New Delhi, Sept. 21: Singur hangs in nebulous deadlock. Jammu and Kashmir remain mutually fire-walled. Terror and hatred leap from province to province, city to city, claiming victims and creating cause for reaction.

On the many erupted frontiers in the world’s largest democracy, disruption and violence, rather than debate and dialogue, have become the routine recourse to resolutions.

Parliament, democracy’s central platform, remains in prolonged recess — a closure probably dictated by the ruling UPA’s anxieties over avoiding assault from both Left and Right. Meantime, the street has become the unruly theatre of engagement.

Gujjars choke all routes to the national capital — rail, motorway, bypass — with violent sit-ins to coax job reserva-tions. Jammu resorts to a two-month civil disruption to se-cure controversial access and operational rights around the Amarnath shrine in Kashmir. The Valley’s counterblast is a series of protests and hartals that dislocate life for weeks on end.

Raj Thackeray’s Navnirman Sena wreaks wanton and recurrent lumpenism in the name of Maratha pride. Mamata Banerjee and her volatile allies enforce an unyielding blockade that spells daily bedlam and threatens to seal the economic future of Bengal.

Are these signposts of a new vibrancy coursing through our democracy, or are we to assume that democracy in its largest arena is descending to its lesser, and more alarming, definition: mobocracy.

Opinion varies, depending on who you ask. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has been gnashing at the prospect of the next bandh; his party has posted prompt disclaimers, holding strikes up as a fundamental right. Statutes enjoin upon Mumbai police to call Thackeray’s whiplash unlawful; his Sena proceeds brazenly with its assault in the name of sentiment. Critical commodity supplies to Kashmir and Ladakh are blocked for weeks by Jammu’s agitationists; Jammu says it couldn’t care until it has its way.

One man’s right has become another man’s violation, what some insist is democracy at play, others call the unleashing of anarchy. Democracy in our parts, it would appear, has discovered a new route to resolutions: disruption.

Of the many interpretations democracy has, one is that it is the dictatorship of the majority, even if it is a majority of one. Numerical might becomes right and is able to justify tactics like bandhs in the name of democracy.

The fame, or infamy, of bandhs has spread far beyond our shores. It has barged into the hallowed columns of the Oxford English Dictionary (bandh: Indian, general strike), it has earned a detailed explanatory on that capricious knowledge-engine called Wikipedia (originally a Hindi word meaning ‘closed’, is a form of protest used by political activists in some countries in South Asia like India and Nepal… a much feared tool of protest).

The following Wiki annotation will probably not surprise readers at home: “The Supreme Court of India banned bandhs in 1998, but political parties still organize them. In 2004, the Supreme Court of India fined two political parties, BJP and Shiv Sena for organizing a bandh in Mumbai as a protest against bomb blasts in the city. The state with the maximum bandhs in India is West Bengal where the average number of bandhs per year is 40-50 (ranging from a couple of hours to a maximum of 2 days per bandh).”

CPM MP Mohammed Salim is in a unique, probably unenviable, corner on the issue: bandhs are enshrined political strategy for his party, but lately, thanks to the intransigent Mamata Banerjee, bandhs have also become a daily blight. But Salim treads the dilemma dexterously.

“Resistance and non-co-operation, strikes and bandhs are fundamental to the democratic process, Gandhi taught us civil disobedience,” he says.

“But it is equally democratic that you exhaust all options before taking such resort. Taking to the streets and spurning talks is perverse Gandhigiri.”

Political scientist and president of the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research Pratap Bhanu Mehta is in broad agreement. “There is often cause to question the democratic legitimacy of protesting groups,” he says. “They resort to some sort of street veto bypassing established avenues of redressal.”

Talking specifically of recent bandhs in Rajasthan, Jammu and Bengal, Mehta says: “None of these groups appear to have a record of sustained agitation on issues they have taken up. In the case of Mamata Banerjee, does she have a record of campaigning for the better functioning of Parliament, for instance?”

Many of those who resort to bandhs argue that it is the only way of attracting attention to their cause.

“Do you think anybody would have heard us if Jammu hadn’t been shut for two months?” asks Lila Karan Sharma, convener of the Amarnath Yatra Sangharsh Samiti, wreathed in the laurels of the most extended disruption Jammu has ever seen. “Hurting the establishment is the only way of making it hear.”

Both Salim and Mehta agree, but in varying degrees. Salim flags the current shuttering of Parliament — there has been no monsoon session and Parliament reopens only on October 17 — as an example of making forums for democratic debate and redressal “unavailable”.

“So many urgent issues need debate, Kashmir, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, but the government is not even calling a meeting of the National Integration Council, what is one to do?”

Mehta agrees that the “erosion in the legitimacy of democratic institutions” often justifies strike and bandh calls.

“There are times that the state is not able to effectively implement its own writ, and any small group can put a foot in the door, but equally, some of our bandhs can be seen as blackmailing the representative process for political gain. Who is to really prove what kind of support they really enjoy, who is to speak for the democratic rights of people whose lives are disrupted by such bandhs?”