Sample Materials of SSC CGL (Tier -3) Study Kit

Subject: Essay

Topic: What have we gained from our democratic set-up?

Democracy is a form of government which is for the people, by the people and of the people. Here people hold power directly or through elected representatives. Modern democracy was evolved out of demand for equality politically, legally, socially and economically. As India gained independence in 1947 she started planning her own future with the constituent Assembly adopting the new constitution of India on 26th January 1950. Then came into being the concern for shaping up her future. The first step in this direction was the introduction of the planning programmes that would continue till future. The first five year plan came into force in 1951. The hurdles in the way were numerous. There was resentment and aggression from the neighbours Pakistan, China etc were out in the field in the form of Partition etc. the time was marked with conflicts with and within India.

Every feature that marks up a democratic set-up will belong to this new system also but these are the elections and their results, not the service and the satisfaction and the plum posts and perks, not the sense of achievement that seek to gain the center stage in this system. This system hovers around highfalutin celebrations but seeks to devour the reasons for these celebrations. Even with celebrations fast on our heels a large swathe of population remains indifferent and skeptical of the outcome.

Every humanized democracy paces ahead with its head aloft with dignity and eyes warm and anchored in vision deriving its power from the sturdiness of spine of election and vim of legs of sense of service and power of motivation. The two hands of justice and equality wave only in tandem with the pace of legs. So while spine carries the whole body together, individually these are the different limbs that do the quotidian work and help the body live its full existence to leverage its very being and ambiance it happens to be in. The idea of equality, especially economic one is a chimera but civil equality i.e. the societal deference for every work and modus Vivendi that fits in the ethical framework of liberal intellectual minds ranging from past to present is achievable.

The Indian government was headed by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who was a great visionary and had set a vision for India. The principles of panchsheel were given out in January 1954 which formed the basis of non-alignment policy and and India started a league of its own. It was agreed that no no-aligned country could enter into a defence treaty with any country in the context of superpower rivalry. It gave the country a boost and she was able to fight against all evils of the time and went on with its preaching’s.

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After setting her foreign policies she now turned towards the problems of the home. Caste system, agrarian class structure, multiplicity of religions and many other obstacles on the way she had to reformulate the objectives of the policies. The new policies would have to be at par with the foreigners, our age old culture and also the modern era to come. The foreign effect was the result of the long rule of the Britishers which agitated the youth to go against the orthodox ways of living. On one hand there was rejection and criticism of the new policies whereas on the other it was that the youth were also encouraging widow remarriages, women education, abolition of untouchability etc. India did not accept this transformation from sanskritisation to westernization with ease as there was a diversity in her cultures rather adopted a secular outlook which preaches equality in religions.

Next came the planning phase for making her industrially stable by tackling issues from every aspect of society. This effort led to urbanization which offered a new lease of life to the rural class who could now experience the city life and earn their living too. This step on the negative side resulted in pressure in the urban areas concerning living conditions, environmental conditions. People were made to understand the importance of literacy and promoted universal and free education, adult education etc. Later correspondence education emerged as a gift for the class of people who were not able to attend regular classes for any personal problems. The motto of ‘Learn while you earn’ was showing on the face of India now but were still waiting a huge box of problems of suicides, crimes, drugs, juvenile delinquency, sex vices, dowry crimes, poverty, unemployment etc to name a few. The sense of being a global citizen has come to every citizen now when even language barriers are crossed as same languages are spoken around the continents and westernization has broadened the horizon. Even today natural calamities like floods, cyclones etc may delay but not retard India’s progress. On the nuclear front India ranks amongst the topmost. With all this we must feel proud of our democracy. The party feuds, frequent elections and terrorism are general and cannot hinder the nation’s growth. We have proved almost at par to the developed nations of the world in all aspects. We have achieved more than we have thought of 60 years back.

If it is democracy it has to be only sane; prone to headache, fault lines and fits but capable of raising the bar and achieving the highest standards possible, being in sound health and rearing greatest disquisition provided measures to this effect are in place. A democratic system never guarantees an absolute Right; for that to happen we will have to revert back to righteous monarchy but makes sure that every crepuscular Wrongs is set right to the maximum push-able degree. Hence a democratic setup aims to have an ideal happy society at its core even at the expanse of a very successful one in riches. When looked at from this view democracy paves the way for the concepts of equity and equality. This equality further can have myriad aspects to be explored but the rudimentary seeds when watered with the civil justness give rise to the tree of highest possible esteem having branches touching every section of the society. The trunk of this tree is rooted in the capital of the nation and hence the soil of the capital will have crucial bearings on the health of the tree. More healthy and green will it be better the all encompassing shadow. This esteem is nothing but a link between the democracy and those who are being democratized by an official decree that in all senses is also a granting of consent on the part of its subjects. But still even as pious and righteous a system as democracy may be, like any other system of governance democracy too does cleave society into two parts.

