Miscellaneous - This Day That Age   

dated December 19, 1957: Democracy in India

Mr. Jaya Prakash Narayan on December 17 warned that efforts to industrialise a backward country like India too fast might bring about a rule of dictatorship as the foundations of the present democracy in India were very weak. In a public talk on the “foundations of Democracy in India” sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Mr. Narayan said that the parliamentary democracy in India as it stood to-day was a “complete failure.” The present form of democracy with its Cabinet system he said, would “boil down to a one-man rule” if the “man at the top happens to be a forceful personality like Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru or Mr. Winston Churchill.” The other weaknesses of the present democracy particularly in India, he continued, lay in its election system in which the vast majority of the voters were illiterate and ignorant. Another discouraging feature of the present democracy, Mr. Narayan said, was the growth of “middle class leadership, which loves power.”

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