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This year marks the 20th anniversary of Lokniti, one of the most admirable intellectual initiatives in the history of independent India. Headquartered at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, Lokniti is a network of political scientists, teaching at colleges and universities across the country. It conducts surveys and opinion polls on each assembly and general election in India, which pay careful attention to voter attitudes and voter behaviour, and to cleavages of caste, class, and religion. Journalists across India, and scholars from across the world, rely massively on the vast storehouse of empirical data that Lokniti has assembled on the Indian elections.

Lokniti is remarkable for its depth of scholarship; and for the collegiality of its scholars. Most Indian academic institutions, like most Indian political parties, are dominated by a single charismatic individual. But Lokniti is run neither by an alpha male nor a high command. It is a genuinely decentralised network, which practises democracy within, even while studying democracy without.

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In the recent round of assembly elections, the pollsters of Lokniti collected field-level data from different parts of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa, Manipur and Punjab. However, for Lokniti the conduct and result of elections in India is only one element of their mandate. A second, as defined by their charter, is the development of a comparative understanding of democratic polities in different historical and cultural settings.

In the first week of March, when polling was still on in Uttar Pradesh, in distant Bengaluru a group of scholars were discussing a report that Lokniti, working with collaborators in four other countries, had just produced on the State of Democracy in South Asia.

Multi-party democracy based on universal adult franchise was long considered a Western monopoly. However, the data in this new report demonstrates that electoral democracy was now strongly rooted in South Asia. Once, only Sri Lanka and India held regular elections; now, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and even Bhutan have abandoned autocracy or monarchy for democracy.

Reading the report closely, one found that while, in a formal sense, democracy is fairly well established in South Asia, in a substantive sense there are real worries. For one thing, while a decade ago 64% of respondents were happy with democratic functioning, the figure now is closer to 55%. For another, respondents seemed to trust unelected (and unrepresentative) public bodies such as the army and the judiciary more than elected bodies such as Parliament.

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Reading this well-researched report on democracy in South Asia, I was struck by how many respondents did not seem to believe that public institutions could function on the basis of impersonal or impartial rules and procedures. 47% of those surveyed across the region believed that bribes were required to access government services. 19% believed that influence or sifarish was crucial. 9% believed that knowing a politician would help them, while 6% thought they needed a middleman instead. A mere 19% of respondents believed that they could access government services without any intervention or influence whatsoever.

Nurturing democracy in the poor, multi-ethnic, multi-religious nations of South Asia was always going to be far harder than in the richer and more homogeneous nations of Western Europe. Among the major challenges the South Asian nations face is overcoming the dangers of linguistic and religious majoritarianism. The record here is decidedly mixed, with this latest Lokniti report demonstrating that minorities across the region continue to feel insecure. At the same time, the study found that, except in Nepal, religious minorities endorsed the idea of democracy more actively than did religious majorities. An earlier Lokniti study had found that, after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, Muslims in north India began to vote in larger numbers. Harassed by the police, suspected by many members of the majority community, minorities across South Asia largely trust the impartiality of the ballot box, where each voter is equal regardless of the language she or he speaks or the religion she or he practises.

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This latest State of Democracy Report will consolidate Loknitis already high and well deserved scholarly reputation. Yet I was disappointed to see so little attention paid to questions of gender. In all the countries of South Asia, women are discriminated against in multiple ways. They remain under-represented in the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Working women are often paid less and offered worse service conditions than their male counterparts in identical jobs. When it comes to making personal or professional choices, boys and men are far freer than girls or women. And within the home and the village, as well as in the office and the city, the harassment of women is ubiquitous, and violence against them widespread as well. So far as the treatment of women is concerned, South Asia must surely be one of the most undemocratic parts of the world.

Ramachandra Guhas books include Gandhi Before India

Twitter: @Ram_Guha

The views expressed are personal

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The state of democracy between elections - Hindustan Times

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This 'Latest Academic Craze' Is Threat to US Democracy Newser Sullivan argues that this is why protesters shouting down campus speakers they don't agree with seem to be performing a ritualistic exorcism. He concludes that this raising of ideology above facts is dangerous to democracy no matter your politics. Read ... and more »

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This 'Latest Academic Craze' Is Threat to US Democracy - Newser

Despite the reluctance of many establishment Republicans, such as Paul Ryan, to support Donald Trumps candidacy for President, for the most part Republicans, like Ryan, have now rallied behind Trump, largely because they see an opportunity to push through the legislation and policies for which they have long salivated but had been unable to approve during the Obama presidency.

The distaste for Trump largely seems to be a response to his political Tourettes syndrome: he gives voice in an uncensored language to the brutally racist, sexist, anti-poor, and anti-working-class values of the GOP.

