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We are writing as two people who have spent much of our careers in conservative circles.  Soren has worked for Senator John McCain’s campaign for President, a Republican Member of Congress, and several conservative and libertarian organizations.  Cameron clerked for conservative federal judges such as the Hon. Edith Brown Clement and worked at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.  We are excited to join Protect Democracy as Director of Communications and Policy, and Counsel, respectively.

We wanted to share our thinking about why we are joining Protect Democracy.

All Americans should be concerned about the state of our democracy, and that includes conservatives.  The United States is in the midst of a long-term democratic decline that must be stopped.

The title, “A time for choosing democracy,” is a reference to the famous Ronald Reagan speech, “A time for choosing.” It has the wonderful line:

You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down: [up] man’s old — old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. 

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Update. There were some very flattering comments:

The #CoalitionOfAllDemocraticForces in action. Yes, @protctdemocracy lawyers @justingflorence and @LSchwartztol represent me in two FOIA lawsuits. And no, I had no idea that this piece was happening. Very moved. https://t.co/kKuyXQyRrM

— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) December 15, 2017

Nice to see people put aside policy fights to focus on the basics of our democracy. There are no long term partisan advantages in destroying the fundamentals of our system: https://t.co/74XuSsCLl2 via @protctdemocracy

— John Dean (@JohnWDean) December 14, 2017

Very impressed with the work that the team @protctdemocracy is undertaking and how they are going about it. https://t.co/nwElAg0E0F via @protctdemocracy

— Daniel Stid (@Daniel_Stid) December 14, 2017

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ALSO FIRST IN PI… Hill+Knowlton Strategies added Soren Dayton, an experienced digital communications and public affairs strategist, as a senior vice president. Dayton comes from Prism Public Affairs (which subsequently merged with Rasky Baerlein Strategic Communications) and before that New Media Strategies, Rep. Nick Smith‘s (R-Mich.) office and John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign

Also covered by O’Dwyer, the Holmes Report, and Bulldog Reporter.

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As someone who has worked on the issue on and off since 2008, I have been struck by how the terms of the debate shift. So I wrote a piece for the Takshashila Institution that tries to give the debate more an analytic framework that explains why it is happening now, what the challenges that its trying to address, and what the uncertainties are.

Ultimately, while I have some sympathies for the values of net neutrality but worry about a lot of the details. That’s why I tend to like the ideas that Google and Verizon negotiated in 2010. However, I recognize that in many ways, they don’t apply to the Indian context.

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Among India’s key advantages are the size and diversity of its population, but also a globally competitive and sophisticated technological and managerial class, all things that we saw manifest in the election:

Just consider the ways in which India’s democratic ecosystem is unique. Not only does India have one of the oldest and most stable democracies of the post-colonial era, with a record of both success and failure to learn from. It also has one of the most dynamic laboratories of democratic practice. Due to its innovative culture, especially in globally competitive skills in technology and management, new organising methods have been created and deployed in its politics. Due to its size, these get deployed and tested and redesigned at a scale that simply no one else can match. Due to its diversity, it has organised communities of all sorts from marginally literate tribals to sophisticated urban elites.

While there can be many advantages that can be collected informally, some institutional support might be useful. I suggest that European Democracy foundations could provide a good model:

India could establish an Indian Institute for International Democracy on these models to leverage and channel the experience and resources it has and ensure that they are deployed in India’s national interest. Ultimately, the purpose of this institution would be to establish Indian democratic practice as a source of soft power, like India’s entertainment industry, and its educational system (with its grounding in English.)

In the end, this is something that only India can do. It is its unique gift to the world. I close with:

“All I think is required is a small light of peace, prosperity and democracy,” said Modi in Japan. This is a message that can only be delivered by a rising India, justifiably proud of its accomplishments and letting them speak for themselves. It is time for India to share the light from its lamp with the rest of the world.

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This week, our office was engaged in a rescue of eleven boys from Jharkhand who had been working selling snacks — pani puri — in Coles Park, a park in a relatively affluent neighborhood in Bangalore.

The exploitation that these children tells a broader story about an emerging pattern here:

This case is interesting because it illustrates that forced labour is not just a phenomenon of rural areas, which is often the image that many people in South Asia have. They  imagine a caste-based agricultural system in which there is a paternalistic exploitation.

And while this certainly  exists across South Asia, there is an urban story that is quite real, as this and other cases illustrate. With crushing poverty in rural areas — in places like Jharkhand or Odisha — people take whatever opportunity is available, even if the opportunity is an illusion and turns into a nightmare. Often that means migration to another more affluent and more booming part of the country, often the South or a city. In those places, they lose contact with family and may be isolated by language and other differences, making them vulnerable to exploitation.

IJM has discussed these issues in other forums:

Bonded labour may have been abolished in India in 1976, but the practice not only continues, experience of grass-roots workers suggests it is becoming more widespread. We might be experiencing a relative decline in the incidence of hereditary bondage, but India’s rapidly evolving economic structure and inadequate livelihood security for the most vulnerable sections of society are giving rise to newer and more complex forms of bonded labour. These may not necessarily be lifelong encumbrances, may even be voluntary at times, but are instances of bondage, nonetheless.

Migration, driven by uneven growth in different parts of the country, is one of the most important drivers of present-day bondage. Slow economic growth and a rapidly growing population mean that there are few jobs available for the burgeoning workforce in the poorer states. Take Punjab and Bihar, for example. While the ratio between relative incomes in the two states has worsened from 1.7 in 1965 to approximately four at present, the population of Bihar has grown much more rapidly. Between 2001-11, while the population of Punjab grew by roughly 14 per cent, that of Bihar grew by 25 per cent, and on a much larger base. These conditions lead to large-scale migration from states such as Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and so on towards states such as Punjab, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. While the advent of the MGNREGS (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) might have helped slow the flow of labour, large- scale migration of farm labour during the cropping season is still a reality across India.

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