Entangled Democracy and Our Role within it
Posted on November 22, 2016“Joined together, the great mass of human minds around the earth seems to behave like a coherent, living system.” – Lewis Thomas1
The earth, in creating conditions favourable to life, exhibits qualities of self-organisation and self-regulation that are like a living organism. If this theory is to be applied to communities, cultures, nations, even the human race at large, one of the most evident examples of self-organisations is evident through its defensive mechanism when it detects a threat to its existing condition. Immunity of the human civilisation can then be expressed as movements, protests and demonstrations2.
One of the examples for a movement that exhibited this immunity and changed the course of freedom struggle from the British empire in India was the Satyagraha movement devised by Gandhi. In Satyagraha, ‘insistence on truth’, one demonstrates civil disobedience of the system by non-violent methods. It is an instrumented way of dismissal of a system by inclusion. The three steps to achieving this change were – (a) objecting a policy, (b) by breaking the law and (c) by facing the consequences of breaking the law.3 This sacrificial act by the protestors was thought to be the motivator for the oppressors to reconsider their actions. But I believe that a much complex understanding of system behaviour was at play.
Thinking about it in terms of systems as Donella Meadow’s describes it, law here acts as the balancing loop for the discrepancies between the desired state and actual state.4 As the discrepancy widens, due to the operation of (b), the balancing loop destabilized the policy. Hence putting pressure on the policy-makers, in this case the British Empire, to weaken their policy assertion or revise them. A similar trajectory can be noted for (c) When the number of people defying the law increases, the consequential punishment regains more dominance as a balancing/reinforcing loop. This recurs until the number of prisoners overwhelms the infrastructural and constitutional capabilities. Hence resulting in the overhaul of the system. From my understanding the Satyagraha movement was successful by its patriotic fervour towards inequality and colonialism complimented by a calculated disintegration of an existing system.
Movements and protests in today’s India are a more relevant testimony to its immunity in the current political scenario. As described in Inventing the Future, one rhetoric of these movements could be that they take form rapidly, gathering substantial numbers but simmer away with no concrete change established.5 One could call them unplanned and lacking a systematic understanding complex enough to contest that which they oppose. I would like to narrate a series of events that unfolded as a movement over the past two years in India in retaliation to the slow but substantial threats to free speech and critical thinking. In my understanding, they seemed to take place as an emergent behaviour amongst communities with no authoritative power to set an agenda or decide on a plan of action for the movement.
The information below is provided for context of the political scenario in India and has been gathered by media resources as an account of the events but continues to be contested for its factual accuracy by various groups.
In the wake of ‘antinational’ and sedition-astic claims on those that have contested or dissented with the ideologies of the right-wing political body in power, including intellectuals, creatives, authors, laureates, even popular celebrities and universities at large, a determined resistance emerged. These claims strengthened as did the resistance. Little attention or address was received from the governing power to the instances of violence such as the lynching of individuals for allegedly consuming beef (the cow is considered as the sacred animal in Hinduism) that led to communal violence in a village in north India to the three cold blooded murders of rationalists that were influential through their progressive writings on caste abolition, anti-superstition, critics on idolatry in Hinduism and the conservative practices of religion at large. After inspections, more than one of these acts of violence have been indirectly connected to conservative organisations protected by the current government and massive evidence of cover-ups has been found. 6 The attack on intellectual activity continued as the focus shifted to the progressive academic Institutes. From the discrimination of minority students, the appointment of government officials with little credibility in the field as chairman of a film school known for its critical rigour, to the imprisonment of student leaders for leading a peaceful demonstration in disagreement with the government’s alleged unfair trial and manner of execution of a prosecuted terrorist.
These instances of violence and the responses to them (or lack of) from the government have threatened intellectual and critical undertaking, progressive thinking and activism, triggering protests and movements that have built momentum from each other. Arundathi Roy articulated the nature of these movements – “In protest (…) one by one, several well-known writers and film-makers began to return various national awards they had received. By the end of 2015, dozens of them had done so (…) an unplanned, spontaneous, and yet deeply political gesture, by artists and intellectuals who did not belong to any particular group or subscribe to any particular ideology, or even agree with each other about most things. It was powerful and unprecedented, and probably has no historical parallel. It was politics plucked out of thin air.” 7
If looked at in a chronological order, it seemed that the various movements that took place in university campuses, within artistic circles and in the public sphere, gathered numbers and forces at a much higher rate than the ones that preceded it. Although triggered by incidents, they seem to take shape and organise themselves often without an assigned leader or a hierarchical structure. They emerged in the form of bottom up organisations that would then be facilitated by, in the case of the Universities, student leaders.
