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When principles of democracy conflict

S. R. Clarke
The national political situation currently remains at an impasse. The opposition maintains that the general election should be held under a caretaker government, while the government maintains that this will not happen. The High Court has decided that the caretaker government system is unconstitutional. This impasse is at one level a clash of interests; each side favours the situation that is more likely to give it power. However, it is also possible to see the disagreement as a conflict of principles, and it is important to identify and explore these principles.
The principle underlying the caretaker system is the importance of free and fair elections. The government has said that even without a caretaker government, the elections will be run by the Election Commission. But this will be overseen by the government, and elections held under it are unlikely to be as neutral as they would be if run by a caretaker system. Under that system, the government steps down from power and an interim body takes over the running of the election. Elections under a caretaker system are more likely to be free and fair.
What is the principle underlying the resistance to the caretaker system? The Court's reasoning was that the constitution rules out having an unelected government; the caretaker government would be appointed rather than elected, and so would be unconstitutional. So the underlying concern here can be called the principle of 'no unelected government.'
The principle of free and fair elections favours the caretaker system while the principle of no unelected government favours the government staying in power during the election period. Which of the two principles is more important? Both are fundamentally democratic and it seems difficult to determine which should prevail. Perhaps it is just a matter of political outlook and simply choosing which one you like the best. However, we can try to decide between them by examining the deeper values of democracy. If we examine what the meaning and purpose of democracy is, we may have some guidance on which principle should prevail.
The history of political thought and experience furnishes us with two main rationales for democracy. The first is that democracy is the best political system for protecting and promoting the interests of the people. Non-democracies do not do a good job of this. Benevolent dictatorship is possible in theory, but seldom works in practice. Venice in the fourteenth century is sometimes cited as an example of undemocratic rule which actually didpromote the interests of all the people, but against this are all the examples of dictatorships throughout history and in the present which have been brutal and corrupt.
Democracy protects the interests of the people in several ways. When the people have a say in political rule, information about their interests is fed through to decision-makers. Also, the people are able to veto any regimes that are acting against their interests. Amartya Sen has argued, for example, that famines are less likely to occur in democracies because popular opinion forces government, through the threat of the ballot box, to respond promptly to such emergencies.
Can this rationale for democracy - protection of the people's interests - help us adjudicate between the two conflicting principles? Free and fair elections are essential for protecting the interests of the people. Without free and fair elections, the
parliament that is formed will not be representative of the people. Instead, it will be skewed towards one sector of society. If so, then the parliamentary mechanism will not adequately respond to information about people's interests, or to public opinion which expresses those interests.
Consider the other principle. While there is the danger that an unelected caretaker government could ignore the people's interests, the period of that system will only be short, so there will only be a brief interruption. Moreover, it is not as though the unelected caretaker government would be completely free of the control of the current democratically elected government. Any temptation it may have towards dictatorship (which is very unlikely) can be reined in. So promoting the interests of the people favours the principle of free and fair elections over the principle of no unelected government (at least, assuming the unelected government is temporary and limited).
Protecting and promoting the interests of the people is not the only function or purpose of democracy. A second main rationale for democracy is the intrinsic value of collective selfrule. Even if the first rationale does not hold and democracy does not protect and promote the people's interest (say because the people are poor judges of their own interests) there is something to be valued about the people ruling themselves. It is in the nature of freedom and autonomy that we be free to make our own decisions even if sometimes those decisions are mistaken or misguided. Democracy enables people to exercise this collective self-rule. They decide for themselves what laws and policies they live under, rather than having laws and policies imposed upon them by somebody else.
This was the contention of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his great political work The Social Contract (1762), a work that helped inspire the French Revolution. Under democracy, he argued, people live according to laws that derive from the general will of all, rather than from a monarch, an elite group, or a foreign ruler. By doing so, each person achieves "moral liberty which alone makes him truly master of himself; for the mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law we prescribe to ourselves is liberty." It is liberty in the sense of collective self-rule, which is possible only under democracy.
Let us see now what the value of collective self-rule can tell us about the clash of principles so far discussed. Free and fair elections are essential for a nation to achieve collective self-rule. If elections are biased, then parliament will not represent the general will of the people. Instead of the people as a whole giving rules to themselves, one sector of society would be unfairly imposing its own will on the rest.
An unelected caretaker government would also mean a suspension of the general will, but again it would be for a short-term period only. Moreover, the temporary suspension is necessary for collective self-rule to prevail in the long run. That goal requires free and fair elections and if the only way of achieving them is to have a temporary suspension of the elected government, then that is a price worth paying.
Hence, both rationales for democracy point us to the same conclusion. The principle of no unelected government should be subordinate to the principle of free and fair elections.
The writer is Assistant Professor at Asian University for Women, Chittagong.