SLOW DEBACLE OF AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES in Eastern Europe and former USSR is being considered as a victory of democratic aspirations of the masses. Therefore scholars have started asking the question why and how democracy triumphed in the world. John Dunn’s book* is an attempt to answer these questions. While trying to address themselves to these questions the contributors in this volume have given us a historical survey of democracy as it developed in the Westem World. The book does not take into account the success and basically the failure of democratic regimes in the developing countries except in India. More than half of the essays (seven out of twelve) deal with the history of democracy upto the French Revolution. If a reader is interested in understanding the career of liberal democracy after the French Revolution he has to depend on one essay which only briefly discusses the Tate twenticth century period.
The editor should have taken into consideration the fact that the problems to which he addresses himself, namely why and how democracy triumphed, cannot be fully discussed in the historical context. Today's democratic structures share very little with the city republics to which he allots four full length essays.
Four essays at the end deal with the contemporary period. The Soviet and East European variety is analysed in two essays while India's experiment in democracy is discussed in one longish essay. Though the author of this essay on India, Sunil Khilani, has failed to present a cohesive account of Indian democracy some of his observations necd further discussion in the light of the changing circumstances in which Indian democracy is trying to survive. One of his observations is about religion, where he says, “Cleaving to religious identities becomes in these circumstances not simply a case of external manipulation of the innocent by the entrepreneurial, but rather a self-conscious effort on the part of vulnerable human beings at creating and sustaining a sense of community...” !
Khilani rightly observes that this form of political representation has little tolerance for liberal models of democracy. Had he covered the recent period he would have definitely labelled Hindutva groups as neo-fascist, and therefore anti-democracy. In fact at a later point in his essay he points out that politics as process of identity formation is a dangerous business. He finds origins of the Hindu political identity in the nineteenth century Brahmanic Hindu renaissance. The question — Khilani does not ask is why aggressive Hindu nationalism was dormant before 1984. The answer to this question could be traced to the state of affairs in the main vehicle of the ruling classes i.e. the Congress Party. The ruling coalition, it seems, can no more rely only on the Congress Party which lacks cohesiveness, capacity to give an all India ideology and able leadership. Khilani, writing this essay if in early 1991, could not give serious thought to economic liberalisation Set, in since the new, a Government came to power. Probably therefore he also could not tackle in his essay the issue of internationalisation of Indian economy and resultant loss of autonomy by the Indian State in formulating its policies. This process of internationalisation is eroding. the democratic freedom of the disadvantaged sections of Indian Society. Nevertheless he makes a passing reference to the way the masses have lost powers of agency as well as choice over who exercises these powers of agency.
Another important essay in this group of four is about the feminist critique of contemporary democracy. Susan Mendus argues that under representation of women in political life is a recognised empirical fact but what is not understood properly is the deep gender bias in democratic theory itself. Democratic theory considers differences (between men and women) as an obstacle to the attainment of equality and therefore a democralic state. Feminists insist that equality must be attained without the elimination of differences. They also argue that difference itself is a valueladen concept because it takes male experience as the norm and considers female expericnce as a disadvantage. What the feminists want is not special treatment for women but rather an end to the existing system of special treatment for men. Indian feminists, while making their case, should take note of the two contributions feminist theory is making to democratic theory. 1) Since some differences cannot be eliminated equality and democracy will have to be aimed at through differences. 2) The concept of difference and the connected concept of disadvantage are themselves male centered.
John Dunn in his concluding essay identifies two components of democracy which made it a viable polity — appeal of the democratic idea coupled with practical viability of compound of. economic, social and political arrangements. Democracy has survived all these years, Dunn argues, because, it has delivered three goods
(1) it provided a moderate government
(2) it gave a modest measure of governments’ responsibility to the governed.
(3) democracy is a safe bet for a modern Capitalist economy. At the end Dunn considers the question of failure of democracy in certain settings and makes the following remarks: economic failure and constitutional disruption often reinforce one another ... with representative democracy as with capitalist development, nothing succeeds quite like success and nothing fails as comprehensively as failure.
It 1S interesting to note that this observation holds good in case of authoritarian regimes of the USSR and Eastern Europe also. In these societies communistauthoritarianism and planned economy crumbled down simultaneously. Dunn does not tell us the exact difference between the two.
Interestingly, Dunn in his concluding essay, only cursorily treats the feminist critique. In fact he could have touched the theoratical issues raised by Susan Mendus, since he is known for his insights in democratic theory. Another problem which he has noteffectively discussed in his essay is that of socialist democracy which has remained one of his pet ideas.
* Democracy: The Unfinished Journey (508 B. C to A D. 1993 Oxford, 1992. Price: Rs. 350/-, pp. 290
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