Major Limitation Of The Indian Democracy example essay topic

Democracy may be a word familiar to most, but still I would like to mention the fact that demos means pertaining to people and k ratios means to rule. Thus this word original coined by the Greeks means rule of people as a whole and not by an individual or a privileged soul. It is a concept still misunderstood and misused in some parts of the world where totalitarian regimes and dictatorships have witnessed popular support by usurping democratic labels like in Iraq and Pakistan. By the dictionary definition, democracy is government by the people in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system. In a famous phrase of Abraham Lincoln, democracy is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Freedom and democracy are often used in place of each other, but the two are not the same.

True, democracy is a set of ideas and principles about freedom, but it also consists of a set of practices and procedures that have been founded through a long history. In short, democracy is the institutionalization of freedom. For this reason, any society must possess time-tested fundamentals of constitutional government, human rights, and equality before the law to be properly called democratic. Democracies can be typified into two fundamental categories, direct and representative. In a direct democracy, all individuals, without the elected or appointed officials, can participate in making public decisions.

This system however seems to be impractical possible only with relatively small numbers of people, say for example in a community organization, village of a developing country, tribal council, or the local unit of a labor union, where members can meet in a single room to discuss issues and arrive at decisions by consensus or majority vote. In rural India the head of such committees are called panc ha and the place where issues for a small population of the concerned area are discussed is called. These meetings are held mostly under a village tree with the maximum number of people who can physically gather in one place and practice direct democracy. Modern society, with its enormous size, complexities and ramifications offers few avenues for direct democracy. Today, the most common form of democracy, whether for a town of 50,000 or nations of 50 million, is representative democracy, in which citizens elect officials to make political decisions, formulate laws, and administer programs for the public welfare. In the name of the people, such authorities can deal with complex public issues in an intellectual and step-by-step manner that requires an investment of time and energy that is often impractical for the vast majority of common citizens.

How such officials are elected can vary enormously. On the national level, for example, legislators can be chosen from districts that each elect a single representative. In India there is a system of proportional representation, each political party is represented in the legislature according to its percentage of the total vote nationwide. Whatever the method used, public officials in a representative democracy hold office due to majority.

But there is always a fine balance between Majority rule and Minority rights. It was with India's first democratic leader, Nehru, that the Indian people were initially introduced to democracy. The Indian people live in a very different type of society when compared to the other democratic nations of the world. The Indians were agricultural people and not very industrialized. By Nehru choosing democracy over industrialization, it has taken a lot of time for the idea of industry to catch on. It has only been recently that the Indians have become a part of the computer software industry.

The main source of income in India is still crops. Even though India adopted a democratic constitution in 1950, democracy as both a form of government and as an organizing principle of politics continues to be a contentious concept in Indian political discourse. The debate has ranged far and wide giving rise to numerous claims and counterclaims and a bewildering array of contentions. The democratic ideals of the national movement have had very significant influence on the people.

The above positive aspects should not however blind us to the many limitations of Indian democracy. The basic weakness of the Indian democracy at the socioeconomic level has been the absence of fundamental democratic reforms to dismantle the semi feudal order such as implementation of land reforms and abolition of caste system. As a result, monopoly in land and rural asset ownership and worst forms of caste discrimination and bondage continue to characterize the countryside where nearly seventy percent of the population lives. The rural, urban divide of the post Independence Indian growth process and the undemocratic rural structure have condemned preponderant majority of the rural masses to a permanent state of poverty and wretchedness, without basic education, health care, shelter and nutrition. At the political level, a major limitation of the Indian democracy has been its centralized nature.

Even though a multinational state, the rights of the federating states are very weak and heavily biased towards the Central Union Government. It is for this reason that Indian constitution has been described to be a quasi federal one even by its ardent admirers. During the last five decades since Independence, the tendency has been to encroach upon the powers of the States formally or informally, increase the control of resources by the Central Government and misuse of the constitutional provisions to intervene in the administration of the States. The response of the Central Union Government to the growing economic and political crisis in India has been in terms of greater centralization strategies and interventions. Another equally important limitation of the Indian parliamentary democracy has been that below the state level it was not mandatory to have elected bodies at district, sub district or local level till 1994. In other words it was a system of parliamentary democracy at the central and state levels and bureaucratic governance at the lower levels.

Grass root level democracy visualized in terms of self reliant and self governing villages was an important nationalist ideal. When the new constitution was framed, elected local bodies at the local levels were not made part of the mandatory structure of government, but enshrined in the Directive Principles of the constitution. By and large the Indian democracy is still in a phase of evolution and change. It seems that the concept of democracy is interpreted in a subjective manner and changes in nations from time to time according to the whims and fancies of the contemporary affluent and powerful people.