The republic and the legislature look to the public for gauging the mood of the nation during the process of formulating laws that necessarily must tap into the prevailing moral sentiment and ethos of the day. Thus a law against child marriage might have been moot a half century ago, but a necessary devolution of current social perceptions. On such issues, public sentiment can guide, indeed force the hand of the legislature and judiciary to come down particularly heavily on one side of the fence. However, it is parochial of us to invoke the illegal and hare-brained claim that since democracy is popularly, rule of, for and by the people, a representative democracy is inherently bound to genuflect to populist opinion, a case in point being the recent debate over the Lokpal bill that at the time of writing was still raging and occupied prime placement amongst the media of the day.

Among the large variations on the theme of democracy are direct and representative democracy. The former being the original, uninhibited by pragmatism conceptual take on rule by the people, the latter tempered by matters of practically and implementation. This dichotomy frequently plays upon our senses and as in this case, guides a sense of acceptability and appropriateness, right and wrong in the republic. Thus, popular culture and lore, in their frequent subscription to the “will of the people” mistakenly circumscribe idealistic expectations borne of redundant knowledge onto differing political realities with disastrous consequences. A direct democracy is one that seeks to frame policy by ascertaining the will of the people through the instruments of plebiscites and referenda. Popular terminology used to describe a democracy such as “the will of the people” and “Vox Populi” is meant to reflect the informed will of the people, arrived at after gathering and exposing themselves to relevant and available information and after subsequent deliberations on the issue in light of applicable information, not codify an expression of opinions in conformance with the prevailing order of the day.

Insofar as information asymmetries and the economic costs associated with the agglomeration of information promote the use of heuristics as decision enabling devices, the outcome of a referendum shall always reflect populist opinion. Opinions shall inevitably be guided by heuristics that shape preferences along predictable caste, creed, party and religion lines. Consequently, populist beliefs are rarely reflective of socio-economic realities and necessities due to constraints on time, negative externalities in information seeking, and the entrenched, unyielding and slow to mould morass of public morality and beliefs. Further, populist beliefs and maxims that shape opinions and guide decisions often curtail effective and meaningful debate. By relegating complex socio-economic issues to one-liners for the purpose of effective sloganeering, we risk sweeping away a wealth of detail that proves useful in guiding the development of policy.

Thus, while a referendum is technically indicative of the will of the people, its effectiveness as an indicator of public sentiment, and even more pertinently as a policy making tool is limited, if not non-existent. The fundamental tenet of a democracy is the provision of freedom and liberties to its gentry and the election of public officials in free, fair and competitive elections, not regular subscription to populism. The will of the people is really then a theoretical concept that lends credence to the devolution of power to the representatives as a practical implementation of theory.

The direction that the Lokpal debate has taken is empirical evidence in support of the above observations. With much of India lacking a basic context against which to visualize the place, position and effects of the bill, and much of media debate reduced to conjecture rather than an establishment of the facts, public opinion has pointedly grasped at any symbolism that can assuredly signify a moral high ground and an identification with the common man. The most useful symbol of this movement then has to be the starched white dhoti and topi and the constant fasts in a heady throwback to the days of the struggle for India’s independence. Journalism has been forced by the political economy of the media to discuss in order to take sides and sensationalize rather than discuss in order to inform and enable the public to come to their own conclusions.

I fear that the democratic underpinnings of our society might be under attack. Democracy has been forcibly yoked to populism in a cruel and ironic bastardization by the very activists who portend themselves as vanguards of our moral and ethical floodgates and represent an informal yet indispensable addendum to the balance and delineation of power in the government and bureaucracy. Long have our glorious NGO’s and social and civic activists shouted themselves hoarse from the rooftops to prevent government from experimenting with our liberties. Long have they prevented our slipping down various slopes, restrained the hand of the government, “prevented sensible regulation from leading to broader prohibition” and informed the decisions of the judiciary. Ideological advocacy groups have been decisive in raising awareness in the nation on issues of socio-economic, moral, political and civic importance, forming, shaping, voicing public opinion and identifying and guarding the nations’ ample reservoir of slippery slopes. Key to this utility, then, has been their position in the political arena as informal observers of events, equally concerned with the ends as well as the means, acutely cognizant that the subversion of the means to the ends augurs contempt for the law that presages an unraveling of the binding social code of the nation, one that has united the nation and created an identity and fostered a sense of belonging.

