On 08/05/2011 07:48 AM, ss wrote:
On Thursday 04 Aug 2011 7:41:18 pm Charles Haynes wrote:
Yet it is a predominantly Hindu country that writhes and struggles with an
internal debate on secularism. If democracy is the will of the majority, then
pluralism should be the rule in india, not secularism. And in fact that is
exactly what I see around me. Pluralism in the guise of secularism. Perhaps it
It is people who object to pluralism who have a problem?
Not directly related to the topic on hand, but I was reminded of a term
that I came across long ago, a form of democracy that intrigued me for
some time - Sortition.
To quote a proponent of this form of governance, John Burnheim -
But do we, in order to have democracy, have to find a way in which the
demos first makes up its mind what is to be done and then controls its
representatives in the process of carrying it out? What I want to
suggest is a different conception. Let the convention for deciding what
is our common will be that we will accept the decision of a group of
people who are well informed about the question, well-motivated to find
as good a solution as possible and representative of our range of
interests simply because they are statistically representative of us as
a group. If this group is then responsible for carrying out what it
decides, the problem of control of the execution process largely
vanishes. Those directing the execution process are carrying out their
own decisions. They may need a little prodding to keep them up to the
mark, but there is no institutional basis for a conflict of interest
between bodies responsible for making decisions and those responsible
for execution. They have an overriding interest in showing that their
decisions are practical and well-grounded.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
Bharath
