There is a sleight of hand at the core of Indian democracy, repeated so often it now passes for normal. Once every five years, the citizen is briefly sovereign: courted by parties, venerated by leaders, drenched in the rhetoric of jan shakti and loktantra, people’s power and democracy. For that moment, the voter is king.
Then the ballots are counted, the winners declared and the citizen reverts, instantly and completely, to being a subject.
For the next five years, elected representatives take decisions that shape every aspect of life – taxation, infrastructure, education, healthcare, land, and law – without any meaningful citizen intervention. There is no continuous mechanism of accountability, no institutional channel for participation, no enforceable right to intervene between elections.
Call it what it is: not democracy, but an elective oligarchy, a ritualised transfer of power to a political class that, once installed, answers to almost no one.
Ritual of the vote
The vote is both the start and the limit of democratic participation in India. In many constituencies, it is also a transaction, shaped by cash, liquor, caste alignments, or manufactured communal fear.
The Centre for Media Studies estimated that parties and candidates in the 2024 Lok Sabha election spent roughly Rs 100,000 crore, with a significant share that...
from Scroll.in https://scroll.in/article/1092431/anand-teltumbde-not-more-mps-indian-democracy-needs-citizens-to-have-a-greater-say-in-governance?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=public https://sc0.blr1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/article/213165-lheemjsacj-1777386538.jpg
via
0 Comments