City Roads - Signposts to our democracy

City Roads - Signposts to our democracy - By Ramesh Ramanathan

Understanding India’s democracy is tough. Describing it is even tougher. Like most things Indian – a soothing ayurvedic massage, piping hot parathas and bhurji at a roadside dhaba – it is best simply experienced. Often these experiences offer themselves as unexpected vignettes that pop into our everyday lives, like the aunt who drops in for evening tea. But if anyone were to seek out a democracy “tour” in India, I would suggest a long ride on our city roads – not just the main arteries, but also the side streets and the gullies that branch off like the veins on a leaf. Our city roads are lined with signposts to our democracy.

Start with the road-occupants. Cycle rickshaw holding up the chauffeur-driven mercedez, overloaded maruti challenging an overbearing city bus, paanwala and bicyle mechanic parked permanently on the pavement. Flower-seller, milk booth, cobbler, hopping school-children. All jostling each other in a display of democratic interdependence, with space being made for everyone.

The physical architecture of our roads are also motifs of our public governance systems. Trees of all species - many totally inappropriate for roadside planting – hang over the streets, gnarled trunks pushing through the tar. The line between private and public property is blurred on India’s city roads. All varieties of properties – residential to commercial - encroach the public space. Electric transformers brazenly occupy half the pavement – public utility invading public space. And the electric company wonders why people don’t think twice about taking illegal connections from the overhead wires.

Watch the road surfaces as well, they tell a tale. The smooth blacktops of the main thoroughfares give way to grainy side roads and dusty slum lanes. Our democracy too is more accessible to some Indians than others. Look carefully and you can see the corruption as well –the recently-laid road surface with an anemic coat of asphalt that wouldn’t survive the next monsoon. In our democracy, we sometimes see different arms of government unable to work with each other, and indeed, sometimes undermining each other. On our city roads as well, we see the municipality finish laying a road one day, only to have the water board cut it open the next.

As for our behaviour on our city roads, they are reflections of how we run our democracy. Every stretch of road has traffic violations. Law-abiders feel like fools as they see the law-breakers getting away scot-free. Democracy demands that we compromise our personal liberty for a larger common good. But each of us will be ready for these compromises only if all of us are ready for them. There is a “tipping point” of unchecked violation, beyond which rules don’t mean anything. Roads or democracy: six of one, half-a-dozen of another. No difference.

Most of us suffer silently, cooped in our self-created urban cocoons - in the overcrowded bus or the airconditioned car, millions of human pressure cookers gathering steam. We all feel the pain of poor roads – lack of planning, bad design, poor execution, minimal legal compliance. But somehow we are not able to come together to claim ownership over the road and say, “This is ours, and we are going to fix the problem”. Often, this is not because we don’t care – in fact, we care so much that it hurts. But we don’t know how to step out of that private space and fix the problem – it’s too overwhelming. The system has made the citizen feel frustratingly irrevelant.

Nothing possibly captures the similarity between our roads and our democracy better than the temple in the middle of the road. It is a remarkable sight: you can almost visualise the pattern of growth that engulfed the temple, with the road snaking upto it, gradually encircling it, and hoping to eventually choke it out. And yet it survives, a resolute reminder of a different way of life, a complete eco-system transported in time. To many, the presence of this “obstacle” is stupefying – “How can we allow this to happen, how can we ever progress like this?” Maybe the temple is a reminder that the road of economic growth that we are rushing on eventually leads nowhere unless we are able to carry all with us, even those whose views we are not able to fully comprehend.

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The author is Co-Founder of Janaagraha.