Democracy, despite its inherent shortcomings, is being pitched as most successful form of governance till date. It is considered that democracy is an outcome of peoples urge to be governed by electing their representatives to legislature, provide executive power to administer that disperses the justice to people through a judicial mechanism.
However, till middle of 20th century the role of citizenry was confined to the extent of electing their representatives to govern by way of making laws and administer by providing the state structure. The role of citizen participation in human development through the policies formulated by the administrative setup backed by the elected legislature came into focus only after the same was envisaged in United Nations Development Report. The report which focused more on poverty also detailed about how poverty limits the human choices and opportunities.
The inability of citizens to participate in decision making had been point of debate for a long time as it was considered that non-participation limits the meaning of political freedom and brings in focus the critical issue of transparency in relation to developmental funding. Here the importance of freedom of expression was felt as it was guaranteed to the citizens by the democracy and derives its origin from Article 10 of European convention on human rights which refers to “freedom to hold opinions, receive and impart information”. The exercising of this right by the citizens ensured the participation of the citizenry to look over the elected representatives and hold the whole administrative setup run by these representatives accountable before it.
This way the evolution of democracy has gone to higher level to be called as participatory democracy. This concept of participatory democracy has now started to take its roots in western developed countries while it is still in an infant stage in developing democracy of India. But the citizens under leadership of active social activists and informed social leaders have been running struggles to move on the path of participatory democracy. The judicial activism shown by Indian courts while dealing with the subject of freedom of expression has contributed to movement of participatory democracy. Furthermore the recent upheaval in Indian national politics and emergence of new political discourse has contributed enormously to the movement of establishment of participatory democracy in Indian democratic setup and established political forces are facing challenges by realignment of new emerging political power groups on the subject of level of citizen participation in day to day affairs of governance. The two weapons of RTI and JLB have armed the Indian citizenry to take on the politics of opacity and unaccountability so as to cure the ills of rotten system wherein the neo maharajas of 21st century wanted to remain insulated from the process of transparency and accountability.
The concept of Swaraj envisaged by the by the freedom fighters is now going to be realized when the decision on expending development funds will be taken in chopals of villages and mohalla sabhas of cities under the vigil of informed citizenry. This not only will help in efficiency of governance system but will help to eradicate corruption. Now if we may think that every problem has been solved by achieving this stage, that will be totally wrong because a lot more needs to be done in that direction and still we have to continue our struggle on the path of establishment of participatory democracy for which the next stage involves the demand for enactment of laws for the protection to whistle blower and judicial accountability mechanism which will help in ensuring the transparency in the domains considered holy cows of the system.
* The author is a lecturer at Kashmir Law College and can be reached at rrconsultantssgr@gmail.com