Deprecated (16384): The ArrayAccess methods will be removed in 4.0.0.Use getParam(), getData() and getQuery() instead. - /home/brlfuser/public_html/src/Controller/ArtileDetailController.php, line: 73
 You can disable deprecation warnings by setting `Error.errorLevel` to `E_ALL & ~E_USER_DEPRECATED` in your config/app.php. [CORE/src/Core/functions.php, line 311]
Deprecated (16384): The ArrayAccess methods will be removed in 4.0.0.Use getParam(), getData() and getQuery() instead. - /home/brlfuser/public_html/src/Controller/ArtileDetailController.php, line: 74
 You can disable deprecation warnings by setting `Error.errorLevel` to `E_ALL & ~E_USER_DEPRECATED` in your config/app.php. [CORE/src/Core/functions.php, line 311]
Warning (512): Unable to emit headers. Headers sent in file=/home/brlfuser/public_html/vendor/cakephp/cakephp/src/Error/Debugger.php line=853 [CORE/src/Http/ResponseEmitter.php, line 48]
Warning (2): Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/brlfuser/public_html/vendor/cakephp/cakephp/src/Error/Debugger.php:853) [CORE/src/Http/ResponseEmitter.php, line 148]
Warning (2): Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/brlfuser/public_html/vendor/cakephp/cakephp/src/Error/Debugger.php:853) [CORE/src/Http/ResponseEmitter.php, line 181]
Notice (8): Undefined variable: urlPrefix [APP/Template/Layout/printlayout.ctp, line 8]latest-news-updates/too-much-representation-too-little-democracy-by-narayan-lakshman-1614.html"/> LATEST NEWS UPDATES | “Too much representation, too little democracy” by Narayan Lakshman | Im4change.org
Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

“Too much representation, too little democracy” by Narayan Lakshman


Democracy and free market have fused into single predatory organism: Arundhati Roy 

MoUs with transnational firms resulted in tribals moving out of their lands: Arundhati Roy

The problem of market externality poses systemic risks: Chomsky

“What happens, now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximising profit,” asked author Arundhati Roy at a discussion with Noam Chomsky, professor of Linguistics and Philosophy, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the discussion, which focussed on the threats to democracy in the United States, India, and worldwide, Ms. Roy said asking such questions about “life after democracy” did not mean we should lapse into earlier discredited models of authoritarian or totalitarian forms of governance. “It is meant to say that in the system of representative democracy too much representation with too little democracy needs some structural adjustment.”

Environmental concerns

As an example of some of the inherent risks within democratic systems, Ms. Roy touched upon environmental concerns. She asked the audience: “Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly, our near-sightedness, our inability to live entirely in the present, like most animals do, combined with our inability to see very far into the future, makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet?”

Ms. Roy also touched upon the institutionalised nature of repressive tendencies in India. “Something about the cunning, Brahmanical, intricate, bureaucratic, file-bound, applied-through-proper-channels nature of governance and subjugation in India seems to have made a clerk out of me.” She said her only excuse was to say that it took “odd twos to uncover the maze of subterfuge and hypocrisy that cloaks the callousness and the cold calculated violence of the world's favourite new superpower.”

Ms. Roy described her recent visit to areas controlled by groups portrayed in the mainstream media as “violent Maoist rebels” that need to be “wiped out.” In exchange for giving such groups the right to vote, democracy “has snatched away their right to livelihoods, to forest produce and to traditional ways of life,” she said.

Ms. Roy pointed out that Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal had signed hundreds of Memoranda of Understanding worth billions of dollars with large transnational companies and this inevitably led to moving tribal people from their lands. “We refer to such areas not as the Maoist corridor but the MoU-ist corridor,” she quipped.

Financial crisis

Corroborating some of her comments with points regarding risks in global financial markets, Mr. Chomsky said even senior officers at the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund recently alluded the high likelihood of a crisis in the global financial system.

Arguing that the problem of market externality posed systemic risks, he said: “If Goldman Sachs sells complex financial instruments which it knows are no good, it will insure itself against loss by betting that they will fail, but it will not take into account systemic risk — the effect on the whole system — if its transactions go bad.”

Perverse incentives

In addition, perverse incentives resulted from the “enormous” power of the financial institutions over the state with the U.S. now changed from a manufacturing to financial economy. This power over the state led to “all kinds of guarantees that if something goes wrong they will have no problem. The most famous of them is the government insurance policy called ‘too big to fail' — if you are too big, the taxpayer will bail you out,” Mr. Chomsky said.

As senior financial regulators had admitted, “the combination of market inefficiencies and perverse incentives virtually guarantees a doomsday cycle,” he argued.