set up the factory. In frustration, Budhadev declared at a meeting of industrialists in Kolkata that disruptive bandhs and gheraos should be banned. Whereupon his own Communist party protested that people must have the right to strike to make their demands heard. The communist government in China cleared Beijing of migrant workers and shut down factories to clean up for the Olympics. It impressed the world with the scale and the efficiency of its organisation. Whereas in our democracy, the communist CM of Bengal could not clear the roads around Singur. On the other hand, India can conduct elections on a massive scale and is proud to be known as the worlds largest democracy. The question Indias discordant democrats must ask is: are elections, or strikes, gheraos and bandhs, the only ways that people can make their voices heard?
Democracy is about listening to many voices and including many points of view in a dialogue about what we all want. Omar Abdullah pointed out, in the TV show We the People, that while political parties in Kashmir had been able to gather up to 100,000 people in their largest rallies, as many as 500,000 had peacefully assembled in the Srinagar Idgah in August to express their unhappiness with the state of affairs. This was a warning, he said, to the governments of India and Kashmir and to politicians including him that they had not been really listening to the people of Kashmir.
In addition to efficient machinery for electing peoples representatives, democracy requires processes for good dialogue. Unfortunately, whatever institutions we have in India for dialogue are not strong enough for the traffic the development of our large, diverse country requires them to carry. Dialogue requires that people listen to each other even if they do not agree with each other. Such dialogue is expected to take place at least amongst the elected representatives of the people. Sadly, we have witnessed the sorry spectacle in our Parliament of the prime minister handing to the Speaker his reply to the motion of no-confidence in his government because the din of the Opposition prevented him from speaking. Healthy democracies also need supplemental processes for dialogue outside Parliament and the assemblies. In the We the People TV programme mentioned earlier, leaders of the peoples movements in Kashmir pointed out that processes of dialogue that had been set up by the government had proved to be a farce, and this had compelled them to consider other ways to make their views known.
WHEN people find that official processes to make their voices heard are not working, they are likely to take recourse to other means to get their point across. They will strike work if that is permissible, gather in large peaceful rallies, or take to the streets with their demands. And if after all that they are not heard, some will resort to gun-shots and explosions. Thus a problem of poor dialogue in democracy can become a problem of law and order, which the state is then pressed to resolve undemocratically and with force.