Current Events
The Emperor Has No Clothes, Part I:
Is India a Democracy?
SOURAV MITRA, Tehelka
India is not a democracy.
It is a conglomerate of feudal oligarchies distributed across the Centre and the states.
Despite proud and strident claims of being the largest democracy in the world, India cannot be a democracy. A democracy is a rule of the people, but in India, the multifarious political leaderships seldom hear the people and heed them even less. It is the will of the powerful few that always plays out.
If you argue that our electoral system is ample proof and guarantee of our democratic status and that the leaders are all elected by the people, I will have to remind you that there is no political party that does not break its election promises. The breaking of election promises is the clear, disturbing, and unnerving sign that the will of the people, manifest in the support of those promises, has been hijacked by the will of the powerful few, thereby removing the veil of democracy with which we try to cover our feudal oligarchies.
Every political party comprises of a few decision-making members of a clan or clique of leaders to whom the rest of the party pays prostrating obeisance and almost blind support until they are short-changed or betrayed in terms of the fruits of governance.
The rule of the few is called an oligarchy. And the subservience of the rest harks back to feudal ways. And as today no single party has a clear majority in government, we are left in the custody of a conglomerate of feudal oligarchies, all bickering in the cusp of compromise and betrayal.
Continued Tomorrow: The Emperor Has No Clothes, Part II - Does India Have Diversity?
August 13, 2012
Conversation about this article
1: Baldev Singh (Bradford, United Kingdom), August 13, 2012, 5:02 AM.
If you mix poverty, caste divisions and morbid superstition, and add it to a religious system which worships idols and imaginary deities, sacrificing animals and humans to them, but sells and abuses real-life females ... then you end up with a society that can achieve nothing meaningful.