Please treat his post as an extension of the previous post. In the previous post I was basically arguing towards the end of the post that democracy was never ever intended to be the empowerment of all. If one were to take (and one has to take since we do not have any option) John Locke as the progenitor of the modern concept of democracy we can clearly see that the limited government concept also meant involvement of a limited number of people in the democratic process. Representative democracy anyway is all about limited involvement of a limited number of people. In a simple majority system of representative democracy, a model that is followed by most number of countries in the world, those who do not vote for a particular candidate are perforce represented by that very candidate, even though they had rejected him as their representative. The implication of this is that the people who have not voted for a victorious candidate are actually going unrepresented.
Jean Jacques Rousseau the French philosopher was someone who believed in the true equality of all. And he did not see democracy as a definite means of attainment of this equality. This much is evident from his writings where he offers two possible models for reaching a society that is based in equity and equality. The first of this is "direct democracy" as opposed to representative democracy. For Rousseau democracy is truly a democracy only if it is reflective of the General Will, a concept with which many commentators of Rousseau grappled with for years. The General Will should be understood as the "good" will which works for the good of "all" (not even one person can be left out of this all) and to borrow a phrase from Immanuel Kant is a categorical imperative. For Rousseau it was clear that the General Will was in no way co-terminus with majority will, a concept which is central to our democracy today. Suspicious that democracy could always take a majoritarian turn, Rousseau proposed the other alternative, his second, which is even more radical than direct democracy. This one is based in the "Universal Legislator" a person who is capable of understanding the good of all and therefore creates laws and a system of administration that would be beneficial to "all". Rousseau believed for either of the two models to work one of the necessary preconditions was a republic consisting of very small populations in the range of five thousand people.
Take a look at today's democracies and the States that they operate in. India itself is a prime example of a billion people all participating and sometimes not participating in the democratic process. Non-participation is of two types, voluntary and forced. The first is self-explanatory but the second needs a little explanation. In many parts of the country, people are not allowed to vote either by someone else voting for them by the time they reach polling station or preventing people from reaching the polling station. Now see this in conjunction with the main driving force of modern democracy. The main driving force of modern democracy is the great capitalist interest. It is no wonder therefore that Noam Chomsky says that the agenda of democracies is never the welfare of the people, it is the welfare of corporations that are large. But since that cannot be the ground on which democracy can be made to look legitimate, it is given the veneer of working for the people. For Chomsky, the consent of the people behind democratic regimes is a manufactured consent. By calling this consent manufactured Chomsky is exploding the myth that democracies survive on the basis of the consent that people give.
And that brings us to the question of mythologies. The title here says that mythology is used to legitimate plutocracies and project them as democracies. What we have seen of Chomsky definitely supports this. The question however is "how do myths get constructed"? Here we can take the help of two Frenchmen, an anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss and a specialist in understanding the construction of mythologies, Roland Barthes. Claude Levi Strauss uses the example of how descent from one person is usually used in order to perpetuate a kinship. Let us understand this in the context of India. Let us take into question the kinship of the Nehru-Gandhi family. When Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi or now Rahul Gandhi are taken into consideration their descent is traced back to either Jawaharlal Nehru or sometimes even Motilal Nehru. But when Indira Gandhi is talked of, there is no mention of her mother, Kamala Nehru. Similarly when Rajiv Gandhi is talked of, there is no mention of his father, Feroze Shah. In fact, no one remembers the tale that Mahatma Gandhi lent his surname to Feroze Shah and made him Feroze Shah Gandhi when Jawaharlal Nehru objected to his daughter Indira's marriage to Feroze Shah. Today, there is no Rajiv Gandhi but his wife Sonia Gandhi is alive but both her and her son Rahul Gandhi's lineage is drawn back to Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi. Now see the myth, none of the people who carry the surname Gandhi today are actually Gandhis. The descendants of the Mahatma are not rightful "owners" of the Congress Party. It is these other Gandhis. This is myth construction as per Claude Levi Strauss, a process that is akin to the sleight of the hand, a process of make believe.