A critic of the organisation and nature of these movements, in Srnieck’s and William’s words can be as that of rejection of domination, practicing direct democracy and aiming for direct action.8 With reference to Judith Butler’s text, they can be said to have achieved their goal, if it was asserting their right to free speech – “the right comes into being when it is exercised, and exercised by those who act in concert, in alliance.”9 But the struggle is not over.
The protests, and the tightening grip of the political power, form a vicious cycle and further polarise the public spheres into the national and the anti-national. I have found it difficult, within my circle of family and friends to bring about conversation regarding these issues without creating a rift between that which is ‘us’ and the ‘other’. These movements may not have sustained or achieved lasting impacts or gone beyond polarising those within their own circle, because they were built on immediate reaction rather than a systemic understating that proposed an alternative like Gandhi’s Satyagraha. But with due credit to the different nature of these movements, perhaps the former could achieve its results because it contested a colonial form of governance, as opposed to the complex structure of the current political scenario that exists today – entangled democracy and its wicked problems.
It is here that I believe designers can play a part in creating a median space or artefact that enables conversation rather than polarise. An example to illustrate the designer’s role in creating these spaces or artefacts is that of the cotton spinning wheel for it symbolised the rejection of machine-made goods imported from Britain and facilitated empowerment of the public to spin their own cloth. The artefact was introduced not only to represent this radical action but also to enable people to work from one’s home and at impeding the flow of Indian money to the British industries. Gandhi’s ambition with the wheel was to ultimately create a new economic and social order that could be built on self-sufficient non-exploitative village communities.10
Image source : http://www.wheelsonourfeet.com/2013/07/08/must-see-in-ahmedabad-sabarmati-ashram/
The wheel went on to establish a long running industry – ‘Khadi’ that is thriving even today. On a more relevant note, the wheel as an artefact triggered conversation about the country’s economic and social aspirations post-independence, while prompting constructive action.
While movements and protests continue to exercise our immediate rights such as free speech, we as designers must also simultaneously work towards the creation of spaces, instances, interactions and artefacts that trigger conversation and mutual empathy to begin bridging the gaps. When we as designers can perceive the social, economic, and political connotations of the products and services we design, we maybe enabled to organise our work to prompt conversations in these aspects, envision a preferred future and work together towards it. At times like these, we must ask how might we prompt constructive dialogues, with the tools we have? How might we design behaviours and interactions as convergent points of these dialogues and envision a positive future? How might we create artefacts that can gesture towards these futures?
– Tanvi Dhond
- Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (New York: Viking Press, 1974), pp. 113-14
- Paul Hawkens, Blessed Unrest: How the largest movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the World (New York: Viking Press), pp. 141
- Abdul Sattar, The Relevance of Gandhian Satyagraha in the 21st Century, Comprehensive Website by Gandhian Institutions – Bombay Sarvodaya Mandal & Gandhi Research Foundation, January – June 2006, Accessed on 17/10/2016 http://www.mkgandhi.org/articles/relevance2.htm
- Donella H Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Vermont, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008), pp. 27-29
- Nick Srnieck and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future : Postcapitalism and a world without work (London, Verso), pp. 5
- Anosh Malekar, Darkness At Dawn, The murders of Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and MM Kalburgi – The Caravan, A journal of politics and culture, 1st August 2016, accessed on 19th November 2016
http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/darkness-dawn-dabholkar-pansare-kalburgi
- Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart, An unfinished diary of nowadays – The Caravan, A journal of politics and culture. 1st May 2016, accessed on 19th November 2016
http://www.caravanmagazine.in/essay/seditious-heart-arundhati-roy/2
- Nick Srnieck and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future : Postcapitalism and a world without work (London, Verso), pp. 27
- Judith Butler, Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street, September 2011, accessed on 16th November 2016 http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en
- Satish K. Kapoor, Spinning wheel in freedom struggle, The Tribune, Sunday Reading,
August 15th 1999, accessed on 21st November 2016