An Essay by Shree Nirmal Jee on Journal of Non Resident Indian (www.jnri.net )

The following thoughts of Nirmal were sent as e-mail to six hundred contacts in May 2004.

The recent elections in India have confirmed the fact that in India we have a 'democratic' system that truly allows people to replace one set of rulers by another. But is it a sign of true democracy?

How can you have true democracy when the the majority of Indians who live in the rural areas live in poverty? They have no electricity, no clean drinking water and no good schools? The fact that the traders, and the middle classes, who live in big cities, and who constitute a minority of the one billion Indian people, enjoy wealth and have good schools does not prove that we have true democracy.

How can India be strong when there is no unity amongst the people? How can you have unity when vast majority of people living in the rural areas are poor and destitute? How can you have unity between those who are poor and those who are rich?

Without unity amongst the people how can we fight external enemies who are always hatching plots to weaken our country and subjugate our people once again?

There is no doubt that we have a political system that allows people to change the rulers. This is much better than the political system that prevails in countries such as China and Vietnam. Recently some Vietnamese friends of mine who live in the USA remarked that the government in Vietnam will be terribly afraid of holding the kind of elections that took place in India.

But the truth of the matter is that in essence during the elections the Indian people really do not have much choice because they only have a choice between two or more sets of bad rulers. This is because the whole political system, the government machinery and and the vast bureacracy are reeking with corruption.

We have no doubt made great strides in such fields as military sciences and software engineering. But this should not mean that we should become complacent. We must preserve the good things we have, get rid of bad things we have acquired by imitating others, and acquire the good things we lack.

Some people equate Indian and American democracies, saying that both are dominated by money, and that both democracies are the best democracy that money can buy.

Well, it is true that American democracy is dominated by money, but this is because America is the bastion of world capitalism. In America, the vast majority of people are well off. Even an ordinary person who works as a garbage pick up person for the little town, can not only afford to support his family financially, but he can also afford a family car. He is not ashamed of telling others that he is a garbage collector working for the little town. This is because there is dignity of labor in the West.

But in India things are different. The vast majority of the people there, who live in rural areas have no electricity, no clean drinking water, no regular source of income, and little hope that things will improve in the future.

What kind of democray is this where the vast majority of people are destitutes? Is right to vote the essence of democracy? No, it is not!

The political system that exsits in India is not democracy. It can be called 'richocracy', i.e. the rule by the rich. When the affairs of the state are decided by political parties that are funded and controlled by the very rich, who are a small minority, when the institutions of the country such as the courts are dominated by the very wealthy class, such a system is not democracy.

America is the sole world superpower. To compare India and USA as if they were on equal footing is meaningless. For Indians to blindly imitate the ways of USA is futile.

In this regard the following report published recently in the Times of India on the web is worth noting.

"A recent study of 25 countries across the world has rated India as a "weak democracy" on account of corruption and lack of accountability in its public institutions.

The Global Integrity Report, prepared by US-based Centre for Public Integrity after a year-long study of 25 nations around the world, has put India in the weak category on a 'public integrity index', which is a measure of the existence and effectiveness of laws and institutions that promote accountability and limit corruption.

Giving a timeline of corruption over the past two decades in the country, the report stated that "the absence of any meaningful law to monitor the funding of political parties has been a glaring limitation in the Indian electoral/political system." There was also a "clear lack of transparency" about the source of party funds and there was no provision for mandatory disclosure of accounts statements, it said. The report further said a major bottleneck in the Indian democratic and legal framework has been lack of transparency about the functioning of the government.

'This lack of transparency empowered the bureaucracy in significant ways and paved the way for abuse of power,' it said.

The study found that while powerful laws were in place in India to deal with corrupt practices, the challenge lay in their effective implementation, adding "the system as a whole does not seem to have effective checks in place to prevent or tackle corruption."

'The war against corruption in India is today largely waged by a few isolated individuals, select citizen groups, a sprinkling of committed officers and the judiciary,' it said.

'Corruption cannot thrive in an environment where the public is informed as to the true extent and nature of abuses of power ,' Lewis said, adding, "this new approach will enable the public to identify weaknesses in institutions and laws that could be strengthened'. (From the web site http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com)

Dear Nirmal, Your essays are beautiful and thought provoking. It should get published in leading magazines and news papers.

"This should be an eye opener to all those of Indian origin that criticise the US while praising India as the sole champion of democracy! India may be world's largest democracy but certainly not the greatest, or else so many felons and 'dons' wouldn't be 'adoring' the high offices... US domestic/ foreign policies are geared primarily towards its interests and every thing else is just secondary!!

I find the comments of KUMAR RHAUL in your web page very appropriate and to the point."

This is good and to the point. Many people miss this. I will use some of this information in my yahoo group, which you may wish to join also: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IonI

Is India a true democracy?