The Democracy Club: Political Nomadism in India

The struggle between the fence and the field in a representative democracy

As democracy has become a part of the commonsense of politics in India it has had to reinvent itself. This is because the processes of deepening, that have been underway over the last six decades, have meant that the new groups, interests and imaginations that have entered politics have begun to challenge the terms of the conventional relationship between the institutions of democracy and of its processes, between the fence and the field.
One of the areas where the challenge is most lively is with respect to defections, a phenomenon where representatives after being elected shift allegiances from one party to another. This phenomenon, called political nomadism in several countries, strikes at the very roots of the parliamentary order, such as the party and electoral system, cabinet government etc. While such political nomadism may be dismissed, within a conventional discourse, as an example of the distortions that have crept into democratic practice as it takes root outside the West (the problem of identifying the standard from which deviations can be measured comes in here) within a subaltern discourse it may be seen as perfectly acceptable as democracy itself gets democratised. This challenge of the relationship between the fence and the field requires the attention of political theorists on at least three issues: (i) on the idea of ‘representation’, on what is entailed by it and when can one say that an impermissible departure has taken place, (ii) on the effectiveness of institutions to discipline political behaviour and produce in such behaviour the commitment to the values of the institution, and (iii) on the issue of political judgement in an ethically plural democracy, one that is so necessary to take the democratic transformation of these societies forward.

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