Making democracy meaningful

Why in news?
  • General Elections are due in April and May. It has been an assumption made about democracy as periodic elections.
More in news
  • Democracy in Indian context in present situation:
    (1) Periodic elections, party-based competitive candidates, and universal adult franchise have turned out to be the primary ingredients of democracy.
    (2) This common sense has come to cloud everything centrally associated with the idea of democracy in general and constitutional democracy in particular.
    (3) This reduction of democracy to elections, today, threatens to undermine the core aspirations associated with it.
    (4) While elections have been successful in reproducing the order of things, they can hardly be considered as the tool of deepening democracy and the nursery of imagining alternative human possibilities.
Challenges with Elections in India
  • Marginalisation of marginalized:
    (1) Elections can hardly be termed as the sole and effective conveyor belts of popular will in India any longer.
    (2) But there were reasons to hope, as the poor and the marginalised, cutting across diversity and the social and gender divide, rallied behind it in strength.
    (3) In the process the electoral space of the poor and the marginalised has shrunk, as other devices have been put in place to elicit their assent.
    (4) Redistribution of resources and opportunities has been lost in the endless litany of promises of goods and bounties.
  • Role Of media:
    (1) Sections of the media have come to play second fiddle in amplifying the sound-bites of political leaders, deploying them to construct and reconstruct opponents, with specified social constituencies in view.
    (2) They have found jingoism and archaic frames easy to stoke rather than nudge public sensitivity to reinforcing the democratic temper.
  • History of elections in India:
    (1) It is important to recall that the Indian National Congress rejected the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (1919) that expanded the then electoral base and entertained grave doubts to the provisions of the Government of India Act, 1935 till it accorded a qualified endorsement to it.
    (2) There have always been political tendencies in India after Independence, particularly on the Left, that have sought boycott of elections by appealing to a richer and thicker version of democracy.
    (3) But there is little to suggest that those who sought to reject or do away with elections have had much success in putting together an alternative.
    (4) Subsequent developments, particularly the option of Left parties to take the parliamentary path, demonstrate that elections as a device of choosing representatives find deep echo in the public culture in India.
  • Way forward:
    (1) As a political community, the bonds that unite Indians are not given but to be forged and forge consciously and deliberately.
    (2) In a complex society such as India, such a political project needs all layers of the political community.
    (3) In a complex society such as India, such a political project needs all layers of the political community.
    (4) Measures such as access to quality education in the mother tongue, neighbourhood schools, strengthening public health systems, public transport, entrepreneurship and skill development, universal social insurance, and reaching out to those who suffer disadvantages in accessing these measures are definitely in synchrony with the democratic project.
    (5) There is a dire need to create a helm to focus on India’s democratic project.
Source
The hindu



Posted by Jawwad Kazi on 6th Apr 2019
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