Electing ‘Alternative Pluralisms’
-- Vasuki
Nesiah
The Space Of Territory
Today with a beleaguered and fractured SLMC divided over the
appropriate strategies towards gaining political voice in the
prospective ‘post’ war dispensation, at least one vocal block
in the Muslim community is advancing the argument that a territorial
state in the South-East is the only route to such recognition.
The proposal to redefine the community’s political subjectivity
in terms of a territorially defined unit is advanced as a shield
for Muslims’ vulnerability in the North and East.
If territory is the hook for privileged political subjectivity,
what is the impact on those actors who do not have access to such
territorial shields but seek some measure of ‘collective’ political
voice? In fact, what is the possibility of our current political
system enabling political formations that contest territorially
grounded claims to self-determination? At issue here are groups
such as the Tamils in Wellawatta and Muslims in Maligawatta who
are entrenched numerical minorities within greater Colombo. Also
at issue, however, are other kinds of territorially dispersed
actors who may seek political community and voice in ways that
are contingent and shifting - on environmental issues today, on
the rights of gays and lesbians tomorrow, against gender based
discrimination today, on interventions to break caste hierarchies
and distinctions tomorrow. What is the relationship between territory
and the specific imaginative lenses and institutional arrangements
that shape political formations? How is territoriality mobilized
by the rules of political engagement (electoral rules for instance)
as a currency that operates as something of a gold standard in
determining which kinds of claims to political community and self-determination
profit from recognition/legitimacy?
Territorial recognition has long been seen as a necessary building
block for how institutional arrangements both reflect and structure
a pluralist political community – the evolution of the Federal
Party maybe cited as an important marker in this regard. Of course
the Federal Party too has interesting continuities and discontinuities
with other antecedents, including the emergence of ‘Ceylon’ as
itself a territorial defined administrative unit of colonial governance.
Today questions of federal boundaries and traditional homelands
inform all dominant approaches to pluralist constitutional change
in Sri Lanka. These approaches to political community situate
attachments to particular territories as the cloth from which
notions of identity and nationhood have been cut. Territory is
understood as, in effect, the fabric of a shared inheritance that
gives content to, and, at the least, loosely marks the boundaries
of the country’s constituent political communities.
This imaginative/legal lens has far-reaching consequences for
what kinds of political alliances and self-determination claims
are on the table, as it were, for legitimization through constitutional
recognition. In our current approach to territory, territorial
contiguity is treated as a naturalized factor. The fact that
we cannot draw neat lines of territorial division between ethnic
communities (particularly in the East) is seen as an administrative
complication of massive proportions, fuelling politically explosive
problems. There is, in other words, a background assumption that
territory operates as the naturalized glue for political community,
and that deviations from the identity/territory congruence raise
thorny problems for democracy and pluralism. Yet it is precisely
the structuring of institutional arrangements in ways that privilege
homogenous political communities that renders ethnically hybrid
territorial spaces political explosive. In other words, if we
take it that our future, as with our past, cannot but be in the
direction of integrated communities living interdependent lives,
then it becomes crucial that we come to terms with the heterogeneous
continuities and discontinuities between territory and political
community. Moreover, if location in different territories has
problematic distributive consequences, we should seek to further
loosen rather than entrench links between political actors and
rights and privileges in particular territories. Thus we may
want to encourage inter-communal territorial migration by making
proactive efforts to ensure that Tamils feel they can live in
safety and dignity in Sinhalese dominated areas, or that Muslims
can do the same in Tamil dominated areas and so on.
This approach leans towards shaping the rules of political engagement
in ways that do not penalize (and, in some cases, even reward)
political formations whose territorial base is plural and contingent.
In addition to being of particular interest to migrant labor,
IDPs and other ‘mobile’ communities, this approach may also enable
a plurality of voting alliances, some territorially based, and
others not. Thus while people may mobilize on more ‘local’ alliances
in some cases, different rules for political engagement may also
proliferate spaces for noncontiguous political community. This
may enable environmentalists pursuing solar energy power in Mannar
and Hamabantota to form alliances; or alternatively, enable dalits
in Kandy and Jaffna to find common cause. Each of these potential
alliances may gesture to the possibility of at least partially
dislodging the privileged political position now accorded to a
region’s territorially contiguous majorities.
The Electoral Landscape
From this perspective, and against the backdrop of rapidly unfolding
political developments that suggest that territory may be further
entrenched as the likely reference point for the long term constitutional
solution, it is useful to investigate alternative ways in which
we may conceive of democracy, and indeed the fabric of political
community through the restructuring of electoral rules. In the
United States, a country that has suffered long from problems
of entrenched majoritarianism, critical scholars are urging that
policy makers think outside the box and expand their understanding
of what electoral democracy demands in a complex, multi-racial
polity. For instance, Lani Guinier has argued that traditional
‘get past the post’ approaches to electoral victory reflect a
reductive approach to democracy – namely, the tyranny of the majority
with no incentive for minorities to stay within the electoral
game because simple arithmetic will always ensure they will lose.
In the Sri Lankan context this same arithmetic has in effect alienated
Tamils, and many Tamils have looked to federalism or a separate
state as a territorially based wall to protect numerical minorities
from the dominance of electoral majorities on the national stage.
Of course, as the present plight of Muslims in the North and East
suggests, this problem just replicates within those regional walls
to alienate minorities within minorities. Moreover, even if ethnicity
as currently defined is the sole register for politics, regional
autonomy itself does little to address territorially dispersed
ethnic minorities scattered through the rest of Sri Lanka.
