Democracy and Development in India:

To most theorists of democracy in the West, India is an embarrassing anomaly and hence largely avoided. By most theoretical stipulations India should not have survived as a democracy: ƒ it's too poor ƒ its citizens largely rural and uneducated ƒ its civic institutions rather weak. ƒ It is a paradox even for those who believe in a positive relationship between economic equality or social homogeneity and democracy. India's wealth inequality (say, in land distribution, and even more in education or human capital) is one of the highest in the world. Indian society is also one of the most heterogeneous in the world (in terms of ethnicity, language, caste and religion), and social inequality, a legacy of the caste system, is considerable. combined), keeps lumbering on decade after decade as a ramshackle, yet remarkably resilient, democratic polity. Of course, depending on the defining features of democracy the depth of Indian democracy may be rather limited. It is useful to keep a distinction between three general aspects of democracy: ¾ (a) some basic minimum civil and political rights enjoyed by citizens, ¾ (b) some procedures of accountability in day-today administration under some overarching constitutional rules of the game, ¾ (c) periodic exercises in electoral voice, participation and representativeness. These aspects are of varying strength in different parts of India. In general while the performance in much of the country over the last sixty years has been really impressive in terms of (c), notwithstanding some pitfalls and electoral malpractices, the performance in respect of (a) and (b) have been somewhat mixed, satisfactory in some respects but not at all in others. Also, except in three or four states, all these aspects of democracy are usually weaker at the local village or municipality level than at the federal or provincial levels. There are several ways in which the historical and social origins of democracy in India are sharply different from those in much of the West, and the indigenous political culture has fundamentally reshaped the processes of democracy. These differences are reflected in the current functioning of democracy in India, making it difficult to fit the Indian case to the canonical cases in the standard theories of democracy. • While in European history democratic rights were won over continuous battles against aristocratic privileges and arbitrary powers of absolute monarchs, in India these battles were fought by a coalition of groups in an otherwise …