The Limits of Representative Democracy

Niraja Gopal Jayal from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, examines the truthfulness of the concept that microcosmic representation of all sections of the population in all institutions becomes the pursuit that inspires democracy, leading to further strengthening of democracy. The overlap between the cultural and the material has not been sufficiently appreciated by past policy interventions, which seem to have assumed that addressing the one was a way of addressing the other. Around 80% of Lok Sabha MPs are Hindus in terms of religion, pointing to their proportion in the population. Religious minorities like Sikhs, Christians and Jains are represented roughly in proportion to their percentage in the population. Social and economic inequalities of the sort that obtain in a large and complex society like India could have been expected to generate class conflict, but political mobilization has increasingly tended to occur along the axes of caste and community.