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Noisy and thriving

To assess the state of our democracy, it helps to try and understand how it came about: for the past, as they say, is prologue. To begin with, India is not a nation-State in the classical 18th/19th century European mould, with one language, one religion, one king etc. Rather, it is basically a richly diverse civilisation, which has decided to create a new State for itself to cope with a world largely moulded by Europeans (for their convenience) in the previous two centuries. Given a diversity unmatched among the nation-States of today’s world, the path of democracy we chose in 1947 launched us on one of the boldest and most original political experiments the world has ever seen. If that experiment is successful, in our own eyes most of all, its effect on the rest of the world can be profound.

The founding fathers of our republic realised that this ancient mosaic that our civilization is could only be governed by the moral authority of a democracy. For, India has reserved its respect only for moral and societal leaders, not for its kings and generals — for, the errant among the latter could always be subverted in a cleverly engineered society that quickly consigned them to historical oblivion. Furthermore, democracy as a concept was not new to India: there were the ganarajyas of old, whose strengths and weaknesses were carefully dissected in the Mahabharata and by the Buddha. Finally, pan-Indian democracy became feasible only in the 20th century because of science and technology — the same products of the industrial revolution that enabled Europe to dominate the world, beginning with the railways, the telegraph, the printing press etc., and more recent ones like TV and the computer – have provided us with the connectivity necessary to run an effective, civilisation-wide democracy.

In the first decades after the end of British rule there was much scepticism about the future of our democracy — in India as elsewhere. In the last few decades, however, democracy has taken root, and all of us now think of it as “mature” and “robust”. We have learnt that the common people can be trusted to recognise and follow great leaders. There is no doubt in my mind that if India has continued to be interesting when so many of our Asian neighbours have either seen violent convulsions or become boring, a large part of the reason is our thriving, noisy, exciting democracy.

Nevertheless, we must guard against a dangerously growing sense of complacency. We often envy the mind-boggling pace of developments in China, and wonder when an official connected with the Chinese Ministry of Communications says cheerfully, “democracy is inefficient”. Perhaps even more alarming is the divisive and corruptive nature of our politics, cutting across party lines — so it must be a systemic flaw. As the political system has been unable to fix it for 61 long years, it must become part of our societal agenda — in India society has always led the State. So our society outside politics — the kavis, the scientists, the businessmen, the media, the large number of peasants and workers who make up our electorate, and all the rest — they have to take a hand in making a more efficient, integrative, honest democracy of India. That needs faith and determination — surely, the success of the great political experiment begun in 1947 deserves and demands no less from all of us.

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