Democratic mass line

"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," said John F Kennedy in his 1961 presidential inauguration address. Given that such addresses are not interactive, nobody could look the newly sworn-in president in the eye and ask why. Since then, a lot has changed in the world. Governments worldwide face a crisis of legitimacy as more and more people question their government's choices and why they are asked to display unqualified loyalty. In a democracy, questioning your government is your legitimate right. Still, those with an overwhelming voice usually manage to dominate such conversations and the voiceless are pushed out of the frame. The exponential population growth further complicates this problem.

But is it not a legitimate question? Why should you not ask what the country can do for you before offering to be helpful? To answer this question, you must ask yourself how much your government is aware of your existence as an individual. Governments indeed work with various datasets to know about the well-being of their citizens. But even in democracies, no government can claim to be well aware of every citizen's life, challenges, and needs. Many data collection and aggregation processes take place to facilitate policymaking, ranging from periodic censuses to town halls. However, it is difficult to see how grassroots realities can inform policymaking at the macro level given the unique complexities of each community and the human resource shortage at the policy level. So, even when your state claims it sees you, it seldom does. It has neither the eyes nor the brainpower to do so. This is why you are witnessing an all-pervasive wave of disillusionment in democratic societies that the subverters easily weaponise. Of course, local governments offer a limited window of ventilation for the masses, but given that in most countries, power resides one step higher than these governments, you cannot hope to find the pacifying effect of such efforts at the community level.

I was made painfully aware of the cluelessness of the Pakistani government about the well-being of their subjects during the 2010 floods. This was when mass displacement took place, and we witnessed an unnerving level of poverty. One high-ranking government official confided in me that successive governments suspected there was grinding poverty in rural areas, but no one knew it was that bad. Imagine a government being this unaware of its citizens' condition and learning about it by chance. The same problem would play out again in the 2022 floods.

This brings us to the title of this piece. You know, the advocates of a prospective clash between China and the West, Doctor Strangeloves convinced of the inevitability of a new cold war, seem in an awful hurry to cause a decoupling between the two sides. But they ignore that we live in a different age full of unique challenges where working together and learning from each other's experiences might offer the only real solution. To understand this matter, imagine all eight billion human beings living in a computer simulation where their experiences generate data which informs the simulation to help them live a better life. Do you think such a simulation could afford to cordon off nearly 1.4 billion souls and not use their data because of some ideological bias? Certainly not. To learn from each other, we need trust between governments, and all this talk of an inevitable clash or cold war only makes such trust-building nearly impossible.

A lot has been written on the Chinese model of governance in the West, and since this scribe can neither read nor write Mandarin, his dependence on such literature is a forgone conclusion. Of course, one could depend a bit on local publications, Urdu literature and the English material created by the People's Republic. Still, it would help if you had more than what is available for critical analysis in this category. With time and practice, one learns to separate views from facts, the method one uses while reading Western literature.

No matter where you start in China, one principle stands out throughout its history: the mass line. Simply put, it means from the masses to the masses. What does it look like in practice? You can see it as a two-pronged strategy. The first prong focuses on the leadership's obligation to listen to and trust the masses. This can be achieved through an exhaustive effort to reach out to each individual citizen and solicit their views and concerns. The second prong can easily be subverted for authoritarian causes, but it is useful, nonetheless. It involves effecting change at the grassroots level through positive engagement and advocacy. There is no doubt that given the nature of governance in China, where two parallel verticals i.e. the administrative silo and the communist party's cadres working in tandem, make it easier to achieve these goals, and democratic societies with smaller governments and less control may not have this luxury. It hasn't stopped many post-colonial democracies from imitating the Chinese model. India's RSS is trying to reshape the polity (single-party rule, active, often intrusive cadres colluding with bureaucracy and state institutions), albeit in Hindutva's name instead of socialism. Similarly, the PTI's Riasat-e-Madina model sought to do it in Islam's name. But even these imitations learn the wrong lesson from China.

Undoubtedly, democracies are supposed to be messier than any controlled polity, and such an endeavour might be too big for them. I remember the PML-N's shikayat (complaint) cell initiative and the PTI's Pakistan Citizens' Portal and how understaffed these entities were. Fortunately, with the penetration of smartphones and easy-to-use apps in societies and the advent of AI as the back-end support system, these issues can be solved in the near future. Thanks to technological advancement, creating targeted interventions custom-designed to each citizen's needs may also be possible. The actual deficit is of intent.

When citizens feel seen and heard, their trust in the system is reinforced. The governments of democratic societies need to ask themselves why they keep losing the trust of their citizens and why it is that, despite the pessimistic predictions of their pundits, China endures and goes from strength to strength. Surely, it must be doing something right. What I propose here is not to copy the Chinese model, which is unique to the country, but to develop a democratic version of the mass line which can empower the individual citizens and local communities beyond their wildest dreams.