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Election; democracy
News:
- SundarSarukkai, Professor of Philosophy at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, analyses the role of elections in a democracy.
Important Analysis:
- The significance of democracy lies in how power is exercised by those elected to power.
3.The defining principle of democracy is the principle of One Person One Vote.
- Over emphasis on the principle of One Person One Vote:
- It has reduced the idea of democracy to a ritual of casting votes.
- The act of participation in a democracy was conceived as a dynamic and continuous process. But in a few years it has been reduced to merely an act of voting.
- The society thus formed is fundamentally undemocratic in character.
- The parties which speak for democracy have little democratic ethos within them.
- Political parties are dominated by families or friends or business partners.
- Nepotism and exclusion are the basic working principles of our political parties.
- Today, voting has become a business transaction where the voters are ‘compensated’ for their votes.
- Significance of voting:
- Voting makes sure that those who have power are accountable in some way and that they exercise that power in a democratic manner.
- Elections are only a means towards the goal of controlling those who wield power, but instead they have become the end in themselves.
- In India, the mere exercise of voting or choosing a representative is being equated with democracy. This results in the election of people who govern undemocratically.
- The Principle of trusteeship:
- It was advocated by Gandhiji and even industrialists like J.R.D Tata.
- All of us have an equal claim to the public goods in the society we belong to.
- Elections help us implement the principle of trusteeship.
- Through elections we choose a person to take care of the ‘public wealth’ that belongs equally to all of us.
- The elected representatives are merely trustees on our behalf and it is a primary duty of the trustee to make sure that they do not destroy what they are trustees of.
- This principle of trusteeship has been completely destroyed by merely viewing democracy as an act of voting.
- Good governance implies that these “trustees” take decisions and implement them so as to protect the common public goods.
- Instead of protecting the common goods, the elected representatives take our share of the public wealth for their personal gain.
- Other institutions are affected due to this watered down notion of democracy:
- Very few institutions inculcate democratic values in their functioning.
- Private institutions have little commitment to democracy. In an overall set up where democracy is not respected, they lose their little sense of trusteeship.
- Political alienation happens because people are a part of the political process only for the few minutes when they cast their votes.
13.Political alienation leads to cultural alienation which in turn leads to right wing movements.
- In order to get rid of most of the problems plaguing India, not only choice, but even power has to be democratised.