Revisiting the crisis of representation thesis

This article addresses the ‘crisis of representation’ thesis by examining some of the findings of a survey conducted in Delhi in 2003. On the basis of the data collected during the course of the survey, it revisits two rather significant questions that have been thrown up by the thesis. First, how valid is the assumption that people have lost confidence in the capacity of political parties to represent them in forums of policymaking? Second, have people really come to believe that civil society groups, such as non-governmental organizations, can better help them resolve the oft intractable problems of everyday life? The answers to these questions could 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 project 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 organizations, whether they belong to the political or the civil domain, to address their basic problems. Keywords: representationbasic needspolitical partiescivil societyIndia Acknowledgments The author gratefully acknowledges the invaluable contribution of Peter Houtzager, John Harriss, and Adrian Lavalle to the conceptualization 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. Notes 1. Peter P. Houtzager, Ruth Berins Collier, John Harriss and Adrian Gurza Lavalle, Rights, Representation and the Poor: Comparison across Latin America and India, Working Paper No. 02031 (London: DESTIN, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2002). 2. The writer has dealt with this in some detail in Neera Chandhoke, State and Civil Society: Explorations in Political Theory (Delhi: Sage, 1995), see the introduction. 3. The survey that was conducted by research scholars affiliated to the Developing Countries Research Centre, University of Delhi, and directed by the writer, is part of a wider international comparative project on ‘Rights, Representation, and the Poor: Comparing Large Developing Democracies-India, Mexico, and Brazil’. The project is part of the programme of the Future State Research Centre at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, and is funded by the British government's Department for International Development. The project seeks to compare the impact of globalization and liberalization on the capacities of different poor social groups to obtain political representation and solve collective problems in five cities. The other project partners are John Harriss of the London School of Economics, Peter P. Houtzager of IDS Sussex, Adrian G Lavalle of CEBRAP and the Pontificia Universidade Catolica de São Paulo, Brazil, and K. Nagraj of India's Madras Institute of Development Studies. The five cities are Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Delhi, Coimbatore and Bangalore. 4. In addition, 229 civil society organizations were surveyed so as to map out patterns of associational life in the city. The total number of surveys carried out in the city was 1,630. 5. The MCD administers 94 per cent of the territory of Delhi. 6. Unauthorized colonies refer to the conditions of their origin: in the sale of land by private entrepreneurs without government permission. Some of these colonies have been regularized by the government in Delhi; others continue to be unregularized. Whereas planned colonies are provided with the highest degree of infrastructure and services, jhuggi jhopri's or squatter settlements and slums are provided with either poor or no infrastructure or services at all. 7. Jean Jacques Rousseau, ‘The Social Contract’, in David Blaug (ed.), Democracy: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000), p.147. 8. Andrew Levine, Liberal Democracy: A Critique of Its Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p.150. 9. The writer agrees with Iris Marion Young that the task of the representative is wider than just representing the interests of her constituents in forums of decision making. Young suggests that the political representative faces three kinds of tasks. First, the representative should look after the interests that we take as our own and which we share with others. Secondly, it is important that the principles, values, and priorities that help people define the ends that they have set for themselves should be represented. Thirdly, representatives who are in the business of discussing and voting on policies should represent the perspectives of their constituents. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Chapter 4. This article focuses on the representation of interests only. 10. Scholars wonder whether the representative has a moral obligation to represent the interests of those who have not voted for her. It is however generally assumed that the representative treats, or at least should treat everyone in the constituency as of equal importance, even those who had opposed her candidature. This is the moral imperative of representation. 11. This is not to say that deep disagreements about how the representative should behave did not dodge the notion of representation. Disagreement over whether the representative should act as if she had the mandate to pursue policies favoured by the constituents, or whether she should be a trustee of the public interest and follow her own reason, as Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century argued (see Footnotenote 40), continue to bedevil the concept of representation. Hannah Pitkin was to ask ‘can both views be right? When they seem to support opposite and incompatible conclusions about the duty of a representative?’ Hannah. F. Pitkin ‘Commentary, the Paradox of Representation’, in J.R Pennock and J.W. Chapman (eds), Representation (New York: Atherton Press, 1968), p.41 12. The late historian Ravinder Kumar was to argue that it ‘would be no exaggeration to assert that in its demographic scale, the liberation movement in India was probably unsurpassed by any comparable movement in world history’. See Ravinder Kumar, The Emergence of Modern India: Retrospect and Prospect (New Delhi: Shimla Indian Institute of Advanced Study and Manohar Publications, 1990), p.29. 