The sanctity of the democracy can be gauged by which one comes first and which second. If people think they come first not their representatives then it is assertive democracy which is good but not great. A large measure of this democracy is contingent upon the intellectual level of people which broadly and quite curiously is nothing but a reflection of their representatives. Thereby much more than this assertiveness which works as a healthy dose for any democracy to grow it is the nature of assertion that determines the direction the democracy will venture into. If representatives position themselves after people it is nothing short of a utopia though along with its own share of fault lines. At the most any society can hope for bouts of these utopian moments for it is not easy to fill the lacunas and chinks in an democracy owing to its being so open and at the same time hostage to the world economic and social order. In third case if people are too acquiescent and toady and representatives too royal and dominant than democracy appears making way for another system which wears the same clothes but gives account of a different disposition. This is psephocracy.

Now imagine we have a body with only spine and no limbs. Democracy too looks same when elections and alliances come to become the be all and end all of a democratic set-up. To get finer perspective we can also equate this state of democracy with the mental setup of a student aiming to crack an entrance examination on account of whatever he could cram in a fortnight before the exam. His buoying through the exam is bound to be proved disastrous in the long run for both candidate himself and the environment he will inhabit. Invariably conflicts will arise thanks to lack of loyalty and dedication to the environment. These very innocuous looking conflicts take on dire consequences when the desire to have a sense of purpose slips in one’s life. This conflict when engendered in political arena which even empirically is all about social service exerts undue influence on entire nation and more importantly on the very definition of service. Every so Often we see the manifestations of these conflicts when we bear witness to a politician utterly naked in his avariciousness. It is not the welfare of the society which forms the crux of a polity outwardly steeped in democracy but the greed that drives his actions and deeds. Corruption which like a waterfall falls forms top to bottom not other way round is nothing but just one offshoot of this conflict. When the conflicting position of a candidate whose cramming planted him at the wrong place in the system leads to uncharitable ways then the challenges another candidate who sought to cheat his way into the superficial but personally favorable result poses to the idea of democracy can easily be imagined.

Marxist revolutionary, Che Guevara had once said, ‘Democracy cannot consist solely of elections that are nearly always fictitious and managed by rich landowners and professional politicians.’

What Che Guevara had said stands true today. This truth takes on even more dangerous form when a large percentage of voters happen to be either illiterate or semi literate. Because democracy allows every single citizen to have his say it all boils down to the characteristics of the majority. If majority is quiescent and inert then democracy will be nothing but a passive one. The choice of the representatives will not be governed by work done by the candidates in the interest of the society, ideological leanings, and election manifestoes but by personal factors. This results in whetting up those very ills which a democratic society in all its fairness stands to fight. This weakness also have lead to criminalization of politics or as often people say politicization of criminals thanks to their election winning abilities. If a person convicted in any case other than political wins an election then it points to huge chinks in our democratic structure that needs to be dealt with greatest immediacy. A politician who in any democracy could have been a bulwark against societal ills becomes the fountain and patron of these ills instead. Worse still not only does he nurture ills and diseases but like a virus also resists the attempts at every medication and often, unfortunately even defeats them. That leaves democracy with the plight of a tamed animal tied to the peg of election rather than the liberty of a human being bound to his roots but free to roam, learn and serve.

For a democracy to be true to its definition and purpose not only do we need only party manifestoes but also strong ideological divide in the society instead of class or caste or religious divide. While caste divide abets regionalization and deigns the administration it is lopsided class divide that results in huge gaps in earnings and as we have often seen in the history it leads to frustration and even revolutions. The sad truth about revolutions that sometimes they are nothing but just a divergence leading to a path seedier than the prevailing stands even today. So far as religious divide’s ramifications are to be said not only distant but even very recent history has evinced the venom they can spill into the vessel of the society and ghettoisations they can lead to. An ideological divide, on the other hand, often ends up as a precursor to the constructive debate in the society. That brings us to the gospel truth that debates are the leashes which a democracy should use to prevent its cart from running astray and ride smooth.

