by TAMANNA KHOSLA
In India, the States of Gujarat and Kashmir have seen a lot of conflict in the past. Kashmir though even now is not free from conflicts of many kinds. Women, men and children in these areas have been affected in the same manner. The pain suffered by them was insurmountable. India is far away from a deliberative democratic state, a form of direct democracy which now is needed to make democracy more participatory. Multicultural states like India do need this kind of democracy to deal with conflicts in the pluralistic set-up. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission is one of the methods to achieve deliberative democracy. A Truth Commission or Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a Commission tasked with discovering and revealing past wrongdoing by a government (or, depending on the circumstances, non-state actors also), in the hope of resolving a conflict left over from the past has been referred to as an answer to provide justice.
Ever since the third-generation Abdullah became Kashmir's Chief Minister, he has been batting for setting up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) which, he believes, would help ascertain the truth behind allegations of widespread atrocities by the government forces in Jammu and Kashmir. The need for setting up the Commission received more attention after the discovery of thousands of unmarked graves in the Valley by the State's Human Rights Commission. The Kashmiri population, especially the Muslim population, have suffered not just at the hands of militants but also the government forces. They are in a state of confusion. Many want to be independent, others want to stay with India or Pakistan. The Kashmiri pundits have been virtually pushed off the Valley to either Jammu or other parts of India. So different sections, be it the majority Muslim population or minority Hindu population, have all faced various kinds of distress. They are yearning for justice. In Gujarat too the demand for setting up a TRC has been made as a transitional means to effective peace.1 According to a study, India is indeed a conflicted democracy and Gujarat is a representative illustration of this.
But the fact is that a Truth Commission would work in every country and every situation differently. For example, if a Truth Commission was successful in South Africa, in both the Indian States this method of deliberative democracy is going to function differently. Gujarat still has the ruling government which was the perpetrator of crimes against minorities in the State, while Kashmir has a very different political set-up with both the minorities and majorities seeking justice. Thus while in South Africa there was a change in regime, in Gujarat the same regime has continued.2 While India is a pluralist democracy, it is still far away from becoming a deliberative democracy. So till now a TRC has not been set up in any of the conflict-ridden States.
Not only India, even the Scandinavian countries, known to be using and advocating deliberative democracy, seem to be far from it. For example, the Cartoon Crisis of 2006 brought out shortcomings in the pluralist and democratic set-up of Denmark. The originating, obscure trigger of the crisis—the publication on September 30, 2005 in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten of caricatures on the subject of Islam, Muslims and Prophet Mohammed—snowballed into a global controversy; Muslims across the world protested, sometimes violently, against Danish and other Western interests. From Indonesia to Iran, Turkey to Lebanon, there were calls for a widespread boycott of Danish goods.3
A project was set up to understand and resolve the issue keeping deliberative democracy in mind. The process was interesting for three reasons.
First, it taught everyone that listening is as important as speaking in these forums. To get a consensus on contentious issues—an important feature of the initial workshops—proved more difficult than anticipated. The participants came from varied backgrounds.
Second, anything that sounded too contro-versial was stripped out during the discussions and voting process. Deliberation of this sort is not a way to get radical proposals on the agenda.
Third, there remains a need for flexibility at crucial moments. To some extent because of partisanship over the challenges from particular groups, the whole process nearly got stuck in the final voting round to establish the ultimate five. (On reflection, it might have been more sensible to have opted for six rather than five concluding challenges, since the number is arbitrary anyway.) The final five were “empower the powerless”, “ensure freedom of religion”, “create public spaces for coexistence”, “ensure judicial independence”, and “overcome the ‘security agenda'”.4
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EVERYwhere in the democratic world right now, people are working towards operationalising deliberative democracy. While India is a federal state, many thinkers have pointed out how reforms at the local governance level have led to a kind of deliberative democracy.5 For example, a study points out how the most recent wave of reforms in the West Bengal village governance system has built a formal apparatus that poten-tially contains all the elements of empowered deliberative democracy.6 According to some observers, the system has already produced impressive results in both agricultural producti-vity, wealth, and political inclusion. The percen-tage of rural population in poverty in West Bengal has fallen much more quickly than the India-wide figure since 1977 and the represen-tation of SC/ST persons on several surveyed Panchayats more than tripled since 1978, to the point where such persons are only slightly under-represented on these governance councils.
