In light of history, the study of participatory mechanisms in the Indian capital New Delhi shows that democracy lies less in procedural engineering, whether participatory or electoral, than in the mobilizations that take hold of it.
Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal opens her study of the uses of participation in India by comparing the conceptions that intellectuals have of it.critics in France and India. While here it is mainly seen as a possible solution to the crises and limits of representative democracy, there it is essentially considered as an antidemocratic instrument in the hands of the upper classes to short-circuit the political representation of the poor and minorities, aided in this by the neoliberal injunctions to “good governance” of international institutions. In India, the deepening of democracy is in fact almost unanimously assigned to the improvement of electoral representation. Neera Chandhoke, Niraja Gopal Jayal or, better known in France, Partha Chatterjee identify the participation and more broadly the values and activities of “organized civil society” (associations and NGOopposed to “social movements”, parties and unions) to privileged social groups. They would see there an alternative channel of access to the State, freed from representative mediations whose double defect would be to be corrupt and to make room for the quantitative majority, i.e. the poor. Let us recall in fact that in India, since the 1990s, the dominant vote less than the dominated in almost all elections – with the notable exception of those of 2014 which brought to power the BJP neo-fascist. This is particularly because the former have acquired, with economic liberalization and decentralization, other accesses to public resources, unlike the latter, who are entirely dependent on the electoral game.
This contrast between Indian and French problematizations, developed in the first chapter, thus allows the author to question the routine associations between participation and democracy (in France) or neoliberalism (in India) and to deconstruct the expressions of “participatory democracy” vs. “representative democracy”. This is because nothing foreshadows a prioriin the implementation of representative devices – this is known – but also participatory – including “bottom-up” or fully appropriated by citizensparticipants –, of their democratizing effects. It is necessary to distinguish the terms participation, representation and democracy in order to be able to study their articulations as well as their possible antinomies.
Participation stuck in the myth of the “village”
These Indian critiques of participation are illuminated by the political history of independent India and its sea serpent, a “decentralization” regularly presented as necessary to improve the effectiveness of public action and nevertheless circumvented in practice. Of the three chapters devoted to it, we can first remember the founding moment of the debate between Gandhi and Ambedkar on the subject of the Constitution. Gandhi is in favor of the constitutionalization of panchayats (village councils) because of his conservative (but anti-colonial) idealization of the pre-colonial village community as a unit “on a human scale”, economically autonomous and self-regulated by consensus. Ambedkar, on the contrary, sees in village society a space hierarchized by caste synonymous with oppression and injustice. Finally, the panchayats are included in the Constitution, but as a secondary referent. They are remobilized in the 1960s and again after the end of the state of emergency (1975-77). With this participation, always conceived as “descending”, it is a question of bypassing the elected officials.is to put bureaucrats and citizens in direct contactnes: better involving the targets of public action in its implementation would make it more effective, as partisan competition is perceived as a factor of corruption and conflict harmful to the social harmony of villages and to the “neutral” or “technical” application of social assistance programs. But, if the last sequence contributes to making “participatory” decentralization a consensual horizon, the government’s recommendations to the federated states remain largely a dead letter. This is because, in addition to the few resources made available, elected officialsThey look askance at devices that are explicitly designed to circumvent them.
The situation only really changed with the reforms of the turn of the 1990s in terms of economic liberalization and decentralization – the two pillars of the structural adjustments required by the IMF. The 73e and 74e Constitutional amendments adopted in 1992 established a third electoral level: elected local governments, with quotas for scheduled castes and tribes and for women, were created at the village and urban neighbourhood level and at the district level (sometimes with an intermediate level at the tehsil level). At the same time, a minimal but systematic form of participation was introduced with the establishment of consultative councils at the village and neighbourhood level, possibly given a deliberative role by the new local governments. Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal thus shows how participation ultimately became a norm integrated into the sometimes combined imperatives of decentralisation and neoliberal “good governance”. If the systems put in place are not very sustainable and not very effective, they are multiplying and their legitimacy has become standardized, giving rise to a “cumulative process by which each new system relies on those which preceded it, whether to distinguish itself from them or to draw inspiration from them” (p. 178).
