The term Democracy originates from the Greek word dēmokratía. It means "rule of the people" and not "rule by representatives" as generally perceived. The definition implies that democracy is a system far above individuals; in fact it is collective in nature. And the key word for any collective exercise is participation. In ancient India, during Buddha’s time, such village republics existed aplenty where periodic local meetings took place in which ALL people of a locality took policy decisions. Thereafter, India went through nearly a millennium of slavery by various foreign civilizations until it gained independence in 1947.
In this interim period, world over and especially in Europe and America, renaissance happened resulting in liberal thoughts taking center stage. The impact of it was that in such places democracies took root and flourished. These democracies were more or less akin to the ancient Indian republics, i.e. they were participatory in nature.
Even during the freedom struggle tall men like the Father of our Nation Gandhiji fiercely advocated autonomous ‘village republics’ in his seminal book “Hind Swaraj”. Incidentally, India in 1947 adopted the model of representative democracy. This was understandable because a dominion nation gaining full-fledged participatory democracy in one leap was a tall order. The ill- effects of representative democracy are becoming glaringly obvious in India of the recent past. Uncivilized tendencies like corruption, alarming crime increase, rapes, mal- governance, anarchy, exploitation, huge economic disparity, hunger, lack of basic amenities to millions etc are seen only in the representative democracies. Empirical evidence suggest that these banes are absent in participatory democracies.
The entire cureent structure of India, by omission or commission is a fusion of exploitative conspiracy against the Polite, the Poor, the Proletariat, and the Common citizen hatched by Criminals, Capitalists, Intellectuals and Politicians. We too are either overt or covert facilitators in fortifying this status-quo. A cerebral deliberation is essential to break this status-quo.
‘Society’ is supreme, ‘nation’ its organ, ‘state’ an aid and ‘religion’ its guide. The root of all contemporary problems is the intense competition by The Nation, The State and Religion to assert themselves and marginalize The Society.
Government And The People
Power and authority have become the instruments for exploiting and oppressing the people instead of removing their hardships, the laws, rules, procedures and methods adopted by an alien and immoral power for its own ends are not only being continued, but even further strengthened in free and democratic India. The exploitation of the masses in collaboration with national and multi-national vested interests is growing by the day.
Those who have got into the seats of power are trying to restrict and furthermore end whatever initiative or freedom is available to the people in the pretext of framing ever newer personal laws. The press and the judiciary too are threatened of their independence. Normal democratic processes are being short-circuited blatantly. The legislatures are becoming arenas for testing political strength or have been turned into market places. Elections have become, without exceptions, degenerated into games of money, caste, brute force and empty slogans. With the democratic process having thus been vitiated, political parties and elections are fast losing the respect of the people.
Freedom should have meant a growth in the power and initiative of the people. Instead, there has been rapid erosion in these matters. ‘People’ are becoming progressively weaker while the ‘State’ is becoming all powerful. Even our day to day affairs has come under the clutches of the government. The people, who are supposed to be masters in a democracy, have actually been reduced to the level of slaves.
ADMINISTRATION, GOVERNANCE etc are termed as “A system”. A system is one in which: a) the society exercises its control over anti- social elements, and b) society functions smoothly. Sadly in In India, the state has declared itself to be the nation. In reality, nation is part of the society and state should merely act as a facilitator for the society. To usher in a systemic approach, the society formulates a concrete unit. This unit is called as The government or The state.The system belongs to the society. The State is only the implementing agent. The document that defines the maximum scope of interference, authority and duties of The state is called as the Constitution. Constitution and Laws are different. Constitution defines the maximum authority of The State and the minimum authority of The Society, whereas laws define The Society’s maximum and The State’s minimum rights.
The entity which is a balance of the executive, the legislature and the judiciary is called as The State/Government/System. In a democracy all the three complement each other in addition to providing checks and balances amongst themselves. In case this triad, instead of self balancing, begins accumulation of power and competing amongst each other, the system gets weakened. If this trend continues over a period of time, democracy’s credibility is eroded. In India, the three arms of the state are competing in the sphere of power accumulation. The job of the legislature is to guide the executive from within the perimeter of the constitution. The legislature, under no circumstance can violate the borders framed by the constitution. The brief of the constitution is to control the legislature. Resultantly, the authority to amend the constitution cannot be vested in the legislature. This is a grave error. In India, the legislature has misused this error to further its agenda on innumerable occasions.
One glaring example of the legislature going wild is the Durga Shakti Nagpal issue recently where an executive was penalized just because she was doing the constitutional thing. The Executive arm of the Government is supposed to take care of the day-to-day affairs. No entity should be allowed to interfere in its works. Sadly in the “CBI caged parrot” issue as well as the Durga Shalti Nagpal issue, the legislature sees itself as the “boss” of the executive.
This anomaly can be changed only be local self governance, meaning to say that they be made directly responsible to the people rather than people’s representatives who have their own vested interests.