While the federal set-up in India has been successful, the multicultural set-up of the country from the angle of deliberative democracy needs a relook. Multicultural countries like India have a large minority population who should be well represented. There have been areas in our polity like Gujarat and Kashmir where these voices need to be heard. So India as a pluralist democracy has heterogeneous public whose voices must be heard and represented. Thus India too needs to experiment with the deliberative democracy model in these conflict-struck States.
TRC is one of the methods in a democratic set-up to achieve peaceful reconciliation in a conflict-ridden area. What are the requirements of a deliberative democracy to function in our state?
Firstly, deliberation may work in certain societies at certain times over certain isssues, as said earlier in the article. This might, however, not work for all societies. Deaveux suggests an example in England of how deliberation worked there with a committee comprising various racial, ethnic and religious communities being formed. The fact remains that a lot depends not only on the relations between the state and minorities but also between minorities and within minorities. These three would determine the outcome of a deliberative procedure. The nature of a problem too determines its outcome. So the success of a certain deliberation process in a specific context cannot lead to a generalisation about the overall success of the procedure as suggested by some theorists.
Therefore, there are certain conditions which are essential to make the deliberative procedures in a democracy successful:
a) No deliberation procedure can succeed till a certain level of trust and mutual respect is established between groups, within groups and between the state and groups.A society needs to fulfil conditions of ‘minimal decency'. No group should be in a more advantageous position. A balance of power should exist between the deliberating parties. Deliberation for groups is not possible from a position of inequality. A TRC in Gujarat and a similar one in Kashmir would just need to keep this in mind. For example, in Kashmir it is the right of the people to choose where they want to hold their allegiance. India needs to win the trust of the people in Kashmir and punish the culprits. Justice needs to be provided to the people in Kashmir and Gujarat by winning their trust.
b) Deliberation also works depending on the group in question. While with some groups mediation might be a relatively easier task, with others, due to hostilities shared with the society in large, reaching the stage of negotiation might be a tough option. So deliberation is a complex process. Proper confidence-building measures need to be initiated by parties in power so as to decrease hostilities between the deliberating parties. Otherwise any policy, which is not conceived properly, might increase hostilities between groups. This is because mediation is being brought on terms of the majority, rather than the minority. So the right political will to resolving the issue with the involvement of civil society is a must in cases where there are past incidences of hostility. An ill-conceived policy might increase suspicion and hostilities between groups; and this could only increase polarisation. Thus while resoving the conflicts in Gujarat and Kashmir, this issue comes to the forefront. This is owing to the fact that India is a diverse country and any solution in the riot-struck areas must understand this point and only then can the solution be arrived at.
c) Deliberative democracy requires that those who were previously excluded or marginalised could express their point of view and be counted.7 It further assumes that open debate and dialogue will enable members to interrogate the existing practices and arrive at a rationally motivated consensus.
d) According to Seyla Benhabib, the strength of deliberative democracy consists in its dual-track approach to politics.8 This dual-track approach, on the one hand, focuses on established institutions, like the legislature and judiciary, in liberal-democratic societies; on the other hand, the political activities and struggles of social movements, associations, and groups in civil society are brought sharply into focus through the theory of democratic public sphere. In India, for example, despite the multicultural framework the state is implicated in the culture of the majority.9 Thus a deliberative democratic model gives currency to not just state institutions but also civil society groups. In contrast to other models of democracy, a model of deliberative democracy emphasises the ‘need for inclusive decision-making' which can contribute towards a ‘more just and political judgment'. Establishing a TRC would be a step in this direction.
