Is India a successful democracy?
What do we even mean by democracy? Is it only a government in which people can exercise their right to vote? Or is it something more?
The encyclopedia Britannica defines democracy as a system of government in which laws, policies, leadership, and major undertakings of a state or other polity are directly or indirectly decided by the people. Shortly after India became free in 1947, the last British commander in chief of the Indian Army, Gen. Claude Auchinleck wrote “The Sikhs may try to set up a separate regime. I think they probably will and that will be only a start of the general decentralization and break-up of the idea that India is a country, whereas it is a subcontinent as varied as Europe.”
Even the smartest of Western officials told that India could not survive as a single nation nor be successful as a democracy. But it seems as if India has proved all its critics wrong. It has been 73 years since our independence and we are still continuing as a somewhat democracy. India defies its skeptics to remain united. To tell the truth, there was violence at its birth and rebellion afterward in Kashmir and Nagaland which had been put down by force.
There was perhaps a lot of bloodshed in these situations, but I must say India got off relatively lightly in comparison to other countries like Britain, American, France, or China. A poor, divided, and the still not fully literate country still remains a democracy is a greater cause for celebration. There is a third thing that we as Indians should be proud of is that it has been able to sustain linguistic pluralism.
Americans are literally paranoid about the people who do not speak English and yet the 10 rupees note in my pocket, has the same words printed in 17 languages, and not only that, they are in 17 different scripts. Indian leaders never wanted to impose Hindi on the public and on the other hand countries like Pakistan and Sri Lanka have had a civil war on this very imposition of one language.
These civil wars have been the cause of bloodshed. India remains a successful democracy because people still can exercise their rights as citizens of this nation. It is an undisputed fact that the formal institutional parameters of democratic rule such as competitive elections on a regular basis, universal suffrage, legally codified and enforced rights of association and many more have been constant in India from the time of independence.
Civil and political rights that form the base of any democratic country are guaranteed by the Fundamental Rights section of the Indian Constitution. Social and economic rights are recognized in Part IV of the Constitution as Directive Principles of State Policy. Both of these are enforceable by law. I hereby conclude by saying that Kashmir is one of India’s faults and we can in no way malign the success of the Indian Democracy by citing one example. India can, therefore, be called a successful democracy.
Information inspired by Ramchandra Guha.
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Opinion by Sirsha Gupta