If people belonging to educated or even elite class can indulge in such medieval and barbarian acts with what hope we expect people living in the recesses of poverty, gloom and darkness of illiteracy to give account of moralistic values. Isn’t it incumbent upon all of us that we call into question our own comportments and those who helm our democratic set-up? Some might want to dismiss these incidents as stray and aberrations but when acutely observed over a period of time only the thinly reported incidents even from the metros are enough to sicken us let alone digging deeper into the dark lanes of hinterland where often law faces the scimitar on the altar of ignorance or insularity. Not only our politicians but we all stand guilty of reducing a system passed onto us by our forefathers to a mere formality. If we and especially those whose job entails this don’t squirm at the sight of a bare feet emaciated boy walking in the excruciating heat or shivering cold or a women splashing contaminated water off her body in the public or a child in an English medium public school using cuss words and expletives at the age of eight then it is not the slow pace of lumbering democracy but the fast pace of the vehicles of governors of democracy and a lack of community-hood that stands reprehensible. Democracy may be just a political system of governance but it is humanity that propelled it to come into being. Without humanity democracy is just a body shaking but not moving and alive but not growing. It is imperative on our part that if we pretend to care for democracy we should also care for what I hold as nothing short of temple: primary schools among other things. Unfortunately the primary schools which give the child the first embrace of his life outside his mother are too clumsy and repulsive. The beginning gets as worse as it could get. It goes without saying that often it is none but democracy that bears the brunt of an adulthood grown out of uncomfortable or absent embraces.

This all having been said still we have some reasons to take pride in whatever muddling we have done through last six decades. Not only have we succeeded in preventing the fabric of democracy from ripping apart completely but have a system which needs overhauling, rectification and makeover but is indispensable. As the elections for 15th Lok Sabha draw near once again we will get to see this festival of democracy being celebrated across the India. I hope soon we will realize that election is a question fundamentally tied to the spirit of democracy asking us the basic tenets of a democracy. That is how it reminds us of the answers we have to look for. Though answer of the ballot will determine only the fate of the symbol that represents the question it is the debate about what could or should have been the answer or who the answerer is or what does the symbol represent and more importantly what our answer is will determine the flowering or wilting of democratic values.

India is an interesting example of how a third world country without having the credentials, which the successful democracies of the first world possess, managed to institutionalize a viable form of democracy. India owes its success in maintaining a democratic setup to many factors but I would like to focus on the way how federalism and gradual decentralization were managed in India so that most of the minorities’ i.e. religious, ethnic and regional ones were kept satisfied. In my view it is not ethnicity itself which is an obstacle in establishing democratic systems in third world countries, but the state structure from within which it tends to originate and is then managed later on. In this case India has countered these divergent ethnic forces by keeping a fine balance in its policies while accommodating the various interest groups during the last 5 decades. 

India democracy in its initial phase was aided by the fact that after independence it did not have to face a very volatile political society. Mainstream Politics like before partition was dominated by the northern states that is mainly Uttar Pradesh which was the power base for the Congress party. Furthermore political conflict on regional basis was usually restricted to demand for greater sharing of power and resources between the centre and the regional elites. This was in most cases handled very amicably by the Nehru administration by creating a federal system that was quite accommodating to the demands of these regional elites. Another reason why these regional conflicts did not blow out of proportion was that most of these demands had only the backing of the regional elites rather then having any mass movement behind them. Since these regional elites were more interested in power sharing the Initial Congress Governments managed to keep the political heterogeneity of the Country from hindering the development of its democracy by gradually granting some political autonomy to the constituent assemblies of the provinces. These demands of the regional elites calling for more autonomy were carefully analyzed and in quite a few cases were rejected as well but enough were conceded to show a tendency towards decentralization. 

In the last decade much criticism has been targeted at India for being centralized and that its much touted “democratic federalism” has been corrupted to a great extent. The recent policy of the nationalist and ethnically based parties “to manipulate” communal divisions among linguistic minorities is not appreciated at all either but the fact that democracy depends upon more than just the practices of political parties is over looked. The success of the Indian democratic system is a result of the whole institutional framework around the political sphere which has evolved over the years and how ethnically diverse forces have shaped that process. India’s democracy now has an institutional framework which is quite expansive in its approach and its multi-tiered—national parliament and government, state (province) parliaments and governments, each with its panoply of institutions, down to the municipal and village- council levels are perfectly suitable for such a vast and diverse country. 

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