Reimagining Swaraj amidst the relentless politics of statism in the 21st century
Barun Mitra, Free Thinker
Last week a good friend invited me to join a series of weekly online socratic dialogues. The topic was 'the functional order of cities'.
He wrote, "In cities, order can be seen and felt as safety, vitality and social capital in a neighbourhood. This functional order is present in some cities and some neighbourhoods, and lacking in others. Through a conversation about cities, the seminars will explore the tension between the sources of this functional order, and planners' desire for regularity and regimentation, in pursuit of a purely aesthetic, visual order of the kind "one shopping area, one residential area".
"There are four readings, selected from Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and James Scott's, "Seeing Like A State."
While I could not join this time, I am attracted to Socratic method of dialogue, and in the role of dialogue and interactions in creating a shared culture, rooting civilisations in communities and cities. All of which begin through informal interactions and informal institutions crafted to meet the needs of moment. These practices are not rigid and therefore are more adaptable to change. As the situation evolves and changes, communities and societies try to renegotiate the necessary changes in practices in search of a better equilibrium.
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Successful civilisations grow in scale, which often lead to calls for more centralised and formal institutions, creating laws and requiring enforcement.
The challenge is to ensure a right balance between self-governing decentralised communities and centralised formal institutions. In the former, informality rules because of familiarity, and the practice of which continuously renews the political culture of self-government, Swaraj. And as Gandhi pointed out, Swaraj has two essential and complementary aspects.
- One, swaraj as rule over the self, cultivating the habits of individual self-restraint, self-discipline, self-control.
- Two, swaraj as in collective self-government at the community level.
Both are critical in nurturing the culture of shared values through daily practices and interactions, economic and social.
Without the recognition and respect for this space for practicing swaraj at the personal and community level, largely informally, centralised institutions invariably begin to acquire authoritarian and then totalitarian tendencies. Much of this takes place through law, whether that law is proclaimed in an authoritarian polity where only one or a few exercise power of coercive enforcement, or in a large democratic polity of anonymous majoritarianism.
Swaraj at the community level is invariably consensual, even if some may have particular reservations on certain things. Because the impacts are felt by all, and corrective action, if necessary, could be initiated quite soon.
The growth of today's mega cities are manifestations of domination of centralised institutions over the informal and localised one. This is dealing a death blow to swaraj in both its dimensions. And without the culture of swaraj, the socio-political institutions are reinforcing the "tyranny of lawfulness", whether by a 'great leader', or by a majoritarian democracy. No wonder, that populism today cuts across prevailing ideological pretences. Hardly a surprise that many libertarians at one end and many communists at the other, with many shades of ethno-religious nationalism in between, all share a common desire to exercise control over the legal institutions therefore over the coercive arms of state enforcement. An amazing convergence on the ideology of statism even by people who imagine themselves to be fighting against the state from either side of the political spectrum. In effect the ideological convergence is bending the unending straight line of the spectrum into a spiraling political circle pointing towards unitary statism.
In a way, Daron Acemoglu and his coauthors in their new book, The Narrow Corridor, stress the criticality of maintaining a balance between the formal and informal institutions of society. Raghuram Rajan too in his book, The Third Pillar, underscore the importance of social customs, associations and voluntary civic engagement.
Even Tocqueville in his classic, Democracy in America, nearly 200 years ago had appreciated the culture of voluntary civic engagement, yet had warned about the creeping centralisation of institutions.
Hannah Arendt, one of 20th century's most prominent political theorist, recognised that despite the many obvious achievements in the US, institutional and social, detected a fatal flaw in the political architecture that doesn't formally recognise and protect the socio-political spaces at the community level.
Yet, from time immemorial, informal institutions have shaped human societies, and helped it to repeatedly rebuild from the debris of institutional collapse of "advanced" civilisations. Although the cost of such collapses and rebuilding have kept on growing relentlessly, reflecting the extent to which centralised institutions of the state had sought to control society.
The contrast between a Dharavi and the imagination of development that is animating Dharavi's redevelopment, illustrate the context and contest of swaraj and centralisation. Dharavi, 'the largest slum in Asia' is itself a consequence of social efforts to live under constant threat of centralised urban and aesthetic laws. And the alternative on offer is a product of exactly same institutional structure that created a Dharavi in the first place.
Incidentally, over 150 years ago, cities and villages were on a continuum of practicing swaraj, local self-government, reflecting the socio-political-economic needs of the tine. And there was no "slums", just as there was no "informal" economy as political or policy categories.
In this context, I see Jane Jacobs idea of cities as horizontal associations and communities, rather than intentionally designed and vertically imposed from above. And James Scott records the extent to which communities, through long history, went to avoid being subsumed by a top-down state.
And yet, in the last two or three centuries of the "modern" era, there has been unimaginable changes in every spheres of life. It seems freedom has marched on in all its dimensions. Yet, the glaring paradox is that almost every aspect of human life is sought to be minutely calibrated and institutionally regulated in a way that would have been unimaginable even a century ago. Like the ideological convergence towards statism, "freedom" seems to be converging towards slavery.
Reimagining the politics of Swaraj seems much more relevant in the 21st century than when it was first conceived at the end of the 19th century to serve a nationalist search for its own statehood.
note: emphasis and image by the editor and not by the author
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