13. Cited in S. Gopal (ed.), Jawaharlal Nehru: An Anthology (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp.76–7. 14. The concept of basic needs was interpreted to the respondents as meaning food, shelter and clothing. 15. J. Feinberg, ‘Harm to Others’, in his The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Vol.1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), ch.1. 16. The classic statement on this has of course been made by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). 17. For Streeten basic needs can be conceptualized, ‘in terms of minimum specified quantities of things as food, clothing, shelter, water, and sanitation that are necessary to prevent ill health, undernourishment and the like’; Paul Streeten, First Things First, Meeting Basic Human Needs in Developing Countries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p.25. 18. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), p.499. 19. Ross Fitzgerald, ‘The Ambiguity and Rhetoric of “Need”’, in Ross Fitzgerald (ed.), Human Needs and Politics (Oxford: Pergammon Press, 1977), p.211. 20. For an excellent discussion on this see Partha Dasgupta, An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 21. Jayaprakash Narayan, ‘Total Revolution: When and How?’, in Bimal Prashad (ed.), A Revolutionary's Quest: Selected Writings of Jayaprakash Narayan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1975). 22. Rajni Kothari, Politics in India (New Delhi: Orient Longmans, 1970). 23. Myron Weiner, Party Building In A New Nation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967) pp.472–3. 24. Myron Weiner, Party Building In A New Nation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp.472–4. 25. Richard Sisson and Ramashray Roy, ‘Introduction: The Congress and the Indian Party System’, in Richard Sisson and Ramashray Roy (ed.), Changing Basis of Congress Support, Vol.1 (Delhi: Sage, 1990), p.21. 26. Pranab Bardhan, The Political Economy of Development in India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p.79. 27. Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.5. 28. As Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph put it, the new generation judged the party less in the light of its historic role and more on the basis of its retrospective and prospective political performance. It is not surprising that the political capital that the Congress party had reaped ‘badly dwindled’. See their ‘Organisational Adaptation of the Congress Under Rajiv Gandhi's Leadership’, in Sisson and Roy (Footnotenote 25) p.88. 29. India was not alone in this. The inhabitants of western societies were to make roughly the same complaint: that of the unresponsiveness of the state, the indifference of the bureaucracy, and the decay of the party system. In the US theorists have long complained that elections and political parties seemed to have become the pawns of the political elite. In the 1960s the ‘new left’, the ‘sit ins’, the ‘direct action’ movements had already raised into question the efficacy of the system of representation. Discontent with the party system continued to mount, with Walter Dean Burnham arguing that in the US political parties had, since 1900, declined as system of action. They won elections, and managed tensions between factions within the party, but they had not acted as forces for collective purposes and action. Indeed elections for Burnham had become ‘candidate image affairs for which only the wealthy or those close to the wealthy need apply’. Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: Norton, 1970), pp.176–9. 30. See D.L. Sheth, ‘Grass-Roots Stirrings and the Future of Politics’, Alternatives, Vol.9, No.1 (1983), pp.1–24; Harsh Sethi, ‘Groups in a New Politics of Transformation’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.19, No.7 (1984), pp.305–16. 31. Rajni Kothari, ‘Masses, Classes and the State’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.21, No.5, (1 February 1986), p.214, also Rajni Kothari, ‘Decline of Parties and Rise of Grass Roots Movements’, in idem., State against Democracy, In Search of Humane Governance (Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1988), pp.33–54. 32..Gail Omvedt, Reinventing Revolution (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), p.xii. 33. D.L. Sheth, ‘Globalisation and New Politics of Micro-Movements’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.39, No.1 (2004), p.45. 34. D.L. Sheth, ‘Globalisation and New Politics of Micro-Movements’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.39, No.1 (2004), p.46 35. Some grass-roots movements distinguish themselves from service or humanitarian NGOs because they see the latter as a political. 36. PRIA (Participatory Research in Asia) and John Hopkins University, Invisible yet Widespread: The Non-Profit Sector in India (Delhi: PRIA, 2003), pp.5, 11. 37. Tenth Five Year Plan 2002–2007, Vol. 1, Governance and Implementation (Delhi: Government of India, Planning Commission, 2003), p.181. 38. The writer has dealt with this in her ‘Governance and Pluralisation of State: Implications for Democratic Citizenship’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.38, No.28 (12–18 July 2003), pp.2957–68. 39. Hannah F. Pitkin, ‘Commentary, the Paradox of Representation’, in J.R. Pennock and J.W. Chapman (eds), Representation (New York: Atherton Press, 1968). 40. Edmund Burke, ‘Speech at the Conclusion of the Poll, 3rd November 1774’, in David Blaug (ed.), Democracy: A Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp.150, 152. 41. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), p.87

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