Netters have discussed a lot about 'Desi Demokrasy' and all the ills it spews forth. Well, here is a great article by DNB. He touches on a number of areas about this Desi Demokrasy.
And those who dare to read, ought to go in with 'WITH EYES WIDE OPEN' :-) :-) --Ram The Burlesque of Democracy WITH EYES WIDE OPEN D. N. Bezboruah Almost six decades after Independence and 55 years after the formation of our democratic republic (attested to be also 'secular' some years later), we are still grappling with the question as to whether democracy was the right kind of political system for a country like India. To many who are averse to analysis and debate, the resolution to this question comes from their subconscious in the form of the laconic comment that we were better off in the days of the British. This observation is both unfair and untrue. There are hundreds of ways in which we are better off today than we were under our foreign rulers who merrily looted the land and permitted only the 'creamy layer' of stooges, sycophants and anglophiles to prosper while keeping the rest in grinding poverty. For instance, life expectancy, the literacy rate, the per capita income and the road and rail network are vastly improved today, even though there is no denying that inflation over the years has made the rupee almost worthless. The infant mortality and the maternal mortality rates today are much less than what they were during British rule. So the Doubting Thomases and the detractors of Indian democracy can be easily silenced. But what is really at the back of their minds is that the British rulers were more just than our present rulers, the orders they issued were more transparent, they were generally free from corruption and were far more efficient. They also had real enthusiasm for their work. Having said this, it is now time to return to the question of what has happened to our democracy. Why is it not functioning as it was expected to? Perhaps one can best answer this question by asking whether democracy could really have been expected to succeed in India. When India became free, it was a nation in the making rather than a nation. We had the three presidencies and a huge number of princely states that were expected to fall in line instantly after accession to India. The presidencies of Bengal, Bombay and Madras had been under colonial rule for about 200 years. The princely states had inherited feudal rule going back to centuries. And the tribal societies had rulers chosen by the people, more by a sort of voice vote rather than through elections. Here too local feudal laws prevailed. So how could we have made the switch to democracy overnight? In any case, democracy is about majority rule, it is about informed choices, it is about electing rather than selecting at every step, it is about decentralization and about empowerment of the people right up from the grassroots level. It is also about equal opportunities (not equality, which is often to be found only in graveyards and cremation grounds) and the fair distribution of wealth and scarce resources. It is about the greatest good of the greatest number, which can stem only from healthy competition. Above all, in a democracy the people are said to be the real masters; but let us try to remind our elected representatives about this and see what happens. What pertains in India today nearly 58 years after Independence is a cruel irony of what people had a right to expect from democracy. Take the principle of majority rule, for instance. The Hindus who still constitute about 80 per cent of the population are marginalized when it comes to the crucial decisions even about themselves. The political gimmickry of the minority having the "cutting edge" in the formation of governments is much in evidence at all times whether one has Uttar Pradesh and Mayawati in mind or the case of Assam, where the majority does not count at all because it is so divided. In any case, even the word "minority" has acquired a special nuance in India over the years. Today it means only "Muslim" in official parlance. But is the minority to blame for this? Who asked the majority to be so disunited? What prompted politicians like Ram Vilas Paswan to declare after the abortive Assembly elections of Bihar that the only solution to the Bihar tangle was for the State to have a Muslim chief minister. After all, how many Muslim legislators were there after the Bihar elections? How many Muslim MLAs did he have in his own party? What else was his statement but a political gimmick to remain on the right side of the Muslim vote bank when the next Assembly elections are held? Besides, the distortions to the meaning of the word "secular" in the political context of India stipulate that only those Hindus who run down their own religion will be acknowledged as 'secular' beings. This is the extent of perversion we have wrought on our political system. Our politicians have merely demonstrated to us how even democracy can be subverted and taken away from the people. Now let us look at the matter of choices. For any informed choice to be made, the people must be educated. Mere notional literacy is not good enough. But how can poor people make informed choices if they have no access to information beyond the lies that the politicians feed them every five years when they come cadging for votes? Over the years, politicians have followed a two-pronged strategy of preventing access to information. One is by failing to promote literacy, and the other is denying information to the media, so that it cannot be passed on to the people. No wonder we need a Right to Information law when few other countries need it. Elsewhere, the bureaucracy is not as busy pretending that every bit of information denied to the people is indeed an official secret. So let us not try to pretend that the poor in India have the ability or the means to make any choices at all. They are all obliged to take life as it comes from one day to the next and to blame their fate for what they cannot have. Democracy can, at best, be only a luxury for them. As for electing rather than selecting, look at how the high commands of the Congress and other political parties actually select the leader of the House after Assembly elections but make the process look like an election. Where is the much-hyped decentralization and empowerment in our democracy? The old man in Nalbari, who takes out a pension scheme of the Life Insurance Corporation of India, has to wait for his cheques to be signed by someone in Kolkata, as though there is no one efficient enough or trustworthy enough in these parts to sign a cheque on behalf of the LICI! Likewise, anyone unfortunate enough to opt for the Mediclaim scheme of the General Insurance Corporation of India must wait for months for payments to be vetted by someone sitting in Delhi. Where is the principle of decentralization in all this? Even the person capable of making a so-called informed choice is taken for a ride. He realizes only too late that what organizations like the LICI or the GICI take so readily from people here in the form of premiums does not come back to them as decentralized benefits. They are very centralized if one happens to live in a wrong part of the country. As for opportunities, one can forget about equal opportunities. When there are only about 28 per cent open seats in the IAS and Central Service examinations, when there is a strong vested interest of IAS and IPS parents rooting for their children and when training institutes for such competitive examinations are confined mainly to metropolitan cities, where are the equal opportunities? As for the distribution of wealth and scarce resources, look at the vast disparities of income and how housing, land, water and electricity are grabbed only by those in power and those in the organized sector. In India, those in the unorganized sector count for nothing at all, though it is a much larger sector than the organized one. As for competition and the greatest good of the greatest number, the politician of the day is out to destroy all competition, because competition does not take the politician with sub-standard intelligence and abilities anywhere at all. Stressing on caste and tribe does. What do you think he is going to prefer? And if he needs his caste and creed to survive at every step, how can he think of the greatest good of the greatest number at all? Obviously, therefore, this brand of democracy is a luxury that the poor cannot afford. They will prefer other political systems like undemocratic (read totalitarian) socialism considering what their experience of democracy has been. But this is not democracy at all. And politicians who want democracy to survive for their sake cannot afford to be as myopic as they are today. They must begin to put performance above everything else if they want to see the goose that lays the golden eggs for them survive. As for the people of India, they must begin to realize that they have no alternative to democracy. Other political systems are much worse, and would be even worse, even more Draconian in the hands of our politicians. What has really happened is that as always we have misused a system and given it a bad name. This is a familiar habit of the people of India. _______________________________________________ Assam mailing list [email protected] http://pikespeak.uccs.edu/mailman/listinfo/assam Mailing list FAQ: http://pikespeak.uccs.edu/assam/assam-faq.html To unsubscribe or change options: http://pikespeak.uccs.edu/mailman/options/assam
