India is world’s largest democracy. India has maintained its democracy on grass root level with non-political army, judiciary & other authorities like election commission. India’s politicians might be corrupt but they are elected by perfectly fair & transparent ways. There is no doubt about credibility of Indian elections. In such a Practicing democracy it is expected that political parties will be having some , if not full transparency & inter-party democracy. Almost all the parties have one supreme leader whose say is bigger than parties. I have never seen Cong. MLAs choosing their chief ministers after elections. Why same decision is taking by every state legislatives which says “we have left the decision of chief minister ship to Cong leader Sonia ji”. If Sonia ji have to decide everything why call the meeting at the first place. Even worst are regional parties, I can’t name another BSP leader than mayawati. Same is case with RJD, SP, DMK, AIADMK, TDP, NC, PDP etc. Almost all of them are single leader parties with some family members influence. Left parties are little better as far as internal democracy is concerned, as none of their leader is above party line. But problem with them is much more dangerous as their party interest is even above national interest. Communism is important than Indianism. Cong being such a big party should have followed internal democracy. Only party which perform better on this front is BJP. But has external democracy also. They also follow what RSS suggest (not dictate, as they prefer to call it.). BJP’s recent problems of too many rebels might be due to too much internal democracy. Due to lack of decision taking members, keeping party united is next to difficult. In that sense inter-party democracy don’t seems to worked well in India. Expulsion of jaswant singh was something BJP should have learned a lesson from. Due to so-called internal democracy party was not united, if was loosing its vision. BJP was in big dilemma should they soften there hindutva agenda or make it even more redical. Party want to win more allies for which they need to soften hindutva a little. On the other hand there was fear of loosing its core vote bank. BJP’s vote bank has reached almost the saturation point. They are not able to improve it any further. They also can’t afford to leave the agenda which is reason for its existence itself.
BJP scored highest on internal party democracy, but on the account of its vision. May be Inter-party democracy is not working out as a whole. Less the discussion, faster the decision, fewer voices against it. Words of Ghandhi family are final in Cong so no one dare to challenge it. It makes Cong decision faster & show party as united in most cases. It might face some problem but single power house make it command follow in one direction. On paper inter-party democracy is nice. But in reality might be different.
True.
ReplyDeleteAs long as the majority of the Indian public and elected leaders are uneducated and elections are won by charismatic cinema stars and people who misuse the Gandhi name, this will probably continue.
In US, even if the President shows support for a policy, the individual senators and congressmen have their freedom to vote for or against it. It took nearly 300 years for America to come to this state, may be we too have to wait for the system to mature !
But then, democracy is not a perfect solution, only better than the dictatorships.