As a recent Washington Post article suggests, the Internet
shutdown in Kashmir valley has crossed a landmark of more than 140 days – the
longest ever internet shutdown to be imposed in any democracy. With the winter
vacations in Supreme Court going on it’s well predictable to go beyond 160 days
at least, unless the government lifts the ban on its own.
Meanwhile, Internet
shutdowns have been rampant throughout the country for the last few days in the
wake of popular protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019. The Internet continues to be shut down in majority parts of the north-eastern state
Assam and some regions of the National Capital Delhi also have faced internet
shutdown in the past few days. Interestingly, a Chinese media cites Indian Internet
Shutdowns as an example to justify Chinese authoritarian shutdowns - which is quite ironic given the fact that India and China are the largest democracy and authoritarian regime, respectively!
Amid such shutdowns,
questions arise as to the extent to which internet shutdowns kill the spirit of
democracy, and the gravity of such shutdowns. Is internet connectivity
important to democracy and democratic processes; and if yes, how important is
it? The degree of importance that we attach to internet connectivity in a
democracy in the 21st century should, to my mind, dictate the extent and
ease with which authorities should be permitted to impose internet
bans/shutdowns.
Constitutional
Democracy – A paradox?
Before we talk of the
importance of internet connectivity in a constitutional democracy, it’s
diligent to discuss a bit about constitutional democracy first. The very idea
of a constitutional democracy is paradoxical prima facie. A democracy, as is
classically understood, rule by the will of the people, where the will of the
people is represented by the majoritarian view. As per the classical conception
of democracy, the law of a republic must express the unrestricted will of the citizens,
with no limits whatsoever thereon[1].
The idea of constitutionalism, on the other hand, is based on the very foundational
conception of a limited government. The powers of a government are and have to
be essentially limited, by the framework of a constitutional boundary,
constitutionalism asserts.
These two contesting
lines of thought have been competing historically in the domain of political
philosophy and even politics in practice. Individual interests versus state
powers, individual rights versus popular sovereignty, private autonomy versus
public autonomy – these have been the central theme of debates throughout the
history of political philosophy. Constitutional democracy, as an idea, brings
together these two competing lines of thought successfully.
A constitutional
democracy views legitimation of those laws from two perspectives; two sources.
The first source of legitimation in a constitutional democracy is what we call
rule of law, or sometimes fundamental rights or human rights – principles of
individual autonomy that is so sacred that they cannot be overridden by any
amount of governmental will or popular view; rights so sacred that no state
power can take them away. The second source of legitimation is the popular
sovereignty, as to incorporate the elements of a democracy. Popular sovereignty
is to be honoured as the law of the land, and will of the people is of surmount
importance, subject to the other source of legitimation, namely
constitutionalism.
Internet
Access and Constitutional democracy
Significant to a
constitutional democracy is an element of deliberation – a deliberation that
sets forth the background for a marketplace of ideas[2]
where truth comes out as winner[3].
Number of scholars have emphasised upon the need and significance of
deliberation in a constitutional democracy and how it is of utmost importance
on the part of the people in order to truly exercise the power of a popular
sovereignty[4].
The
deliberative democracy model can be traced back to the late 20th
century, to scholars like Benjamin Barber[5], Robert Bellah[6], Amitai Etzioni[7], etc. Although different
scholars have proposed for different models on how a deliberative democracy
should be like ideally, they all have a common agreement when it comes to the
fundamental identifying features thereof. Almost all the scholars agree on the
significance of at least three features of deliberative democracy: the role
of open discussions, the importance of citizen participation, and lastly, the
existence of a well-functioning ‘public sphere’. Of these, the concept of a
well-functioning ‘public sphere’ holds specific significance for a discussion
on the role of the internet.
A
well-functioning public sphere can be understood as a public space where
discourse and deliberations can be undertaken freely and qualitatively so as to
pave way for an informed citizenry. Few scholars have attempted at mapping out
a number of distinctive features of a well-functioning public sphere, so as to
work as a starting point. As Peters and Habermas[8] defines them, the
distinctive features of a well-functioning public sphere can be encapsulated as
equal access to available resources, openness in the pursuit of particular issues,
transparency of the outer and inner affairs, and a public network of connected
participants[9].
The conviction that the internet can help us create the perfect public sphere is made
stronger when we look at the role that the internet plays in transforming
communication around us. Almost all the forms of communication central to a
deliberative democracy have been transformed and amplified by the internet[10]. As Gimmler[11] discusses, the primary
forms of communication, namely, Conversation, Information Aggregation,
Broadcast, and Group dialogue stand transformed by the internet.
Modern
communication frontiers and the internet have been inseparably linked, so much so
that ICT and the internet are often used interchangeably. Internet and other modern
Information and Communication Technologies provide for the amplification of
five features that are central to the transformation of communication frontiers[12]. The first one is the
quantity of information: internet presents before us the possibility to
generate, transfer, and store unimaginably large amounts of data and
information which was never possible in human history before. And that links
well with the second feature, communication speed. Modern technologies like
optical fibre and other solid transmission techniques provide for information
transfer at the blink of an eye, which paves the way for real-time communication.
The third feature is decentralisation, and it’s getting renovated each passing
day with the upcoming of new technologies like the blockchain technology and
other peer-to-peer techniques which completely eliminate the need for
intermediaries. The last two features are interactivity and demassfication,
which no doubt play a significant role in making digital communication what it is
today[13]. In addition to these
five, other scholars have also added other dimensions, like cost, security,
complexity, convergence, asynchronicity, globalisation etc[14].
Internet
shutdowns – Deathblow to well-functioning public-spheres?
Internet
shutdowns are detrimental as well as threatening to the very existence of a
constitutional democracy, given the crucial role the internet plays in a constitutional democracy; they suffocate all the democratic aspects of
inter-citizen interactions that the internet promotes. Conversation,
Information Aggregation, Broadcast, and Group dialogue, as discussed before,
are the four main forms of inter-citizen communication and interaction in a
democracy that facilitates deliberation – and all these stand blocked by an internet shutdown.
Given
the significance of information technologies and internet in ensuring a
well-functioning public-sphere, internet shutdowns are nothing but a deathblow
to the very existence of public-spheres. And given the role that public-spheres
play in a deliberative democracy, internet shutdowns are ultimately the perfect
recipe for an authoritarian regime in the twenty-first century – no wonder the
Chinese state media was one of the quickest to support and justify the internet
shutdown in a neighbouring country.
[2] See Shreya Singhal v. Union
of India, AIR 2015 SC 1523.
[3] Jill
Gordon, John Stuart Mill and the
Marketplace of Ideas, 23 Soc. Theory
Pract. 235–249 (2016).
[4] Antje
Gimmler, Deliberative democracy, the
public sphere and the internet, 27 Philos.
Soc. Crit. 21–39 (2001).
[5] Benjamin
Barber, Strong democracy: Participatory politics for a new age (1984).
[6] Robert
Bellah, The Good Society (1991).
[7] Amitai
Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the
Communitarian Agenda (1993).
[8] Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts
and Norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of Law and Democracy (1998).
[11] Id.
[12] Christopher
Weare, the Internet and Democracy: the
Causal Links Between Technology and Politics, 25 Int. J. Public Adm. 659–691 (2002).
[13] J.R.
Abramson et al., The Electronic
Commonwealth: The Impact of New Media Technologies on Democratic Politics 331 (1988).
[14] E.M.
Rogers, Communication Technology: The New Media in Society 273 (1986).
