THE MIRAGE OF "PARTY-LESS" DEMOCRACY

Author(s): John A. Vieg

Source: The Indian Journal of Political Science , January—December, 1962, Vol. 23, No.
1/4 (January—December, 1962), pp. 39-47
Published by: Indian Political Science Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41853910

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 THE MIRAGE OF "PARTY-LESS" DEMOCRACY

By
John A. Vieg*

In the near despair thousands of civic-minded Indians apparently

feel over what one distinguished political scientist has called "the miserable
state of our politics", it is only to be expected that suspicion and criticism
should center on the party system. That at any rate is how many
people react to the anything-but-admirable tactics and candidates which
loom so large in the public image of the various parties pretending to
serve the nation today. They think the party system a big handicap to
democracy rather than a help.

Three Critics and Their Proposals

Of the many lines of criticism directed towards the Indian party

system in recent years, it will suffice for present purposes to single out but
three. These are the criticisms made by the Gandhian leader of the
Bhoodan movement, Vinoba Bhave ; those made by the gentle spirit Jaya
and Prakash Narayan in his Plea for the Reconstruction of Indian Polity ;
and those offered at Cuttack in December, 1961 by S. V. Kogekar of
Poona in his presidential address before the 24th Indian Political Science
Conference.

Vinoba. Vinoba's condemnation of the party system, it should

perhaps be said at once, is incidental to his distrust of government in
general.1 What he apparently wants is not so much a "party-less state"
as a "state-less" society, specifically an idyllic anarchy in which India
would consist of thousands of self-ruled and self-sufficient villages governed
by panchayats (councils) chosen mirabile dietu unanimously by all their
members. Convinced that the state is a synthetic artifice imposed on
society, he would do away with the whole apparatus of parties and elec-
tions so basic to parliamentary democracy.*

* Professor of Government, Pomona College and Claremont University College ;

Fulbright Research Professor, University of Delhi, 1961-62.
1 See for example his booklet From Bhoodan to Gramdan, Tanjore : Sarvodaya
Prachuralaya, 1957. pp. 32-37.
2 This description of Vinoba's ideas draws heavily on Adi H. Doctor's fine essay
on "Anarchist Trends in Vinoba's Political Thought", Marathwada University
Journal, Vol. I, No. 1, 1960-61.

39

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40 THE INDIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

As Vinoba sees them, it is of the very nature of political parties th

they place loyalty to party interests above loyalty to truth or conscien
that they maneuver for power at any cost, and, worst of all, that th
exacerbate differences between castes and creeds in such a way as to m
it difficult for people to come together even for a good cause. And as f
elections, they amount, so to speak, to giving the sheep the right to ch
their shepherd. This may be all right as far as it goes but does not, in
Vinoba's phrase, "lead to any change in the condition of the she
Thus he would sweep away all such machinery and, man's heart being
he claims "always good at the core", replace the modern state wit
network of pure, direct village democracies living in harmony under
rule of unanimity.

Narayan. Jaya Prakash, or J.P., insists on getting rid of the partie

for reasons somewhat similar to those of Vinoba. However his "cure"
for what has gone wrong is somewhat less simplistic and unsophisticated.3
Liberty has been a passion with him all his life, and equality and fraternity
have never been far behind. After an early dalliance with marxism in
the 1920's he became disillusioned with communism because of its
contempt for freedom and became a moderate socialist. This satisfied his
idealism for a time but more recently he has renounced socialism for
Sarvodaya - government by all for the welfare of all.

J.P. condemns socialists on the ground that in some ways they are
even worse than capitalists. Both want monopolies but whereas the
bourgeoise are mainly concerned about political power, the socialists want
a monopoly of economic power as well. Parliamentary democracy offers
no solution to the problem of insuring freedom for the individual because,
as he puts it, "The Democratic Socialist State remains a Leviathan that
will (always) sit heavily on the freedom of the people". What then is the
solution ? It is to strive for the abolition of all centers of power such as
the present Union and State governments and likewise of the present
system of parties and elections. In their place he would establish a
system of "organic" or "participating" democracy under which the powers
now exercised by a relatively small number of political leaders and a
growing army of self-serving bureaucrats, alike at the Center and in the
States, would be vested in a network of Village and Regional Communi-
ties and there would be no need for parties of any kind.

In J.P.'s theory of politics and society (which he describes with great

plausibility and with such transparent good-will toward his fellow-men as

3 In addition to the Plea for the Reconstruction of Indian Polity , J.P.'s ideas have
been set forth in his books Organic Democracy and From Socialism to Sarvodaya
and in various journals such as Kurukshetra and Panchayati Raj published by the
Government of India. For a summary analysis of his views, see Adi
H. Doctor, "A Critique of J.P. 9 s Polity Indian Journal of Political Science ?
Yol. XXII, No. 3, July-September, 1961.

