Democracy in India: A farce?

Hi All,

I write this post with great disappointment and an even greater wrath at our elected representatives. An entire session of Parliament has been washed out due to the utterly reprehensible and irresponsible attitude of the ‘honorable members of parliament’. The session concluded with not much business done and the bitter acrimony between the government of the day and the opposition is showing no signs of abating.

Slowly but steadily, my confidence in our democracy is diminishing. This is how the scenario looks as of now: We have MPs who don’t even bother to be present during the session. There are some who will only ask questions in the House when they are ‘paid to do so’ [Cash for questions scam]. For a whole chunk of them, the quantum of money paid is the only consideration for voting on a certain bill. Barring a few exemplary members, almost of all of them love converging on the well of the house to chant slogans and disrupt proceedings. I pretty sure I have missed out at some of the negative traits of our MPs [as it’s a never ending list] but the above instances should suffice to show the state of despair of democracy in our country.

We can keep on with the chest beating that we are the world’s largest democracy. Mr. Obama might say we are a beacon for many nations in the world. We can go on with the humongous carnival of over 600million people exercising their franchise every 5 years. But we must ask ourselves, what does it mean to the poor labourer who is unsure of his livelihood? What does it mean to the farmer who sees no end to his misery? Democracy must work for these people for it to be proclaimed as a mechanism of support and redressal of grievances.

Needless to say, democracy has worked the world over. It has forced society to listen to the voices of the poor and downtrodden, share their burden and more importantly ensure their social and economic uplift. Unfortunately the same concept doesn’t seem to be reaping the desired benefits in our country. The question here is why isn’t democracy delivering for us? Is it really a problem with the system? Where have we gone wrong and what do we need to do to put the house (pun intended) in order. As usual, we find ourselves in a situation where we have more questions than answers.

P.S. Apologies for a rather somber post during the holiday season. But just thought that it might be good to discuss this. Happy New Year 2011 to one and all...