Yogendra Yadav writes | Democracy, globally, needs renewal. Our idea of Swaraj offers some answers

Democracy is thus not just about good institutions but also about robust practices. (Illustration: C R Sasikumar)

6 min readSep 22, 2026 06:20 AM IST First published on: Sep 22, 2026 at 06:20 AM IST

What should be a new constitution for the 21st century? For us, the question raises the spectre of mutilation of the Constitution of India. But once we think of constitution with a small “c” — not simply as the name of a founding text, but as the basic arrangement of power — we can appreciate the pressing nature of this question across the globe. The crisis of democracy in the US and the extreme right-wing wave in Europe have put the rather sorry state of democracy across the globe in the spotlight. Once we refer to the verb form of the constitution — to constitute, or the act of constituting — the idea of a new constitution opens up the possibility of reimagining the future of democracy.

India has a surprisingly salient place in answering this global question, and not just as a case study of democratic degeneration. India can also be a source of ideas for democratic regeneration.

The concept of Swaraj can help enrich the democratic ideal. The dominant idea of democracy as self-rule is limited to how the people relate to rulers: The idea that citizens should have an equal right to choose those who rule them and then hold them accountable. But it does not draw our attention to what these citizens must do to one another, what the demos must look like. The idea of Swaraj, as interpreted by Gandhiji, involved a conceptual twist: Swaraj is not just rule of the self, but also rule over the self; it is not just about how people relate to rulers, but also about how they relate to one another and to themselves. On this reading, the building of a political community bound by shared norms, an open dialogue and self-regulation is central to the idea of democracy. In a similar vein, Dr Ambedkar underlined fraternity as a precondition for a successful democracy.

Democracy is thus not just about good institutions but also about robust practices. Constituting democracy is not just about sowing the seeds, but about regular cultivation. In Cultivating Democracy, anthropologist Mukulika Banerjee draws our attention to how the activity of cultivating crops encourages democratic practices of “nurture, patience, vigilance and hope”. A culture of democracy requires building community bonds or fraternity, crafting a shared vision, rearticulating the vision for every new generation, investing in developing political leaders and placing a premium on the tiny class of “idealists” who participate in this game of democracy not as entrepreneurs but as missionaries.

Several 20th-century Indian political thinkers can help us rethink the institutional design of democracy in the 21st century. They were all radical democrats, but deeply sceptical of the arrangement of democracy in post-Independence India. Ambedkar’s insistence on the “preconditions of democracy”, M N Roy’s advocacy of party-less democracy, Jayaprakash Narayan’s plea for the reconstruction of Indian polity and Rammanohar Lohia’s proposal for chaukhanba raj (four-pillar democracy) may not have gained acceptance in their own times. These ideas cannot be adopted today in their original form. But their critique invites us to think of reconstituting some of the taken-for-granted furniture of modern democracies.

Let us note four of these design defects. One, modern democracies operate at a scale too vast to make the idea of self-rule meaningful. Nation-states or even their federal units are simply too unwieldy to allow any meaningful self-rule. Two, there is a radical mismatch between the level at which a problem presents itself and the level at which the power to redress it is located. There is a case for building the architecture of democracy from the bottom up, starting with the village or local councils and going all the way up to global governance, following the principle of subsidiarity — what can be decided at a lower level must not be left to a higher level. Three, the calendar of democratic accountability — elections every five or four or even two years — is at once too short and too long. It’s too short to allow long-term policy designs and too long to check arbitrary use of power. And four, the threshold of a simple majority of seats in an election is too low to hand over the keys to the brute power of the modern state. The majoritarianism we see all around us is not a perversion but the natural unfolding of the institutional design of what we call democracy.

These thinkers also drew our attention to three systemic defects of democracy. One, the social hierarchy of caste and class that negates the promise of one person, one vote. The caste system and the capitalist economic system allow and encourage the concentration of social and economic power that is simply incompatible with the idea of self-rule by equal citizens. Two, the present system of corporate-controlled mass media negates the possibility of democratic public opinion. It serves to under-inform and misinform the public and allows for an easy democracy capture. And three, the fossilised oligarchies that constitute political parties across the world serve as high barriers to entry to politics and end up perpetuating the rule of a tiny elite, unresponsive to the electorate. Just as the 20th century could not imagine a democratic constitution without a bill of rights, we cannot imagine a constitution for the 21st century without a chapter on institutional mechanisms to check the concentration of economic power in corporates, information flows in mass media, and political decision-making in political parties.

The writer is a member of Swaraj India and national convenor of Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan. The article is based on his presentation at the conference on “A Constitution for the 21st Century”, organised by the McQuillan Institute at Boston, September 11-12