© Sameh El-Shahat 2009
…is India, of course, anybody will tell you that. It is a rather odd kind of democracy. It has a caste system which relegates millions of its adherents to the status of sub-humans, the “untouchables”, and it has a love of dynastic power, with a quite a few “Ghandis” having climbed to the highest offices in the land. In India, these feudal shenanigans don’t seem to create any conflict with their brand of “democracy”.
However it seems that India is once again about to redefine its claim to being the world’s largest democracy.
BREAKING NEWS
Well it is not really breaking news as such, but given the mess we are in these days, I began to wonder whethter our democracies themselves had some systemic problem that made them prone to electing such unoriginal people. I think we can safely say that this no gimmick, for it seems Rhesus macaque monkeys have just been given the vote. They have in fact been given the kind of powers that most of us can only dream of. They didn’t like their local politician, so they threw him out of the window or balcony. In doing so, they were unwittingly re-enacting the Defenestration of Prague, one of the events that led to the 30 Years’ War, and some would say one of the greatest early acts of democratic expressions in Europe. How many of us would have wished for the power to do this to some of our rather useless politicos????
What Happened?
Exasperated by their having to share the city with humans and being constantly shooed out of the parliament building, the macaques took matters in hand, and voted to evict the politician. It would seem that their worsening conditions are in part due to town-planning of Delhi. So they took out their ire on the second most important local politician.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7055625.stm
The irony is that these monkeys are running amok in Delhi but cannot be culled because they are venerated by the Hindus, yet, in a show of great non-partisan politics, they managed to get rid of a politician of the extremist Hindu BJP Party. I salute their even-handedness.
We here in the older democracies of Europe have toyed with a whole bunch of systems to create the best possible representation of the people and the most efficient use of power: first-past-the-post, proportional representation, and so on… But may be things would move far smoother, and more definitively if we introduced Zoological Representation…At first, we can give that right to our closest relatives, the apes, and only say, at local politics level…Then we can think of letting in others…To be honest, given how pathetic and apathetic we have become about our own democracies, it wouldn’t harm to give the vote to those who might appreciate it… Representative politics has become so jaded and dull… And we the voters often act like we no longer care…thereby undermining the whole point of democracy. If we don’t care, then the system is no longer efficient.
The problem with European‐style democracy is the inflexibility of the system. Take politicians, for example. We vote them in and then we can’t get rid of them for 4 or even 5 years (the only notable exception being Italy*). During that time, they don’t declare donations, pay absent members of their family salaries and enjoy one taxpayer‐funded junket after another. If they were chief executives of a company, such behaviour would invite the speedy termination of their contracts. I personally look forward to a greater turnover of politicians. If they don’t cut the mustard, if they are too sleazy or just plain inefficient then they should expect a speedy downfall, from a balcony, say. It is time to clean up the Mother of Parliaments and we should look to India for some inspiration. Political life has never been immune to monkey‐business, but it may seem that some of the real stuff is what politics decidedly needs it if it is ever to become relevant again. Why should the politicians have a monopoly on monkeying around? It’s time they got a taste of their own medicine. Move over, Homo Sapiens. Let the real Monkeys show us how it’s done. Politics might never be the same again.
* N.B. The Italian political system being what it is, efforts to allow monkeys or other non‐human primates aside humans on the electoral register are not likely to meet with much success. Aside from the fact that they not native to the Italy, governments there fall all the time with reassuring regularity, unaided by human or other means.
© Sameh El-Shahat 2009
© Sameh El-Shahat 2009
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