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 TttB MIRAGE OF "PARTY -LESS*' DEMOCRACY 4Í

to have persuaded many otherwise skeptical people of its feasibility) the

family is the elemental social unit. The next unit is the local or village
community which is formed when a number of families arrange to live in
physical proximity with each other for greater security and enjoyment.
The Regional Community is the third unit. It has its raison ďetre in the
association of a number of neighbouring villages to tackle common
problems on a cooperative basis. This in his view is the "key" or
"optimum" community, presumably because it arises naturally in response
to important felt needs and because it is also the largest social unit able
to operate on the basis of face-to-face relationships and common experience.

Not that Narayan denies the need for some political units above the
level of the region : as a matter of fact he envisages in his Organic
Democracy the formation not only of district and provincial (or state)
communities but also of a national community, with some kind of govern-
ing council for each. And to complete the picture, in several public
appearances in early 1962 he looked forward not only to what amounted
to a South Asian Community based on a confederation of India and
Pakistan but to an eventual world community.

As to the relation between these communities and to the nature of

their systems of internal power or control, J.P.'s theory is that the village
would do all it could to meet its needs through its own internal resources.
Those adjacent villages comprising a Regional Community would entrust
it solely with those functions which proved to be beyond their local
competence. (Provision of health services and the fostering of village
industries may be cited as examples.) Above this key level, the district,
provincial and national communities would be established and would
receive their credentials, so to speak, by an extension of this same process
of "organic growth". Power would always be delegated from the lower
to the higher units rather than the reverse and thus, as J.P. visualizes his
utopia, it would never suffer corruption.

As for parties and elections they would no longer stultify democracy

because they would simply have disappeared.4 There would be no need
for them. The residents of each village would choose the members of
their Panchayat by some kind of universal consensus (which J.P. has never
been able to explain clearly) and this is the closest thing there would be
to a popular election. Narayan prides himself on the fact that his would
be a "participating" democracy but it would appear that, apart from
choosing their panches in an "all-citizens" village meeting, their participa-
tion would be via administration (or through people's advisory committees
a la Soviet democracy) rather than politics.

4 Cf. J.P. Narayan, Towards a New Society [New Delhi, New Delhi Press, 1958].
pp. 27-39.

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42 THB INDIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIBNCE

The members of the councils for each Regional Community, by which

J.P. sets such great store, would be chosen by the panchayats of its
constituent villages rather than by the mere "arithmetic" of counting votes
cast by atomistic individuals largely strangers to each other. So also with
the council of the community on each succeeding tier : its members would
be chosen by the council on the level immediately below. This is the
rationale behind J.P.'s other favorite adjective, "organic". All the
communities would be organically related through the processes which
have been described and all their councils would be linked to that most
genuinely organic of all social units after the family, namely the village.

Kogekar. Professor Kogekar's dissatisfaction with the party system

arises mainly, it would seem, from the fact that the parties insist on
squabbling over programmatic details, over personalities and over the
spoils of office at a time when the well-being of the nation requires
an effort no less united and inspired than the struggle for independence.
His remedy would be to replace the party system by "a broad national
front based on agreement on the fundamentals of national policy" but
"permitting full freedom of expression on matters of detail"5

Kogekar's conviction of the practicality of his proposal stems

from several considerations, some positive, some negative. The
chief positive considerations are that "except for the dissent of a tiny
minority" there is general agreement both on the broad goals of
economic and social development set forth in the Third Five Year Plan
and on the vital necessity of fulfilling them on schedule, indeed ahead of
schedule if at all possible.* The main negative considerations are that,
unless such a front is formed or unless, alternatively, all "the policies and
decisions relating to the plan" are removed "from the area of party
political controversy", (a) the opposition parties will use their strength to
oppose the Government even when they have no substantial ideological
difference with the ruling Congress party, this to the serious detriment
of the nation, and (b) the great hopes invested in Panchayati Raj, India's
scheme of democratic decentralization (on what Americans would call
the local level) are all too likely to be suffocated by partisan appeals to
caste and creed throughout the vast rural areas of the country.7

There is, in addition, one final consideration which probably ought to

be mentioned. Kogekar suspects that one of the prime reasons why
something like his proposal has not already been adopted lies in simple
Indian "prejudice in favour of the British pattern" of parliamentary
democracy, of a ruling party criticized and checked by an opposition,

8 S. V. Kogekar, Presidential Address before 24th Indian Political Science Confer-

ence, Cuttack, 26 December 1961, p. 11.
« Ibid, p. 4.
7 Ibid, p. 14.

