THE DRYING UP OF DEMOCRATIC IMAGINATION

For democracy to survive when citizenship is tenuous, we must create knowledge panchayats. In such spaces, diverse voices can inform policy in everyday language

- 

FOR over a fortnight, I have been excited about the student revolt in Nepal. It seemed to be a new desire for democracy. What intrigued me in particular was the tacit balance it sought between oral, textual and digital cultures. I talked to my colleague, a brilliant philosopher. Oddly, he didn't sound positive. He turned to me and said, "Let me play wet-blanket and argue with you." He felt that for all the enthusiasm for democracy there was a failure of imagination and aridity of concepts. He cited the example of citizenship.

When first coined, citizenship was an ode to hope, a claim to membership and its rights. A poetry of possibility Today, it has lost its magic. It has become empty and desiccated. Words like migrant, marginal, refugee, exile-all emphasise the temporariness, tenuousness of citizenship. What one sees politically is the fragility of citizenship. One can see this state of being in Assam and Bangladesh.

The tenuous fate of citizens emphasises the waywardness of democracy.

My friend argued that for democracy to survive creatively, the sense of justice needs to be politically agile and philosophically supple. He said there was an epistemic illiteracy about democracy Consider the word 'I', the idea of the self. Biologists Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock had pointed out that the body is composed of millions of organisms. Who does the word 'I' represent here? They then added that the individualism of the word hardly conveys the dynamism of the body. An 'I' indicates contract and commodification, but the body operates on symbiotic principles, which mark most of life. My friend added, the word 'I' inaugurates the illiteracy of present philosophy. Democracy has to rework the very idea of the person.