analise the transformation of democratic to non democratic india
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Answer:
Explanation:
While India’s economy has received periodic attention, mostly during critical moments defined by food shortages and foreign exchange outages, the workings of its democracy have received next to none. This reflects a complacency.
Interestingly, the neglect is evident in every angle from which the country has been approached, applying to observers located both within and without its society. Thus while the rulers of the western world berate India for its deviance from the apparently superior norms of a free-market architecture, India’s nationalist elite traces her pathologies to western hegemony. Both lose the narrative by refusing to see that its condition is related to the failings of its democracy, which in one dimension has remained more or less unchanged since 1947. This dimension is that the majority of the population has been left with weak capabilities.
Unfree after Independence
Capabilities are what enable individuals to pursue the lives that they value. This, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has suggested, is true freedom and should therefore be the focus of all developmental effort. The idea is foundational in that it vaults over narrow economistic or political definitions of development. It is irrelevant to it whether we have more or less of the state or the market or whether we insert ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ into the Constitution so long as large sections of our people are unfree in the sense that they cannot lead lives that they value. Jawaharlal Nehru, though perhaps elliptically, had expressed this in his famous speech on August 14, 1947.
He had seen Indian Independence as an opportunity to build a “prosperous, democratic and progressive nation and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman”. B.R. Ambedkar, with legal acumen and a practical bent of mind, had defined democracy as a means to bring about a significant change in the living conditions of the depressed without resorting to bloodshed. These ambitious programmes and the hard work they would have entailed fell by the wayside in the practices of India’s political class and in the discourse of its intellectuals.
Whatever may have been the vision of India’s founding fathers, Indian democracy has not lived up to their expectations. As a matter of fact, it has done far worse. In the past year it appears to have added heightened violence towards the marginalised to its sedentary character. The >incident of four Dalit youth being beaten in full public view in Gujarat is only the most recent instance of this. >Parliament reportedly heard accusations and defences the next day but it is not yet clear what impact it will have and how civil society will respond. India’s middle classes are quick to be hurt when news of Indians subjected to racial indignity in the West is beamed into our living rooms. No one could have missed the irony of Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this month >travelling by train in South Africa where about a century ago M.K. Gandhi was thrown out of a first class carriage because of the colour of his skin.
The scenes from India come a full century later. And the Dalit youths had, going by public sources, only skinned a dead cow, a task to which Indian society historically confined them. By assaulting them for undertaking it, not only has their dignity been denied but their livelihood snatched away. In any civilised society the perpetrators of this crime would not just be grasped by the long arm of the law but publicly shamed.