Write a note on the history of democracy in Delhi.
Answers
Explanation:
On 15 August 1947, at the stroke of the midnight hour, while half the world slept and the other half lay chained by colonialism, the epochal question before the Indian people switched. Till then, it was: “When shall we get freedom?” After 15 August it became: “What shall we do with freedom?”
Mahatma Gandhi had answered the first question. When he launched his phase of our freedom struggle in 1919, a notable Indian sceptic famously scoffed: “What does this man in a dhoti think he is doing? The British empire will last 400 years.” Once Gandhi lit the long-dormant spark within Indians, the British were out in less than 30 years. India’s liberation signalled the end of Europe’s colonial project. Within another 30 years, colonial rule had vanished. But the question it left in its wake — “What shall we do with freedom?” — is still searching for answers across the world.
The first part of the answer was easy. India had not won freedom from Britain in order to deny freedom to its own people. Democracy, equality and their attendant rights became the first and fundamental principles of India’s Constitution.
It is often suggested, by apologists of Empire, that the British gave us democracy. Gandhi did not need anyone’s advice on the meaning of freedom. He believed in the people and their rights. His programme was anchored in mass action. He rejected both the class elitism of Lords and Ladies and the class conflicts of Karl Marx. The British did not give us democracy. What they gave us was the Westminster model, which is quite another story.
There is no perfect polity. As political architecture, the Westminster model has much to commend it. Its racehorse simplicity (“first past the post”) finesses the fractures in proportional representation. Such fractures can easily become fissures under the pressure of power politics, with dangerous unintended consequences. But while Westminster offers confidence at the electoral base, it begins to wobble at its upper stories. The absence of fixed terms for Parliament, for instance, makes any government vulnerable to destabilisation. A president of America, in contrast, can only be removed from office through a fixed-date election (barring impeachment). The people elect, the people reject. Other democracies have taken steps to protect the democratic edifice from structural flaws. France ended serial instability with President Charles de Gaulle’s reforms. Italy could not, and the consequences are the substance of daily news.
Political stability in India has always required a prime minister who can command both the confidence of Parliament and the trust of the people. We witnessed this level of stability only for a decade after the first general election in 1952. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru retained the confidence of Parliament after the war with China in 1962, but trust in his government was shattered by traumatic defeat. Nehru had to resort to anxious measures like the Kamaraj Plan in October 1963 to allay the seismic tremors. But it was too late and never enough. Nehru and his friend, Egypt’s Gamal Nasser, suffered the same fate. Nasser’s popularity survived defeat in the 1976 war with Israel, but not his credibility.
In the 1967 elections, Congress, now led by Indira Gandhi, lost all state governments from Punjab to Bengal, and survived in Delhi by a narrow margin. What was implicit became explicit. In 1969, her government lapsed into a minority when the Congress split. Mrs Gandhi veered steeply towards the left in her economic policies, in order to woo Communist support to survive.
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