1 Forthcoming in Democratization. Revisiting the Crisis of Representation Thesis: The Indian Context Neera Chandhoke 1 I gratefully acknowledge the invaluable contribution of Peter Houtzager, John Harriss, and Adrian Lavalle, to the conceptualisation of the project and to the design of the survey instrument. Ravi Ranjan deserves a special note of thanks for help in analysing the data and for generating the charts and figures. Thanks are due to Niraja G. Jayal and Manindra Thakur for some very helpful comments and suggestion. And finally thanks to the anonymous referees of the journal; their insightful observations compelled me to fill in the gaps in an earlier version of the essay. 1 Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Delhi and Director, Developing Countries Research Centre, University of Delhi. Residential address- C-516 Defence Colony, New Delhi 110024, India. Phones- 91-11-24335957, 24332730. e-mail, [email protected]. Word length, 12,514 2 Revisiting the Crisis of Representation Thesis : The Indian Context Neera Chandhoke Summary This essay addresses the ‘crisis of representation’ thesis by examining some of the findings of a survey conducted in Delhi in the year 20031. On the basis of the data that was collected during the course of the survey, I seek to revisit two rather significant questions that have been thrown up by the thesis. Firstly how valid is the assumption that people have lost confidence in the capacity of political parties to represent them in forums of policy making? Secondly, have people really come to believe that civil society groups, such as non-governmental organisations, can better help them resolve the oft intractable problems of everyday life? The answers to these questions may prove to be of some political interest, since they might help to throw light on two vital political and theoretical issues: the relationship between citizens and the world of representative politics in particular, and the adequacy of representative democracy in general. The findings of the research proje ct tell us that the crisis of representation runs deep, and that people seem to have lost confidence in the ability or indeed the political will of all organisations, whether they belong to the political or the civil domain, to address their basic problems. Introduction: The ‘crisis of representation’ thesis, which has preoccupied a fair amount of academic energy for some time now, holds that citizens across the world have shifted from older and traditional forms of representation such as political parties and trade unions, to ‘newer’, modes such as social movements, informal citizen groups, and non-governmental organisations2. Alternatively taking the Eastern and Central European experience of the 1980s as a referral, theorists suggest that citizens faced with recalcitrant and unresponsive political institutions turn their back on the political domain and form self-help organisations in civil society to resolve their problems. In other words, now people either approach the state and its institutions of policy making through civil society organisations, or come together in and through dense networks of associational life, in order to negotiate their collective problems. The shift, it is generally suggested, has taken place for the following reasons: traditional modes of representation such as political parties have exhausted their capacity to represent the aspirations of their constituencies, they have become hierarchical, bureaucratic, and rigid, and they tend to follow the political logic and impulse of power seeking more, and pursue the task of representing the needs and the interests of their constituents less. Since political modes of representation have proved inadequate, the move to civil society organisations, which at least are in touch with the exigencies of everyday life, is both natural and understandable. The days of grand representational politics may be over, and it is time to concentrate on the local, the immediate, and the experiential through the study of multiple, decentred, localised, and single -issue modes of representation3. In this essay I re-examine the two basic questions that have been thrown up by the ‘crisis of representation’ thesis. Firstly, is the assumption that people have lost confidence in traditional forms of representation such as political parties valid? Secondly, have people turned towards relatively newer forms of interest aggregation and representation to help them solve their problems? The answers to these questions may prove to be of some political significance, for they will necessarily serve to highlight the relationship between citizens and the world of representative politics in particular and the adequacy of representative democracy in general. The crisis of representation thesis is re-examined by reflecting on the findings of an empirical survey conducted in Delhi in the year 2003. The research team in the course of its fieldwork interviewed 1401 inhabitants of the city and asked them to respond to a structured questionnaire4. The 3 objective of administering the questionnaire was to allow the team to map out patterns of politics in civil society: by asking people to identify the magnitude of the various problems they encounter in their existential capacity, to examine whether traditional and familiar practices of representation that were characteristic of mass politics for most of the twentieth century have slackened, to inquire what is it that people do if older forms have slackened, to probe popular perceptions of other modes of representation such as religious and caste associations and non- governmental organisations, to figure out whether patterns of politics in the world of work and that in residential neighbourhoods diverge, and to evaluate the implications of all this on political awareness as well as on the possibilities for collective action. On the basis of some of the empirical data generated by the survey, I seek to foreground the opinions, the interests, and the political activities of those who are represented, rather than concentrate on those who do the representing. I focus in particular on responses to two questions: what do people think of traditional as well as of relatively newer modes of representation? Or what standing do political and civil society organisations hold in popular expectations? Secondly, what is it that people do when it comes to problems that demand resolution, if indeed all modes of representation are found wanting? The answers to these questions may help us to understand the nature of representative democracy in India. A Note on Method The research team, taking the categories provided by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi as the base for investigation, distributed the survey across different and distinct categories of residential areas 5. The MCD categorises residential settlements on the basis of (a) infrastructure: sewerage, public and internal roads, and public spaces such as community halls, and parks, and (b) services: primary schools, dispensaries, electricity, and water supply, which are provided to the area. On these two grounds the MCD categorises residential areas as (a) planned colonies, (b) unauthorised regularised colonies, (c) unauthorised unregularised colonies, and (d) jhuggi jhopris and slums 6. 600 of the 1401 questionnaires were administered to the relatively poorer sections of society living in b, c, and d categories of residential settlements. 801 questionnaires were distributed on the basis of the ratio between the four types of colonies, within each of the 70 legislative constituencies in Delhi. Democracy and Representation ‘Sovereignty, wrote the great defender of direct democracy, Jean Jacques Rousseau, ‘for the same reason as makes it inalienable, cannot be represented; it lies essentially in the general will, and will does not admit of representation: it is either the same or the other; there is no intermediate possibility’ 7. Other theorists concur : Levine for instance argues that democracy gives the right to the citizens to critically choose among alternative options. However since representative democracy does not allow the citizen to participate directly in the processes of decision making, all that he or s/he can do is to confer consent upon the choices of others. This , concludes Levine, violates the basic precepts of democracy8. In general the criticism of representative democracy focuses on the fact that popular sovereignty diminishes considerably; when citizens delegate the power of representing their opinions, their needs, and their interests to someone else. However, despite the often dire warnings of critics that representative democracy compromises the normative premises of democracy, it is representative democracy that has come to command the world ever since the institutionalisation of democracy itself. Of course there are very good reasons for this, the primary reason being the sheer size and complexity of modern societies, which renders direct or face-to-face democracy a remote possibility. Therefore, though it is true that representative democracy diminishes the autonomy of citizens, it is also true that people need to be represented, simply because direct democracy would demand the kind of time and energy that no one can afford in today’s rushed world. Representatives in other words take over the task 4 of bringing popular opinion to bear upon policy making. They also act as channels of accountability. Therefore, for better or for worse, representative