Despite the fact that Trump claims to have the best words, Republicans tended to distance themselves from his rhetoric while quietly champing at the bit to have a puppet in the White House to smooth a path of no resistance for their objective of funneling taxpayer money away from serving the millions of average citizens who pay taxes to the wealthiest one percent who seem fiscally insatiable.

Most particularly, Republicans have long looked forward to repealing and, supposedly, replacing Obamacare, having voted some 62 times or more (estimates vary) in Congress to repeal it during the Obama administration.

So what is happening now that Republicans control both chambers of Congress and effectively own a White House enthusiastically poised to obliterate the Affordable Care Act, one of the most sweeping and transformative pieces of legislation in American history?

Democracy is happening, in both participatory and representational terms, making clear that the political hopes of the nations working-class majority, including those who voted for Trump, reside, as President Obama reminded us in his farewell speech, in the people in us.

Recently, in the pages of PoliticusUSA, I wrote that Trumps Presidency has been in large part an assault on dissent itself and the process of deliberative democracy as imagined by our founders and which James Madison articulated most sharply and profoundly.

The recent uprisings at Republican town halls, however, are demonstrating the power of the people to withstand and turn back that assault and to encourage a more reasoned and deliberate approach to addressing the healthcare needs of the American majority.

Take Joni Ernst, for example, elected as part of the GOP 2014 Senatorial class. She ran on a vociferous pledge to repeal Obamacare immediately, as portrayed in a notorious political ad featuring her wielding a firearm and literally shooting down the act. But, as Burgess Everett has reported in Politico, she now is using the word deliberative when describing her state of mind about replacing Obamacare.

Ernst and others among her Republican colleagues are more than just getting cold feet about their weddedness to repealing the ACA; they are feeling the intense heat of the voting public, putting the proverbial feet of their elected representatives to the fire.

Veteran Senator Chuck Grassley, who infamously misrepresented the ACA in inflammatory terms, charging the act would result in death panels making decisions about your grandmas life, is just one example of someone feeling the pressures of democracy in action.

Jennifer Haberkorn reports in Politico, for example, about Grassleys recent appearance at a town hall. She tells the story of a 62-year-old pig farmer, Chris Petersen, who is worried about losing health coverage. As a message for Grassley about the power of the electorate in a representational democracy, he brought him a pack of Extra Strength Tums. According to Haberkorn, Petersen elaborated to Grassley on the meaning of his offering:

Youre going to need them in the next few years. People are disappointed. If it wasnt for Obamacare, we wouldnt be able to afford insurance. Over 20 million will lose coverage and with all due respect, sir, youre the man who talked about the death panels. Youre going to create one great big death panel in this country for people cant afford to get insurance.

Petersen demonstrates that voters have long memories, and he also demonstrates the power of participatory democracy to move our those who are supposed to represent the real needs and interests of their constituencies and not just push their own ideological agendas or the ideological agendas of the moneyed interests who sponsor their campaigns.

Republicans all over the nation are facing this kind of pressure in town halls and are now admitting that those showing up are not the professional protesters many Republicans have charged in efforts to dismiss dissent but in fact genuinely concerned constituents fulfilling their roles as citizens in the democratic process.

Some, though, like Illinois Republican Representative Peter Roskam, are refusing to hold town halls, effectively rejecting democracy in both representational and participatory terms. Can one really represent the constituents one refuses to hear?

The Republican Senator from Arkansas Tom Cotton has been clear about the realities of American democracy, warning Congress that it is moving too quickly and cautioning Republicans that they will be judged in future elections by the legislation they pass now.

People want healthcare, and they are clearly not just paying close attention but asserting their power as voters. Republicans this time will not be allowed to get away with false claims that their plan will lower costs and broaden coverage. They will actually have to produce legislation that does so. As of now, the Congressional Budget Office indicates millions will lose coverage and not be able to afford it.

When James Madison penned Federalist Paper No. 10, he underscored the importance of representatives who would act at some distance from the passions of the people and thus be capable of enacting a deliberative democracy. For Madison, the representatives should be able to withstand the temporary delusion to give time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection.

What we see today is that it is peoples participation that is forcing their representatives into a deliberative stance to control their temporary delusion that repealing the ACA will be good policy for the majority of Americans.

Let us be cognizant of what we are witnessing: Participatory democracy is our last and best hope. The chants at town halls of DO YOUR JOB! are in fact making Republican lawmakers afraid that they will lose theirs and hopefully encourage accountability to their constituents genuine needs and interests.

affordable care act, Burgess Everett, Chris Petersen, Chuck Grassley, Deliberative Democracy, democracy, Donald Trump, James Madison, Jennifer Haberkorn, Joni Ernst, Obamacare, Participatory Democracy, paul ryan, Tom Cotton

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Town Halls Show Participatory Democracy Best Hope of Saving Obamacare and Country - PoliticusUSA

Transnational socialism vs. Transnational Socialism TechCrunch Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose, declaimed the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace ...

