India Direly Needs Democracy and Democratic Governance

The context, the contents as well as the title of the book can be best appreciated in light of some of the glaring news and incidents of modern-day India. One; more than thirty members of the legislative assembly of a prominent state of India, all duly elected by the people, flew to the capital of a different far away state and stayed in a posh hotel there for more than a month in order to make up their mind about their allegiance to their leader. It is an open question how the huge cost incurred on this account has been met and how the time wasted in this exercise has been accounted for. Another was the case when the Rashtrapati Bhawan (i.e. the President’s House) of India and the Rajyapal Bhawan (Governor’s House) of a state acted in concert overnight, as if there was a national crisis to be urgently taken of, in order to install the state government in haste, which ultimately proved to be abortive. A third is the case where the education minister of a state was found to have collected a very large sum of money in bribe for the appointment of teachers in government schools in his state, mostly in currency notes stacked in a house. All these incidents and many more, or rather increasingly more in this genre, make one think what kind of governance India has even after more than seven decades of declaring itself to be a democratic republic after having suffered almost two centuries of colonialism and exploitative governance. It is particularly intriguing since India’s struggle for freedom was waged under the inspiring leadership of Mahatma Gandhi who always advocated for democracy as a way of life and governance for free India and autonomous village governance would be the core of democratic India. Instead, India adopted in its Constitution essentially colonial system of governance under the veneer of parliamentary democracy and thus fell into the delusion of having democracy. The book examines all these aspects in their historical perspective and concludes that India’s governance still suffers from the virus of colonialism, i.e. exploitativeness and only democracy and democratic governance can deliver India out of the present deplorable situation and bring in its rightful prosperity commensurate with its excellent resources – natural, human as well as cultural.