TIME TO LOOK AT KNOWLEDGE PANCHAYATS

Democracy must be more inventive than science to survive. It must explore new kinds of citizenship. Knowledge panchayats would give a place in policymaking to the less heard

- SHIV VISVANATHAN

ONE of the great tragedies of contemporary imagination is that democracy as a discourse has become impoverished. As an imagination, it needs to renew its creation myths. The old social contract built around majoritarianism and electoral view is no longer adequate. It has the tendency to become authoritarian in its everydayness.

The direct democracy experiment did recharge the imagination, but it also revealed that democracy needs craftsmanship that renews its assumption in a changing world. One discourse that needs to be re-examined is the relation between democracy, knowledge, information and communication. These need a new discourse enacting out the dialogic nature, revealing the dynamics between technology, knowledge and democracy.

Democracy lost out in the age of the storyteller. A storyteller imparts more than news. He embodies the angst and enthusiasm to the creation myths of the time. Modern media has brushed aside the storyteller. The whole commons of fables, myths, parables and stories is tending to disappear.

One has to realise that news as information creates forms of obsolescence. It erases what is old, it erases the question of oral memory. Memory is not information. It is a lived era. It is like being more at home with the world. There is a phenomenological intensity to the way it unfolds.

One major illustration of this came when political scientist Chandrika Parmar was interviewing an entrepreneur. We wanted to talk to him on pollution, but he was intrigued by our studies on the partition. He insisted on talking about his experiences. He referred to the train from Pakistan-of hiding in the bathroom, of watching people being slaughtered. He spoke passionately time and again, until we discovered he was seven years old when the partition occurred. We realised he had internalised the story of his father.