e) A deliberative model presupposes the need for those affected to be included in the process of decision-making. So the affected people in the regions of Kashmir and Gujarat need to be well represented in any forum or agency. However, this also raises the question of how inclusion needs to come about in large democracies. Inclusion must be effected through a genuine desire to foster the spirit of multiculturalism which is one of the basic principles of Indian democracy.
f) All ought to have equal effective opportunity to question one another and to question and criticise one another's proposals. A TRC should be based on such principles, be it in Kashmir or Gujarat.
g) The principle of reasonableness requires the willingness to listen to others who want to explain to them why their ideas are incorrect or inappropriate. This was seen from the example of Scandinavia as seen above. Reasonable people enter discussion to solve collective problems with the aim of reaching agreements.
h) The public consists of a plurality of different individuals and collective experiences, histo-ries, commitments, ideals, interests and goals discussing a set of problems under a set of procedures. When members of such a public speak to each other, they know that they are accountable to the plurality of others. Thus they must explain their particular back-ground, experiences, interests or proposals in ways that others can understand. If a TRC is set up, it should be extended to mean this.
Deliberative democracy in India would thus strengthen citizens' voices in governance by including people of all races, classes, ages and geographies in deliberations that directly affect public decisions. As a result, citizens influence—and can see the result of their influence on—the policy and decisions that impact their daily lives and their future. While the fact is that India is a vast country, efforts to resolve problems by deliberative democratic methods can ensure the truest form of democracy in what is doubtless the world's largest democracy. Thus democracy is in the midst of a parti-cularly major shift in its development. Leaders of all hues are realising that the traditionally distant relationship between the citizens and government is inadequate for solving the public problems. They are recognising that the usual formats for decision-making often waste public resources, create unproductive conflicts, and fail to tap the citizens' potential. They are attempting many different civic experiments—some success-ful, some not—to help citizens and governments work together more democratically and more effectively. Deliberative democracy worldwide is being seen as a solution to problems of the present multicultural polities. India too needs to experiment with this.
END NOTES
1. Ameya Kilara, “Facing the Demons of the Past: Transitional Justice in Gujarat”, Socio-Legal Review, Volume 3, 2007.
2. Ibid.
3. Graham Thompson, “Talking Democracy: China's Lesson in Denmark”, November 30, 2006, http://www.opendemocracy.net/global…
4. According to Grahame Thompson, even though the project was on a small scale—and independent of the actual results—to undertake this kind of venture is salutary. Deliberative forums are interesting and important occasions for exercises of democratic activity, but they are obviously not a substitute for the more formal apparatus of democratic decision-making. Deliberative democracy is not a substitute for formal and substantive democracy: at best it complements the latter.
5. See Shirin Rai: “Deliberative Democracy and the Politics of Redistribution: The Case of the Indian Panchayats”, Hypatia, 2009, http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/1290/1/WR…
In the article, Shirin Rai looks at the working of women in local government and says that a strengthened deliberative process might then produce improved outcomes for village development. This study demonstrates that institutional reform can disturb hegemonic discourses and the politics of presence sufficiently to prepare the soil in which deliberative democratic norms might be able to take root. The deliberative model gives us a framework for holding these bodies more accountable and ensuring that participants in its processes can do so with confidence, thus perhaps disturbing some identity-based power relations as well as delivering outcomes that enhance the welfare of marginalised communities.
6. Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy: Introduction, June 1999, http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/ wright/del…
7. In the Indian context, see Gurpreet Mahajan, “Can intra-group equality co exist with cultural diversity? Re-examining Multicultural framework of Accomodation”, in Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Rights and Diversity, Oxford University Press, 2005.
8. Iris Young, Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 31.
9. See Gurpreet Mahajan, “Can intra-group equality co exist with cultural diversity? Re-examining Multicultural framework of Accomodation”, op. cit., p. 112.
Dr Tamanna Khosla did her Ph.D from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi on multiculturalism and feminism. She is currently teaching Political Science as an Assistant Professor, Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi.