A rational and sensible politics demands that representation of every segment of society is ensured. The process through which this representation is guaranteed, however, is not limited to asking the public their opinion once every five years. Genuine representation lies in the recognition of separate identities within a whole and in the acceptance that the subjugation of these identities is not similar, rather almost as different as these identities themselves.
The standard operating procedure of our democracy has been the constant negation of the idea that representation goes beyond a vote every five years. The conversation around the elections, therefore, is constructed in a way that some of the gravest issues of the people are deliberately silenced. Various media houses have initiated campaigns that urge people to act upon their “national duty”: to vote. The sanctity of voting has been stressed as almost a religious ritual, as something that can change the reality we live in if we do it correctly. As if the correct use of vote can take away the severity of everyday problems. This might be true, but behind this elevation of the act of voting as a moral responsibility is a dangerous assumption: if the wrong people end up in power after elections, it would be our own doing and the responsibility would lie solely on the average voter.
Why don't these campaigns, built upon self-assumed responsibility of spreading awareness regarding the moral responsibility of voting, ask what issues people would be interested in voting on? Perhaps then they would realise that high politics is far removed from ground realities
I say this because this assumption deliberately denies the gap between the power politics of electables and the daily life of an average working class voter. We live in a country with great economic inequality, which has worsened overtime. Yet, the rich blame the poor for voting the wrong elites to power. How absurd and how offensive! Nobody in these campaigns talks about the fact that political parties and their high politics have failed to provide representation to the workers who do not get minimum wage, to the people who are being displaced by the state and by private entities, to the women who face harassment on workplaces and campuses and much worse, to the people who lost their lives as a direct result of state policies, to the communities who do not have water to drink in their homes and to the youth who cannot become conscious, responsible citizens because the state does not care to invest in their wellbeing.
Democracy is not an event. Its success or failure is not determined exclusively by the number of people turning up at the polling stations on election day. Its soul lies in how the state opens to its people for constant engagement, beyond electoral duties. What we must strive for, if we wish to form a strong democracy, is to democratise all avenues people are related to, be it our universities or workplaces.
Many workers do not get minimum wage and no political party has seriously attempted to address this issue
Why don’t these campaigns, built upon self-assumed responsibility of spreading awareness regarding the moral responsibility of voting, ask what issues people would be interested in voting on? Perhaps then they would realise that high politics is far removed from ground realities, where people have completely different questions: they want to know if they will be paid the minimum wage promised to them, or if there they will ever have jobs to make ends meet, or education opportunities or health facilities.
I would go a step further and ask that in this election season, when the entire conversation of the last few months has centred on political engineering to get a certain outcome, how does a conscious citizen exercise their choice? Do they even have a choice?
It makes sense, then, that in the absence of genuine democratic spaces such campaigns become necessary to convince people to come out and vote. You would need a high-profile advertisement strategy and the use of excessive rhetoric to convince people that they can make the world how they want it to be. And even then, the most destitute and marginalised sections of our society would either be disinterested in our hollow democracy, or would be an open ground for extremist and far right organisations to exploit. What we must finally realize is that you don’t ask people for come out for democracy, you take democracy to them at their campuses and their workplaces.
My argument is not a case against democracy or voting. On the contrary, it is centred around the idea that we don’t have enough democracy. The democracy we need isn’t where feudal lords and factory owners run for elections and their sympathisers in media ask people to carry out the national duty of voting for them. What we need is a system where the masses are empowered enough to ask the Sharifs, the Tareens, the Chaudharys, the Zardaris, or even the Askaris how much democracy is present in the factories that they own.