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 THE MIRAGB OF "PARTY-LESS" DBMOCRACY 43

whether consisting of a single party or several. It is his evidently strong

belief that, if the people would only give up this prejudice, they would
soon realize, as he put in his presidential address, that "there is n
reason to think that the British pattern exhausts the whole range o
possibilities in this connection."8

Western - Or Simply Natural ?

Having set forth as fairly as possible the grounds on which these

three critics condemn the existing party system and the assumptions o
which they base their advocacy of "party-less" democracy, let us no
examine the validity of their arguments, treating them in combination
rather than separately. It will be understood of course that, since th
essay is mainly concerned with the idea expounded by these critics that
Indian democracy would work better without parties, attention wi
be focused primarily on that issue.

Three main points are involved : (1) What vital functions, if any, do
political parties perform by way of giving meaning and substance
the ideal of personal freedom ? (2) To what extent is it true, a la Vinob
and Narayan, that the only community which is real to the individual (in
the sense that he feels himself an organic part of it) is the village o
one step away, the regional community. (3) To what extent is there warran
for saying that bi -party systems or multi-party systems are Western inven-
tions suiting Western conditions but likely to suit other peoples wit
different cultural traditions either poorly or not at all ?

Party Activity and Individual Freedom. Granting always that a

political party may abuse its privileges and fail to justify its existence,
is it actually true that a party system could be abandoned or abolished
(or even merely put on ice for the duration of some extended crisis) without
in any significant way reducing or compromising individual freedom ?
Freedom is certainly subject to misuse and perhaps millions of Indians ar
abusing the freedom that came with Independence (just as millions
Americans and Frenchmen often misuse theirs) but what of those othe
millions who, though perhaps not quite deserving of civic medals o
honor, yet furnish that most essential thing - "the sufficient number" w
care enough to keep the system going and who, making responsible use o
their freedom, do it through the parties of their choice ?

How satisfying would freedom be if it left a citizen free only to think,

speak, write, move, worship, form civic discussion groups and the like b
did not include freedom to act, which is to say, to join with fellow citize
of like mind to form a political party and thereby try to gain the right and
power to run the government in line with policies they honestly believ

* Ibid, p. 7.

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44 THE INDIAN JÔURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

will best promote the public interest ? It is absurd to think that any peop
who have ever experienced this freedom to act in the realm of civic af
would ever willingly give it up. Talk about participation : democ
being government by the people, certainly does mean participation b
means participation in action - in the actual selection of those who de
policy on the great issues- rather than participation in mere discuss
about high policy.

This is not to deny that democracy also calls for self-discipline. I

quite essential that the normal play of party rivalry be muted or susp
during a war involving the nation's survival or during a domestic cr
threatening its solvency. If India were presently faced with any cri
this kind, such a proposal as Kogekar's would doubtless commend its
not only to the leaders of all moderate parties but even to those of ex
mist parties honestly concerned about preserving the country's independen
Obviously however very few people believe any such crisis exists tod
even though conceivably one may be in the making.

The net of it is that, far from being barriers to freedom or plac

checkreins upon it, parties are instrumentalities that facilitate the exe
of freedom and thereby serve to protect it and quicken it. To elimi
them in the hope of thereby getting rid of the evils sometimes assoc
with them would be to aggravate the condition of politics in the coun
rather than ameliorate it.

The Nation : A Real Community. Unless Indian nationalism isa w

and sickly sentiment compared to the nationalism so common among
peoples, both in the Occident and in the Orient, Vinoba and Narayan
incredibly naive in thinking, as they evidently do, that only the villag
regional communities could ever be vital and real to the individu
may well be that, until the forging and tempering of a sense of nat
unity or integration has been completed, "India" will be largely
geographical expression even as "America", "Germany" ar.d "Italy" w
at one time. But that period will end, as indeed Vinoba and Nara
must themselves hope it will end.

When that day comes they will discover that the nation is not on
just as real to the individual Indian as this village or region, but that
may live in his mind with even greater warmth and vitality. Year by
as modern communication and transportation are extended and as In
vast system of public education pays out its precious dividends, what m
be expected is that the consciousness of "being an Indian" will grow
that, instead of becoming more and more attached to his local villag
region, the average man will begin to look upon his birth in a partic
place as being in the nature of an historical accident rather than some
prdained by the gods and thus to be especially cherished.