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Transnational socialism vs. Transnational Socialism - TechCrunch

Headlines about the end of the republic litter political commentary across the political landscape. They usually mark the beginning of a discussion of the merits of Donald Trump as president of the United States, but his ascendency is not the leading sign of a collapse of American society. For that, see a recent poll indicating a tectonic shift occurring in the political preferences of U.S. adults. When you consider current trends in cultural norms and widely held beliefs, you will see that we are headed toward the end of the American experiment.

The American Culture and Faith Institute recently conducted a survey of adults 18 and older. It shows not only how deeply divided Americans are on some issues but also how their view of the nation stands in many cases in stark contrast to our nations founding principles. Most Americans (58 percent) see themselves as politically moderate, while a quarter identify as conservative, and 17 percent as liberal. Those who were both socially and fiscally conservative, the group tracked by the ACFI in greatest detail, were 6 percent of the population.

But those differences dont reveal the greatest divide and danger to Americas future. The most alarming result, according to [George] Barna, was that four out of every ten adults say they prefer socialism to capitalism, the ACFI noted in its commentary on the poll. That is a large minority, Barna said, and it includes a majority of the liberals who will be pushing for a completely different economic model to dominate our nation. That is the stuff of civil wars. It ought to set off alarm bells among more traditionally-oriented leaders across the nation. That 40 percent of Americans now prefer socialism to capitalism could spell major change to the policies advanced by legislators and political leaders and to the interpretations of judges ruling on the application of new and pre-existing laws.

How did we get here? The popularity of Bernie Sanders, whose 2016 presidential campaign was marked by an altruistic spirit and a consistent value system, is of course not the cause of this movement in public opinion but rather an indicator of it. Many Americans have forgotten the lessons of the Cold War and the disasters witnessed in the crumbling economies and failed polities of Communist and socialist countries in the 1990s. Communism was on its last leg, it appeared, and its little brother socialism was not far behind.

Little did we know that the fires of socialism were being stoked in corners all across America where it is held in higher regard than in nations that have suffered under it. It is obvious where such thinking abounds and continues to spread: in our colleges and universities. The ideologies of professors and educators have proven stronger than facts: The benefits of socialism and Communism are taught from the Ivy League to the local community college. A generation has been taught a lie, and they now believe it.

Americans who believe in limited government, welfare reform, and states rights should look over their shoulder and realize that a dangerous ideology is gaining ground. A crowd that you thought history had left behind is growing. It prefers an America that would look drastically different from what it has been from its founding through the present day.

One reason that such a dangerous political construct has advanced is that left-leaning activists have hijacked terms of the debate and muddied the popular understanding of political language. Consider that more than 80 percent of all respondents to the ACFI poll said they supported traditional values, as did nearly 70 percent of those who identify as liberal, even if in fact they tend to be socially progressive.

Barna described those who in the poll were identified to be liberals. They are

a group among whom three-fourths support same-sex marriage; seven out of ten advocate legalized abortion; a majority want socialism to replace capitalism; and nearly one out of five claim to be LGBT. Its hard to imagine which traditional moral values they are referring to. This oddity does, however, reflect how the ideological Left consistently appropriates language and imputes new meaning to terms that are known and popular. The survey data raise the possibility that liberals may redefine traditional moral values to include beliefs and behaviors that are not at all traditional or moral, from a biblical perspective.

It all depends on what the definition of values is.

Freedom isnt free is inscribed on the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., reminding all who visit of the blood and treasure that has been paid to end tyrannical rule abroad. That America itself may become a socialist country must be abhorrent and foreign to the many who have fought, and to those who still fight, for free markets, traditional values, and capitalist ideals. Conservative and traditionally minded Americans can no longer assume that their neighbor believes what they believe or that he defines the terms of political discourse the same way. The country has changed.

Sadly, Barna is only partially wrong that this divide is the stuff of civil wars. In this case, the civil war is fought not directly and openly, with bullets and bombs, but with an intellectual assault on history and facts a quiet revolution.

It is time to play both the short and the long game.Now is the time to speak out and educate all who will hear about the history of this nation and the benefits of traditional values, free markets, and capitalism, which, though not perfect, are better than all the alternatives. Those who love this nation and the ideals of our experiment in liberty must counter the gainsayers in academia and the media or they will soon find that America as one nation under God is no more.

David Nammo, an attorney, is the executive director and CEO of the Christian Legal Society.

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Socialism's Rising Popularity Threatens America's Future - National Review