We take great pride in being the largest democracy in the world, unfortunately our democracy ends once the citizen exercises his franchise. Post the event leaders ride rough shod over peoples aspirations and loot the public. An equally weak executive and judiciary add to the overall ineffectiveness of our democracy.
Democracy in India is about who is shouting hoarser or rather which leader or party practices demagogy. Mass illiteracy and poverty helps such leaders and parties gain foothold in public life. Add the illegal and unaccounted money that flows into the political system, we have created a monster of a political system in this country. We have an environment where it is difficult for genuine political parties to survive.
We can contrast two political parties in the state of AP and ponder over the current state of affairs in the country. One is Lok Satta started by Shri. Jayaprakash Narayan, a successful bureaucrat and an intellectual. He has attracted the urban youth with his mature views and has attracted about 10% vote in the last election, a credible achievement considering the challenges he was up against. But he is struggling to push his message of all inclusive development to the masses in the din of noise created by his rivals. In contrast look at the way one Mr. Jagan Mohan Reddy is riding rough shod in AP, he has no credentials except that he belongs to a political family. He is accused of massive corruption and is currently under investigation, he uses his father’s popularity to the hilt along with money power to reach out the masses. There is no particular message in his story line but it is all about the din we talked about. Such parties survive in the malignant political echo system we created and this is what we need to change.
So what is the long term remedy for clean our political system, voter education and improving literacy levels is the only way out. We need to rapidly improve the literacy levels in the country and parallel the election commission should play an even more active role in educating the public on the electoral process. With an aware and enlightened voter political parties will find it difficult to exploit the voter on emotive issues.
The first step in creating a thriving democracy is to clean up the political system until then we will have to put up demagogues who are pretending to be leaders.
