By Piash Karim

IT WILL be a sad day when we will fail to remember that the singularly significant dynamic that laid the basis of our struggle for national independence was a massive unleashing of democratic energy. That energy was not unproblematic by any stretch of imagination. But in spite of its vulnerability to a narrow class leadership or its eventual inability to mobilise itself into a coherent discourse of freedom and justice, a desire for democratic self-empowerment was what made us fight a war. Democracy, in that instance, was not about esoteric theoretical formulations or obtuse pontification on constitutional technicalities. Nor was it something that needed to be painstakingly explained in government press notes or expert position papers. It was something way more desperate, something with a profoundly greater sense of urgency. Democracy, in that phenomenally radical moment of our collective historicity, was a will to live without oppression, fear, and humiliation. That desire, emerging from the depth of our everyday existence, defined itself in opposition to the brutal power of a colonial regime and its occupation forces. But it also contained an emancipatory expectation, a spectacular hope for a better future. What made 1971 so memorable was the way it synchronised resistance with optimism, mass spontaneity with magnificent display of human solidarity, unbearable tragedy with defiant assertion of human possibilities, explosive anger with eager anticipation.
   But that spirit, which seemed so inextinguishable at that point, didn’t lead to a more authentic life. As if to prove the validity of the trenchant observations made by Franz Fanon in his ‘Pitfalls of National Consciousness,’ our post-independence experience has been dotted with broken promises, dashed hopes, and defeated disenchantments. After thirty-six years, we have reached a place that doesn’t resemble the terrain of dreams that 1971 offered. Our peripheral political economy, our subjugation to the dictates of global corporate capitalism, our state apparatuses that are more interested in governing us than giving us a stake at governance, the inability and unwillingness of subsequent governments to address the fundamental issues of livelihood and liberty, all these testify to the magnitude of our crisis.
   The crisis of conventional politics was never so painfully acute in the recent memory of the nation. Mainstream politics has reached an impasse that it doesn’t know how to overcome. The old cults and symbols are in disarray, yet there does not seem to be any visible ray of a new world at the end of the tunnel. If there is anything more frustrating than the failure of the status quo, it is the inadequate mobilisation of alternative forces that can reclaim a viable space of democracy.
   That democratic alternative, if history is any guide, never comes from privileged cliques of oligarchic do-gooders. It will not emerge from a domesticated civil society that is incapable of imagining a qualitatively distinct world of freedom, equality, and siblinghood. It will definitely not come from different stripes of ‘reformists’ who are too quickly too willing to shed their old skins and change their familiar colours with the arrival of new fears, or new opportunities for that matter.
   If we are serious about democratisation of our national life, it is possible only through the radical construction of a democratic citizenry. A self-reflexive democratic polity that is able to carry out popular conversations and practices to multiple layers of society seems to be the only feasible way out of the crisis that we have found ourselves in. A truly democratic citizenry, an ‘alternative civil society’ in a Gramscian sense, is our final territory of hope, our last chance for a meaningful collective life.
   A genuine democracy is not possible without articulating the dreams and anxieties of the subaltern populace. Not only that, it is not possible without placing the workers, peasants, lower middle class, women (the subaltern of the subaltern), religious, ethnic, and national minorities, people who are traditionally marginalised in the mainstream political structure, at the centre of a new political configuration. A meaningful representative democracy is not where the passive populace is represented by their hegemonic leaders, but where people can represent themselves.
   Such an authentic democratic citizenry, for instance, is politically responsible to oppose the eviction of slum dwellers or hawkers. A viable democratic citizenry needs to be the conscience of the nation by opposing the deprivation of jute workers of their sustenance through mindless factory closures. A liberated democratic citizenry needs to demand the materialization of the agreement, accomplished by the blood of the peasants of Phulbari, to stop Asia Energy from going ahead with open pit mining, a destructive venture with enormous human and environmental costs. A historically aware democratic citizenry needs to be able to draw a parallel between the Kafkaesque absurdity of the arrest of university professors in the dead of the night with other horrifying historical episodes. A true democratic citizenry, always, with utmost sincerity, needs to assert that the only alternative to democracy is more, not less democracy.
   A democratic citizenry also needs to have the world-historical awareness to acknowledge where the global threats to democracy come from. As the history of Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, or Chile in 1973 demonstrate, the global ‘promoters’ of democracy, when threatened by the popular release of democratic aspirations, are only too eager to strangle the democratic processes. A democratic citizenry must keep vigilance against those global forces who only like democracy when it is limited to constitutional formalities, and, of course, when it does not subvert the interests of the international masters.
   None of these are easy tasks. The path to democratic self-creation is barely a relaxed cakewalk. It involves many moments of despairs, dreads, and disillusionments. But on an affirmative note, unlike Samuel Becket’s Godot, who is so conspicuous in his absence, the concrete possibility of an alternative civil society is right here with us. We can feel the traces of its presence in our historical memory of upheavals, oppositions, and joyous celebrations of life.
   It is difficult to be a believer in democracy in today’s political universe, but whatever is left of the democratic consciousness that we so strenuously built in 1971 is the only hope we are left with.
   
   Piash Karim teaches at BRAC University