Civil society’s present role in burning copies of legislative bills, promoting the use of suicidal fasts as a means of holding parliament and the nation hostage to an opinion that counts amongst its inputs the views of a few key people and has been tacked onto the nation as the will of the people, injecting an atmosphere of “us vs. them” into this struggle by portraying a sense of acute division between government and society, unconcern on the part of the government, and generalrabble rousing and demagoguery represents a debasement of the role, scope and influence that civil and social activists have come to occupy in the public space. By usurping the due political process in the hope of aiding a quicker solution to the issue, civil society stands guilty as charged of having happily greased a slippery slope that is all the more portentous since it makes a nonsensical position politically tenable due to the characterization of the movement as one enjoying popular support among the people of the nation and the political opportunism and ideological bankruptcy rife in the political parties of the nation. Civil society, by playing dead to the charges of unconstitutional conduct, has also cleared the way for populist rule unchecked by the restraint of the opinions of the minority. A victory today shall galvanize the fast unto death ideology, enmesh it in the public space; while a loss shall only serve to accentuate a non-existent divide between the people and their government; disenchanting the nation to the wonderful experiment of democracy, and decreasing the quality of debate in the country, making it decidedly easier to flippantly oppose a position on account of it being one that the government endorses, an instance of the ad hominem fallacy coming into play.

Civil society might be justified in warning that the government version of the bill is toothless and largely a hoodwink that tries to get away by reposing too little power, however civil society tries to compensate by allocating too much power to the proposed Lokpal. Where an un-necessitated concentration of power in public institutions is the central issue, where the problem is an agglomeration of power that stifles decision making, hampers accountability and amplifies risk averse tendencies in bureaucracy, the solution is a more effective distribution of powers and the implementation of existing redressal mechanisms that galvanize our public institutions, not the creation of draconian, authoritarian preventive policing organizations.

While rent seeking opportunities might be enhanced by the curious intersection of a nation on the cusp of a move towards a liberal market economy coupled with a deepening of its relation with democratic principles (until now at the least), and resolved by a myriad of means (conspicuous by its absence, the people’s version of the ombudsman act), corruption and corruptibility are endemic to the human condition. It is naïve of us to wish it away. It is then even more childish to fast against corruption or to legislate against it, especially in a nation that has an abysmal record of implementation. Such legislation, while theorized as having a preventive effect that would serve to choke the supply, or creation of corrupt public functionaries shall only serve to further nurture contempt for a flawed and broken political process overcompensated for by an actively imaginative and exceedingly proactive judiciary and engender a pessimistic outlook on the system that would serve the useful function of actualizing a self fulfilling prophecy of the impossibility of repairing the political process. The only discernible effect of the bill has and shall be to create awareness and allow the populace to gain a wider recognition of their rights and responsibilities, consequently effecting a change in public outlook on the morality of corruption and its nihilistic acceptability and integration into the Indian pseudo socialist setting. Should we then, given the partial, though tangential to stated intent, success, applaud civil and political activists as having provided a valuable service to the nation? For the reasons outlined previously, I fear the answer has to be no. Civil society should be deplored and castigated for losing sense of their privileged position in the public space and the sense of duty that has to accompany it, and for very effectively and efficiently ridding the nation of its most valuable crutch by devaluing the role and value of India’s NGO’s. While Bedi, Kejriwal and Hazare might have envisioned their role as enabling a convalescent nation to run, they have only crippled it and forced it to crawl.