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 THE MIRAGE OF "PARTY-LESS" DEMOCRACY 45

For Americans and for Russians, to cite but two examples, the se
in the one case, of being a citizen of the United States is unquestion
keener than the sense of being, say, a resident of Webster County,
just as, in the other, the sense of bein£ a citizen of the Soviet Unio
doubtless sharper than that of being a resident of a collective farm
Kazakstan. While voting rights could hardly mean as much to a Rus
as to an American, any person who would reconstruct India's polity
keep it democratic) would do well to ponder this fact : in every dec
for at least the last century Americans prove that they care far more
their right to vote for the President and for their U.S. Senator
Congressmen than about the right to vote for city, country, school or
officials. Indian political psychology may conceivably take a diff
course but, unless India turns her back on modernization and thus res
her 550,000 villages to their splendid isolation, the chances are overwh
ing that her people will react to national unification in the same
(The time required for the generation of such loyalties may well be m
greater however because of the deep fissures within the Indian
politic.)

Parliamentary Democracy as a Western Invention . In a century from

now (it may be more, it may be less) when India and Japan and China
and Indonesia and Nigeria have perfected their political systems, it should
be possible to say with relative certainty - particularly of those systems
resting on the open consent of the governed - what kinds of civic
institutions and processes if any are uniquely American, European, Asian,
African or something else. Until that time all that can be done, when
someone in a developing country insists that a proposed scheme cannot be
expected to work satisfactorily because of being Western in origin and
suited only to Western conditions, is to subject the assertion to rigorous
logical scrutiny.

Admittedly parliamentary democracy based on competing parties

originated in the West. But is it for that reason inherently Western ?
Not necessarily so. The explanation may rather lie in the simple fact that
those Western peoples achieved political maturity (and fulfilled the social
and economic pre-requisities of democracy) several generations earlier than
the people of the developing nations. There may be nothing uniquely or
peculiarly Western about bi-party or multi-party democracy insofar as
fundamentals are concerned and, as a matter of fact, there are strong
reasons for thinking this to be the case.

Perhaps the strongest - at any rate it demolished the idea that

responsible party government is a Western invention - is that in no Western
democracy was the party system ever invented at all. To study the history
of Britain, America, France, Germany, Italy or Scandinavia, not to
jnentioii several other relevant countries is to learn th at in çaçh

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46 THE INDIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIBNCB

case what is called the party system emerged spontaneously rather th

response to some deliberate design. The essential insight has per
been most happily phrased by that sagacious and mellow observ
Arthur N. Holcombe. It is all wrapped up in the title to one of t
chapters in his book, Our More Perfect Union , namely "The Unplan
Institution of Organized Partisanship."9

The party systems in Western democracies were never plann

because they simply could not be planned. In a free polity partie
voluntary, indeed from one point of view private, associations. They
neither be forced or molded artificially. They develop spontaneously
not at all. Thus there are good reasons for thinking that they are nat
political phenomena rather than "Western" contrivances.

Indians might conceivably have decided, when they became indep

dent, that they were not ready for democracy. But the moment they
for democracy and became free to establish parties it was inevitable
some kind of party system would develop. For in any bcdy politic w
transcends the limits of face-to-face discussion, parties (of some kind
a practical necessity. So essential are they to the working of democr
that, without them, the freedom which democracy supposedly incorpo
simply has no meaning.

Incidentally one aspect of American experience is particula

instructive on the point that parties are unnecessary - and hence expendab
As reflected in the famous Federalist Papers written in 1787-88 to urg
ratification of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers inveighed ag
the rise of factions (their name for parties) and expressed the hope
none would ever be formed. Indeed they even flattered themselves
they had framed a constitution which would render parties for
unnecessary. Even so their hopes proved vain. Within a year the
steps had been taken toward forming what are today called the Repub
and Democratic parties and he is a rare, yea an extraordinarily r
American who sees any way by which this development could have
avoided.

Conclusion

India is a democracy and, because that is what her people want, her
parties are here to stay. "Party-less" democracy is a mirage. Any attempt
to transform it into reality would inevitably endanger individual freedom
for, as David Cushman Coyle has said, politics or, in other words, party,
campaign and electoral activity is simply "the way people behave when
tliey are free".10

9 A.N. Holcombe, Our More Perfect Union , Cambridge, Harvard University

Press, 1950.
Pavid Çushman Coyle, The U.S.- Political System, New York, 1957. p. I,

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 THB MIRAGE OF "PARTY-LBSS" DEMOCRACY 47

Normally, to be sure, no single political leader dominates the scene

in a democracy to the extent that Jawaharlal Nehru has in India since she
became free. For this reason alone therefore, to say nothing of others
perhaps equally important, the present party situation in the country is
unnatural and unsatisfactory. Casteism, linguism, communalism, regiona
lism and a general "slump in idealism" following the glorious achievement
of independence also combine to exert a baleful influence on wholesome
party rivalry.

For these reasons India may be compelled, if not to "mark time" for
a period in the evolution of her party system, at least to wage a long, hard
patient struggle. All over the world she will have friends wishing he
well. But as for keeping and improving her parties, there simply is no
alternative, for the parties constitute the teams by which the game of
democracy is played.

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