Why cultivating virtues is important for upholding democratic values
By Mohammad Saalim Farooq
POLITICS is specified through its explicit relationship with the public. Political decision-making manifests through public institutions. When feminists claim even “personal is political”, the claim is substantiated in making power relationships and domestic hierarchies open to public scrutiny. Any democracy remains inadequate in its structural framework if public institutions are partially constituted.
Institutions get structured by empowering democratically mandated agreements in the form of orders, MoUs, statuaries or regimes. Every institution is upheld by rules and regulations, entrusted in the governance of an institutional head. A limitation in structuring a democracy through institutions is that we cannot create more institutions to check the functioning of other institutions. In other words, we cannot create another police force to check the police. This fundamental limitation is avoided by entrusting the responsibility of an institution with a head, where even the head has to work within the limits of law under which the institution is essentially constituted. To argue whether law is subject to interpretation of the head or whether head is subject to the interpretation of law would be to argue in circles. But it is here, within this circle, abuse emanates. This can be understood through an illustrious example. Imagine person A needs access to a public educational institution, let’s say a college. While fulfilling the purpose for which access was required. A witnesses her former male students talking to each other in the college lawn. In the exuberance of seeing each other, students rush to their former teacher, greet her and describe their experience. While talking, the institutional head (henceforth principal sahib) rushes in to get hold of the ‘stranger’ talking to college students. The conversation follows:
Principal Sahib: (yelling) Hey, Miss… Hello! Who are you? And why are you talking to my students?
Person A: Excuse me sir! Why are you yelling at me?
Principal Sahib: Hey! You cannot come here like this, and talk to our students. This is my college and I’ve a responsibility to save the honour of my students.
Person A: Sir, I’m amusingly delighted to know that, but you are being very rude to me. Whatever it is, you cannot talk to me like this.
Principal Sahib: (angrily) don’t talk! Who are you to these boys?
Person A: I’ve been their teacher and I was excited to see them study in this college.
Principal Sahib: Don’t you see we have people in uniform here, how can you talk to them here, this is my college not any public park.
Person A: Absolutely sir! This is a public institution with public access and not a private property. Public citizenry can have access to public institutions, and I also have the same rightfully.
Principal Sahib: We have rules here. No strangers are allowed. How can you come in?
Person A: Sir, first of all denying people entry to public institutions is bizarre, now even if it is a rule then I need to be duly informed about it right at the entry point. But when your gatekeepers allowed me access, I stepped in with a good conscience.
Principal Sahib: You don’t tell me this nonsense! It is common-sense to understand that no stranger should get in. Would you like it if a stranger steps-in your house?
Person A: Sir, I fail to understand this. How can you equate a public institution to my house? A specific and fundamental difference stands in between the two; a public institution has public access, whereas my house is my private property.
Principal Sahib: (exhumed with anger in his failure to respond logically) this is my college… I’ve all the responsibility here…you are a criminal…I know people like you…I will show you who I’m…
Person A: Excuse me sir! How can you call me a criminal? I’m sorry to inform you but you are subjecting me to public harassment.
Principal Sahib: (while rushing away in anger) Oh you shut up! (Gibberish)
Where does the illustration specify the political and moral err committed? Principal Sahib is agitated when his authority (vested in him for public service) is challenged by an ordinary citizen. His pathology seems to be disconcerting and off-putting. Politically Principal Sahib remains to be obnoxiously naive to differentiate between public and private spaces and morally he boasts himself as a custodian of a parochially understood decency. This is precisely what Dunning-Kruger effect is all about; Principal Sahib with all his limited political and moral knowledge greatly overestimates himself. Perhaps, he remains, unconsciously stuck in the vicious circle of law versus interpreter. One of my scholar friends rightly observes the phenomena as “personalization of public institutions”. His argument is that in a democratic space abuse gets reproduced when public institutions are considered as an extension of personal or private spaces.
As feminists would lament about confining women to their domestic drudgery and argue for their emancipation by putting in praxis a political struggle with a slogan of “personal is political”, it becomes increasingly necessary to recognize the other side of the coin. When a man positioned as head extends his privately conceived authority (performed as a patriarch) into publically contextualized institutions, he imagines himself as the giver, interpreter and adjudicator of law (or any public rule) in a similar manner he conceives of himself as the ‘head of a family’.
Conclusively, the phenomenon remains in a stark contradiction with democratic principles. When public gets camouflaged as private, what follows is abuse, misuse, harassment, parochialism, orthodoxy and an immunity to growth and change. All such attributes are abandoned in envisioning values of democracy. Democratic spaces breed heterogeneity; celebrate differences while holding dignity of individuals in a higher esteem. However, when public institutions are captured by officials, like Principal Sahib of our example, driven by paternalistic psychopathology coupled with incompetence, abuse of power becomes the order of the day. This is why training in developing virtues, as Aristotle had once emphasized, which are in consonance with democratic values of tolerance, freedom, respecting individual dignity remains important.
- The author is a Ph.D. candidate at University of Delhi
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