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Saturday 21 December 2019

Daily Diary (DD) - Day 355 of 2019

1730hrs:

Still in Mirpur. Rich interaction. Very behind in routine 24 hour tasks. They pile up by the day and after 4 days of such lag, one feels they need to put a brake on public activity; in order to make sense of exactly what they've done in the past. 

There is a technology lag too.

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The following notes emerged from a major theme discussed throughout the day between our immediate company:

'Crowd' Politics

They are hard to discipline and it is hard to grasp their collective wisdom in real time, as just a few antagonists make long speeches with very little scope for 2 way interaction. 

The aggregate quality of thinking doesn't improve in such societies. It remains stagnant and thus adaptability to modern conditions and needs of public interest do not arise.....Problem solving is a shared pursuit and we don't give each other the chance to progress. We become dogmatic rather than pragmatic.

A research based approach to democracy 

Horizontal weight is necessary (among citizens) rather than the prevailing leader and crowd approach to democracy.

100 citizens proportional to the population of each tehsil - with 1 minute each - gives a much more measured approach than a leader crowd approach using the muscle of some business interests, who in turn suffocate public interest with their subsequent advance in vested personal interest.

Both conformist and nationalist politics in AJK have always adopted a leader crowd approach..... 

This is not helping us in our current dilemma.

It should be remembered that measuring public opinion helps in consensus building, which is the most difficult of the 4 stages involved in resolving our national question and needs of governance in AJK > J & K.

The 4 stages of Public Policy in AJK:

1) Pilot Study throughout AJK and GB: 2009 - 2011
2) Public Opinion Survey throughout AJK: 2011 - 2016
3) Consensus Building in AJK via an internal political process ....> The People's Assembly: 2017 - 2020
4) Legislation in AJK > Model for other parts of J & K: 2020 >

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We were so engaged with people that we totally forgot to upload our now customary daily video update, which corresponds to Day 5 of our current AJK wide tour to scout out members of the People's Assembly. We will now produce a video tomorrow on Day 6 despite it being a Sunday, in order to make up for our absence on Day 5. 


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