Thus even if we focus solely on the legal framework for a pluralist
polity, considerable regional decentralization has to be accompanied
with a range of other initiatives – constitutionally protected
minority rights, implementation of a multi-lingual policy, and
various other initiatives in all aspects of our collective lives
– including the restructuring of electoral rules to disaggregate
and redistribute the rewards of elections. For instance, in the
US context, Guinier has argued that structuring elections on a
single vote for a single candidate translates into 'a-winner-takes-all'
system that disproportionately augments the voice of territorially
contiguous majorities, and unfairly dilutes the voice of minorities
to make them entrenched losers. Instead she proposes a system
that allows each voter a number of votes that she could distribute
among one or more candidates. In this way it is possible that
under certain circumstances minorities may strategically pool
their votes to punch above their weight as it were. For instance
in an election with candidates running for two seats in the legislature
(say seat A and seat B), minorities may choose to forego any impact
in regard to who wins seat A, by pooling all their votes on the
race for seat B, and thereby increasing the chances of having
a decisive impact at least on one of the candidates. Interestingly,
local experiments with this proposal in some US constituencies
has suggested that cumulative voting models have also incentivized
the forging of alliances between different minorities to shape
a different arithmetic at the polling booth.
In a provocative article titled Decentering Decentralization,
Jerry Frug suggests an even more radical modification of this
proposal by arguing for unmooring votes from territorial constituencies
in recognition that we have political solidarities that do not
always map onto geographic contiguity. In fact, it is a proposal
that may actively encourage non-territorial alliances that engender
new maps (and indeed new futures) for the pluralism constitutive
of the country! Ethnicity itself mat come to have different
‘meanings’ as a register of identity and interest. Thus in the
US context this may give incentives for unexpected alliances (the
equivalents of the solar energy advocates in Mannar and Hambantota)
to form contingent solidarities across ‘ethnic’ divisions to enhance
their power at the voting booth. However there is no guarantee
that this will only enable progressive coalitions. Territorially
unmoored votes may also help link white racist in Idaho with white
racists in North Carolina in pooling their votes against a Hispanic
majority in Miami – but in doing so they lose their influence
in Idaho and North Carolina. In this way it may make each election
unpredictable, but to that extent may also raise the possibility
of new and shifting alliances that unseat entrenched territorial
majorities. Ultimately, this model may not be able to offer substantive
guarantees on outcomes, but it can have substantive impact in
regard to the kind of political formations it enables.
The electoral proposals described here were advanced in the context
of the United States and their relevance for deliberations on
the legal architecture of pluralism in Sri Lanka is an open question.
In addition, the role of background legal rules in shaping elections,
leave alone pluralism, is also an open question – electoral dynamics
(in the short term and the long term) are impacted by a range
of other factors, from campaign finance practices to patronage
networks, from the distribution of resources in particular communities
to gender stereotypes – in other words, a complex range of factors
that are not captured by the domain of legal rules. We wouldn’t
want to fetishize the law and ignore the social/economic/imaginative
domains that shape the texts and contexts of legal rules in any
particular situation. Thus I draw attention to Guinier’s and
Frug’s proposals for reforming electoral rules in the US as thought
experiments that may challenge us to expand our institutional
imagination, rather than as policy proposals for particular institutional
arrangements.
Moreover, in the Sri Lankan context, at this point, a very significant
measure of regional autonomy is a necessary part of a fair and
just political settlement - so I am not arguing against decentralization.
The argument however is that regional decentralization alone should
not represent closure in our effort to shape the background conditions
for a pluralist polity. In addition to several other issues,
we also need further public debate and deliberation in rethinking
some of the ways in which our current political system interpolates
political identity and territory.
In this context, this note may be seen as allied with a growing
effort at revisiting the production of majorities and minorities
in Sri Lanka. I am thinking here particularly of the work of
David Scott and Qadri Ismail who have, in their different ways,
addressed the naturalization of the logic of ‘number’ in how institutional
arrangements stabilize a particular notion of majority and minority
communities (for Ismail’s critique see MinorMatters).
They both cite the Donoughmore constitution as the critical moment
when the political discourse of Sri Lanka was transformed from
one that spoke of two majority communities to one that had a dominant
majority, and several minority communities. Consciously deciding
to reject an ethnically structured electoral system as fuelling
moribund communal solidarities, the Donoughmore committee opted
for the ‘unencumbered’ vote that would operate on the ostensibly
neutral arithmetic of electoral majorities and minorities. Thus
it naturalized the logic of ‘number’ in ways that, in effect,
rewarded numerical majorities as being on the side of rationality,
progress and democratic modernity.
Scott, Ismail and others are animated by a worry regarding the
impact of numerical majoritarianism in enabling and empowering
Sinhalese chauvinism. My own concern is in the domino effect
of this dynamic in privileging territory as the primary channel
for minority political claims to gain legitimacy – numerical majoritarianism,
in effect, pushed minorities to articulate all grievances through
claims to enhanced powers attaching to regional bodies. Thus
again and again territorially defined constitutional settlements
emerge as the privileged modality to addresses minority rights.
This makes those communities that cannot control territorial power
even more vulnerable to majority chauvinism. This includes minorities
within minorities (such as Muslim IDPs discussed by Shahul
Hasbullah in this issue) as well as territorially dispersed
political communities (such as the women who form the Women’s
Support Group of Companions on a Journey). Given our history
substantial decentralization/federalism with extensive power devolved
away from the central government is imperative – but this is not
the end game. As the peace process moves ever more rapidly to
discussions regarding the future of pluralism in Sri Lanka, it
is imperative that we all enter that conversation but not limit
ourselves to the proposals currently on the table. We need to
interrogate received solutions, learn from our critiques, and
experiment with revolutionary institutional architectures[1] that
challenge our political practice to chart new paths towards ‘alternative
pluralisms’.
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