Three types of participatory devices
The survey then makes it possible to identify from this diversity three forms of devices which combine different objectives and definitions of citizenship. The assembly (neighborhood committees, ward committeesstudied in Chapter 5, and neighborhood assemblies, mohalla sabhasstudied in chapter 8) brings together citizensto whom the elective and administrative authorities of a local constituency present their actions, request suggestions and report. The democratization effect is all the more fragile because it is based on a representation that is certainly new, but vague and not very binding on citizens.born as a voterrices coming to “control” the action of their governorsthe premisesTHE.
The workshop organizes small groups of participantsare invitedare by the authorities to collectively develop a solution to a local problem that they submit to them in order to arrive at a consensual resolution. The objective here is less democratization than good governance: citizensare designedare like residentsare useful because they know their neighborhood well and whose cooperation is necessary for public action. The rich empirical study of the Bhagidari program (chapter 6), launched in 2004 in New Delhi to involve residents’ associationses to the implementation of public action programs on the scale of a street or a neighborhood, certainly leads to largely confirming the criticisms: “One can wonder whether this is not in reality the political side of the “revolt of the elites” that economic reforms constitute” (p. 125). But it also allows them to be qualified on three points. On the one hand, the weight given to residents’ associationses, composed of middle and upper classes, has had the secondary effect of remobilizing these social groups in the electoral game. On the other hand, the multiplication and institutionalization of associations and participatory workshops have led to collective actions that go beyond them and sometimes reinscribe them in the social movement – with for example successful mobilizations on the subject of electricity distribution (2002), the regulation of cable operators (2003) or the property tax (2004) followed by participation in the movement for the right to water launched in 2005. An even less visible element in the public debate, if the extension in 2008 of the program to “unauthorized subdivisions” remained only an electoral promise, it nevertheless gave rise to the multiplication of residents’ associations.are less elitist, appropriate as complementary channels to the electoral route by participantsThey are also often active in political parties or movements defending the rights of the poor and minorities.
The third form of participation that has been brought to light is specific to India. The people’s court – essentially embodied by the public hearing, or jan sunwai, but whose success has given rise to multiple variations – borrows from judicial theatricality to invite citizensto testify in public about the negligence of local administrations placed in the position of accused, in front of a jury composed of expertsis chosenis by the leadersits of a citizen, militant or even electoral mobilization (chapter 7). The citizenHere, we are beneficiaries of a failing welfare state, victims expressing their experience who neither initiated the system nor were asked to act as carriers.its possible solutions – conflictingly defined by expertses facing local authorities. Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal nevertheless insists on the democratic potential of this form of participation in a context of great distance between the bureaucracy and marginalized populations and very weak application of legislative texts – it is common to note for example that the Indian constitutional and legal corpus is one of the most democratic in the world, when Indian society is one of the most unequal and oppressive. The public hearing in fact produces an awareness of both the governedare on their rights and the governingare on their responsibilities – provided that the use does not become routine in a neutralizing theatricalization of conflicts, but rather is part of mobilizations which give it meaning and strength.
Anchoring participation to unleash its democratic potential
In conclusion, Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal underlines the “great political ambiguity” of Indian uses of participation, which reveal “a problematic relationship with democracy” (p. 179). This is because most supporters of participation, including “bottom-up” participation, are indifferentes, even hostile for somees, to the ideals of inclusion and pluralism as well as to the electoral institution. The strongest mobilizations for participation are also essentially part of the fight against corruption of political parties, with the effects of a delegitimization of the main access, year in and year out, of the poor to public resources and a paradoxical valorization of the role of civil servants against elected officials.This is in particular the lesson learned from the participatory experiments carried out by theAAPa new party which came to power in Delhi in 2013 and then 2015 and raised many hopes – incidentally, the chapter dedicated to it constitutes, to my knowledge, the first substantial study on this party.
It remains that participatory practices, “because they are multiple, innovative and susceptible to diverse appropriations, make possible a deepening, a democratization of democracy. In India as elsewhere, participatory democracy only strengthens democracy insofar as it opens it, through new procedures, to audiences, ideas and actions that are not (entirely) predetermined” (p. 183). In other words, the link between participation and democracy is no more obvious than that between electoral representation and democracy: it is the way in which procedures are seized in social conflict and appropriated by governing institutions, social movements, political organizations and even more so by citizens.which determines their effects.