Dilemma of Democracy

I hail from India, the land with the world’s largest democracy. Despite that, I am not a big fan of democracy. This post might irk a lot of people but I can’t help sharing my views.

The whole concept of allowing each and every one to have a say in every common decision, without considering whether or not they are fit enough to take decisions, is sort of an exaggeration of the concept of rights. Democracy, in its purest form, is something that looks good and promising in theory but in practical, its repercussions can easily be seen.

Let’s go through them one by one.

·        1) Universal Adult Franchise: The present criteria of allowing every person older than 18 years, to vote is not the best way to judge a person’s eligibility to cast his/her vote. This allows so many people who simply don’t care about the ideals of democracy, to cast vote. I have personally seen people selling their votes for a bottle of liquor in broad daylight.

 Almost each and every one of us will relate to it when I say one of the most influential factor that determines a person’s vote is the caste of the candidates. This is what I found while researching for this post. 

This is what people searched for! Surely a bummer, huh?

·         2) The vision of democracy is to make sure the legislators are “representatives” of the citizens, but does that really happen with the present system?

Take the records of the present (UPA –II) parliament. The Election Commission of India has valued the assets of an MP at an average of Rs. 1.4 crores. This can’t be disregarded as mere coincidence. Democracy often is the government of the rich.

Modern democracy is capitalistic. The rich candidates “buy” votes of those are incompetent enough to choose by themselves. We might face away from the reality but this is the bottom line.

A few manipulators who can get votes with the greatest success get the democratic power.

·         3) Bad influence of the political parties: Political parties are the basis of democracy. A political party aims at capturing power. Its members are to safeguard the interests of the party. Sometimes, they overlook the overall interest of the state for the sake of their party.

4) There is more emphasis on quantity than quality. Democracy demands representation from every state, caste, community, religion,gender,race,color and what not, but one thing that it says nothing about is the competence of the representatives.

I completely agree that democracy is probably the best form of governance that has ever been put on test. But then, there are problems associated with it too. These are just some of the problems that I find with it, maybe there are more or maybe I exaggerated. In any case, it would surely help the system if we are able to eliminate bugs such as above from the form of governance we have.