The Role of Civil Society In India — Pareto’s Parody

By Siddarth Pai

Published in

Global Shapers Bangalore

3 min readJun 3, 2018

Vilfredo Pareto, a 20th century economist noticed in Italy that 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the population, leading him to frame his famous 80–20 principle. When applied to the canons of democracy, the rule of the people, it lends itself to a rather hilarious predicament — a ridiculously small proportion of the population governs a vast majority of our choices and decisions. For a country that prides itself upon being the largest democracy in the world, this lends itself to quite a quandary.

India lacks institutions or think tanks, which can mold public opinion and give them all the facts. We live insulated lives; unaware of the laws being passed or of the happenings of the government machinery. There are never referendums on any topics, never debate or dialogue with our elected representatives about the ills that we face and a total lack of democratic participation except on a lustrum or five-yearly basis wherein we vote.

The joke of democracy is now is that they are of the people, by the people but against the people.

The system of checks and balances that was afforded by the accountability our elected representatives had to us through elections is grossly inadequate. Civil society offers us an avenue to grapple with these problems by creating forums for addressing problems and an architecture for redressing them.

If you can’t beat them, join them

There’s an old caveat that reads as such — ‘Never argue with a fool, for he shall take you down to his level and beat you by his experience’. Without dwelling upon the epithets used by this caveat, it does have a very pertinent message- Should civil society assimilate itself with the political class?

Politics, like love, is a game you can only win by not playing. By trying to assimilate itself into the political mainstream, civil society risks alienating the very people who support it. Arvind Kejriwal faces the same problem today. Politics tests your principles when it is better that you have none. To succeed at politics requires one to have the subterfuge and chicanery of a magician while maintaining the charm and innocence of a newborn calf. It opens itself to attacks and acrimony from all sides and exposes oneself to iniquities of the ruling class. To maintain its credence, civil society in the realm of politics would require impeccable integrity from its participants, the likes of which politics has not encountered. Even Gandhi was more an activist than a politician, eschewing any formal political titles (though he was the president of the INC session in Belgaum in 1924). The objectivity of civil society would be diluted by this endeavor.

But the need of the hour may be as such that it requires such a drastic move. Politics is a cruel mistress, and people, a fickle one. The need for change depends solely upon us. There’s a theory in political science, which states that ‘there is as much corruption as we are willing to tolerate’.

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The Role of Civil Society In India — Pareto’s Parody

By Siddarth Pai

Written by Nithya J Rao