Making Democracy Social

The growing attempts to communalise certain social and cultural areas within the limits of a narrow understanding of religion and ethnicity seem to be pushing our democracy at the crossroads, as has been done by a certain set of politicians in general and a certain brand of people’s representatives in particular. As the editorial in the current issue of EPW suggests, people’s representatives, aided by certain politicians, have taken a lead in monitoring and regulating their constituents’ intimate interpersonal relations.

Democracy exists at the crossroads of public institutions that, in the recent past, have taken over the task of arbitrary stamping or labelling people. Religious identity is used to impose a patriarchal order on intimate relationships between two human beings from different sexes. Similarly, it also exists at a level where the “personal” is politicised not for defending the dignity of women but for defending one’s personal as well as party interests. Politicians with a communal and patriarchal orientation tend to drag such issues in public discussion that are strictly interpersonal. This certainly leads to an inversion of the feminist radical call which said that the “personal is political.” This feminist call seeks to indicate the act of taking the charge of one’s own self-definition and thus launch a public fight for the decolonisation of the female body, which has been colonised by patriarchy that is active across the board.