EVENTS 2011
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
'CHALLENGES TO DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH ASIA'
Concept Note
The Indian Institute of Advanced Study is organising a Seminar on ‘Challenges to Democracy in South Asia’. There are several reasons to choose the theme, some of them stem from a genuine desire to understand the working of democracies in the region, in terms of their histories and the historical residues that still interfere in their contemporary politics, the paradoxes that emerge as contested claims have to be negotiated, and conflicting goals harmonised, if possible, the consequences that are produced in the dialectical relationship between politics and economies as these democracies respond to the forces that have been unleashed by globalisation. This first set of motivations can be located along the axis of ‘what is democracy doing to South Asia’.
The second set of concerns is located on the other axis of ‘what is South Asia doing to democracy’. Stating it this way allows us to revisit the conceptual discourse on democracy, led primarily by the epistemic north, and thereby present it with the ‘inconvenient facts’ of our working democracies, ‘inconvenient facts’ that do not lend themselves to easy evaluation and, therefore, ones which this conceptual discourse cannot quite accommodate. This perhaps calls for a reworking of some of the concepts of the democracy discourse.
An example of this is the conceptual attributes of democracy. To people in South Asia its attributes would include justice, and development, and rights and equality. In the epistemic north this would be seen as a normative overloading of the concept since each of the attributes would be regarded as a standalone concept which needs to be treated separately. Another aspect, from the different direction of political economy, is the part played by the new elites who have emerged as a result of the overturning of the old order, because of democracy in South Asia, and who then capture institutions and disregard the normative constraints of the institution which are very much a part of their constitution but are seen, in the new era, as unacceptable constraints that are part of the old elite order. How does one then proceed?
To explore these questions of ‘challenges’ at different levels - conceptual, empirical, institutional, policy – the IIAS has planned this seminar to generate a body of empirical and analytical material from South Asia which will complicate the global discourse of democracy. Seminar papers are planned to give not just a reading of the problem but will also suggest some questions that we need to ask, challenging questions, and also present us with some ambivalences so that as scholars on democracy, we are invited to go beyond the standard explanations of democracy and its deficits that come from the epistemic north.
