A wit wryly defined democracy as ‘a rumour not yet disproved’. In our time, that’s indeed the case — in Chile, Russia, Nigeria, Egypt, the US, not to forget, our own country.

There has been a great surge in anti-democratic sentiment all over the world. Left-leaning thinkers explain this as the capture of the State by the Corporation. Gandhians see it as a predictable consequence of unchecked greed. For neo-liberals, this is a clash between technocratic ethics (i.e., ‘transparency’ and ‘fast growth’) and a political order prone to ‘populist’ economic drives.

There are other explanations that underline the deviant personality traits of individuals leading nations. But why is democracy falling apart in so many countries and why all together?

The Spanish American philosopher-poet George Santayana (1863–1952) had once spoken of the world being ‘on a moral holiday’; on those lines, one can probably say the world today appears to be ‘on a political holiday’.

In a democracy, the ideal is a maximal representation of the wishes of the people; but the processes institutionalised to realise the ideal keep sliding off the ideal. In India, we have seen this happening in the SIR exercise, which has unfolded as a tyranny of the State over those who constitute the nation. As the gap increases between the ideal and the mechanism created to attain it, representation gets replaced by domination of the people by the State. Empty rituals replace the........

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