Now for another example and this time to show the notion of "connotation" which becomes myth construction according to Roland Barthes. We shall use an example that was used by Barthes himself but we will also remember that this example would serve a great purpose in understanding Indian politics. Barthes talks about a bottle of wine and says that its primary significance is that it is an alcoholic brew that when consumed in large quantities could intoxicate the consumer and also damage the person's health. However, upper classes in society have imbued the bottle of wine with secondary significations. A bottle of wine is considered to be the drink of wealthy, those with taste for the 'finer things of life', an elixir that relaxes the mind, body and soul and also stimulates appetite. Over a period of time according to Barthes, the secondary signification or the connotation takes over from the first and slowly obliterates it so much so that only the finer things of life, relaxation and possession of wealth are signified by a bottle of wine. In Indian politics, the brew that we should talk about is not wine. At its worst its some form of hooch and at its best it is cheap Indian Made Foreign Liquor spiked with diazepam or alprazolam to give the consumer a high. This in conjunction with a local delicacy is enough to buy votes during elections.
During the electoral process, manifestos are released but nobody knows what is in them, speeches are made but nobody listens and developmental agendas are set and nobody gives a damn. Elections in India are not seen as opportunity to empower oneself, or to change regimes for the better. They are seen by the lumpen, whose services are bought as opportunities for the consumption of drug spiked alcoholic brews and good food while the election campaigning is on. Most elections are won or lost on this basis. Yet the victorious party claims that its developmental agendas have the support of the people. And if a party comes back to power a second time it is taken as a mandate for the policies that were pursued by the government in the last five years. However, the money (the most important component of a plutocracy) comes from vested interests such as corporations, business families and the politicians themselves. It is this money that literally buys votes and the victors then claim that their politics are vindicated. The agendas based either in ideology, development or identities is the mythology that legitimates the process of buying and selling votes. This buying and selling of votes is the basis for the perpetuation of plutocracies, but the mythology generated by publicly placed agendas is what makes the plutocracies appear as democracies.
Off late in the State of Andhra Pradesh in India, there is the separate Telangana movement. It started as a movement that premised itself in politics of development and has now wound up as a movement that is premised in identity. Whenever the Andhra-Telangana issue is raised there is talk of the Gentleman's Agreement and how the Andhra side has reneged on it. The Gentleman's agreement is not something that anyone knows with any clarity. Yet it is invoked again and again by both sides who are completely ignorant of its context and content and thereby both sides argue on the basis of a mythology that they seek to perpetuate. Terms such as backwardness, exploitation and self-respect are all firmly aimed at furthering these mythologies. The reality is that what is happening in Andhra Pradesh can be brought down to the feuding among a few families that seek to control the State.
Till the establishment of the Telugu Desam Party, Andhra Pradesh was the fiefdom of Mrs. Gandhi. NT Rama Rao challenged that fiefdom with his own by setting up the Telugu Desam. The mantle was subsequently taken over, rather forcefully, by Chandra Babu Naidu and today NT Rama Rao's progeny are the ones who are trying to control the Telugu Desam Party and with it the politics of Andhra Pradesh. Queering this pitch is the K Chandrashekhar Rao's family, the saviours of Telangana. Some of the Telangana upper castes will support Chandrashekhar Rao's Telangana Rashtra Samithi so that they can either continue their domination of the region or snatch it back from the coastal Andhra "settlers" who have taken it away from them during the Telugu Desam rule. YS Rajashekhar Reddy changed the face of the Congress in Andhra Pradesh by considerably lessening the influence of the Gandhi - Nehru family. When he died his son Jagan Mohan Reddy decided that he should be the heir to the YSR legacy. So he falls out with the Congress Party that does not recognise any family other than the Gandhi-Nehru family. In the meanwhile, somewhere Chiranjeevi and his family thought they can control of the State. That they failed is now well known and the man has saved his face by plumbing for the Gandhi-Nehru family.
These family feuds will use any language that is necessary to perpetuate their own rule in the State. The case of Andhra Pradesh is being discussed here but this largely true of all states in India. Politicians and their think tanks are actively creating believable mythologies which seek to project their own plutocratic agendas as democratic agendas that have the down trodden at the heart of things. But nothing is farther from the truth, that much is now obvious.
P.S: Long post. Not proof read. Excuse errors please. Thank you.
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