Conditions necessary for the success of democracy essay

Democracy is not something readymade and finished. It grows, evolves and passes through stages of failures and unsuccessful. Anti-democratic and undemocratic forces are never absent from any human society. Man is not a perfectly rational animal. Reason and unreason are in constant conflict.

All writers on the subject of democracy have dwelt on the difficulty against which the aims and ideals of democracy have to contest. Socrates and Jesus Christ were victims of a mob-minded majority. In India such monstrous and atrocious customs as the Sati system, untouchability, the caste system, enjoyed popular support for centuries.

Rule by a brute majority is not democracy. Sidekick speaks of a democratic minimum, namely those irreducible and inviolable natural rights which majority rule cannot touch. Democracy is an all-embracing comprehensive system, very carefully and understandingly built-up and modified or liberalised from time to time.

England was a democracy pretty old in the 19th century, and yet Macaulay failed to get a Bill passed against child-labour which he wished to be limited to ten hours a day. Monstrous and cruel practices even in England, the mother of Parliaments, were legally permitted for decades and centuries. The novels of Dickens are an eloquent testimony to the cruelties, to the legalised hardship and injustice under which poor men and women and their children suffered in Victorian England.

We may outline some of the conditions requisite for the success of democracy. Our Indian democracy is among the youngest democracies of the world. Since 1947, and the first general elections in 1952, many loop-holes and glaring facts have come to light. Our soldiers are underpaid, the naval and air forces are barely sufficient, ill-paid and not quite-well-treated. Our police force is ill-rewarded, poorly-paid and highly inadequate in number. Our teachers, except in a few cases, are neither properly trained nor adequately paid.

Men appointed as anti-corruption officers so act as if that a small bribe makes them connive at food and medicine adulteration. Our authorities have woefully failed to hold the price-line which is the life of the nation and the one encourager of bribery and corruption. The major part of the energy and output in the name of our five-year Plans and other public services goes to line the pockets of supervisors and other authorities. None is free from a position to resist temptation. Hegel says, “Wars are the outcome of latent vardom”. The world is passing through a period of imminent explosion. Every nation lives under the fear of danger and insecurity. The abiding values of life have been allowed to die or sanity have been given the go-by.

Home-life, the basis of civilization, is breaking up. Inspiring literature and art have been replaced by the literature and art of cynicism and denial. The generation is a hungry generation and therefore an angry generation with a black future. The healthy restraints of life, the necessary checks and balances of life have all gone.

Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru on one occasion significantly remarked that England made a success of democracy because the Industrial Revolution in England preceded full democracy by almost a century or more. We in India started the democratic experiment without an Industrial Revolution.

What did he mean to say? The British Industrial Revolution brought prosperity and economic security to 70 per cent of the common population of Britain which helped to make British democracy progressively a success.

Our Indian democracy has remained bankrupt and poverty-stricken with about ninety per cent of people living under the subsistence-level. Not only people living under the subsistence-level but bureaucracy, the peasantry and the labour class but our bureaucrats and the middle classes, too, remain deprived. Such a economic security and economic democracy state of affairs is inimical to the success of democracy in India. When is said and done the economic forces are the decisive forces.

Should we despair of the success of democracy in India? There are signs of hope that India is becoming change-conscious and change-impelled. Land to the landless, work to the workless, houses to the houseless, family planning, spread of letters in Indian population, general discontent and unrest cannot go all waste. Weak forces and great movements are at work all over the globe. It is, therefore, not unreasonable, almost certain, to believe that before the 20th century is over,

will have turned the corner. Sidney Webb once said about India, “gradualness. Rome was not built in a day.” We are still in a democratic India a new Indian democratic experiment of rare importance and significance, the pathetic contentment of which Montaigne, the Secretary of State of India cherished. In the second decade of the second half of the century, India has changed and India is changing.

Our people are no longer fatalistic, contented, happy and discontented; they have begun to feel and to think. The awakening of masses is the foundation of democracy and for the gradual realization of democratic ideals. India is today at the turning of the ways. Conditions necessary for the success of democracy essay