Reassert democratic values

While many old problems persist, we also have new challenges & opportunities. We are a country of young people. More than 70% Indians are below 35. They have new aspirations. Are we equipping them to meet these new aspirations? Let there be an employment mission to coordinate various programmes. Nearly 250 million are adolescents, who have their own problems. This is the time to give them education in life-skills.

Binding force: The ideals enshrined in the Constitution have helped sustain India as a secular democracy. PTI

SY Quraishi

Former Chief Election Commissioner of India

The Republic of India, with its varied topography, extraordinary ethnic mix, 22 official and 780 spoken languages and diverse religions and cultures has survived derisive remarks by the likes of Winston Churchill who lived in the delusion that the nation was no more than a “geographical expression”. Whatever the political dispensation, however complex the social fabric, the nation has moved decisively on the path of progress overcoming existential threats and garnering attention as one of the world’s most powerful democracies. Why did most countries consider India’s choice of becoming a democratic republic with universal adult suffrage a foolhardy misadventure?

The scepticism of most leaders was based on the circumstances in which India became a free nation. The devastation caused by the deadly Partition which claimed over a million lives and displaced a further 18 million, the unequal caste-based hierarchical society steeped in poverty and appalling illiteracy levels of 84% were hardly great qualifications for a country beginning afresh.

However, disproving those anxieties, elections have become a central and indispensable feature of Indian democracy, a mechanism through which the nation’s citizenry expresses its will and participates in public affairs. Around 73 countries across the world do not have elections, and it is in this context that the Indian achievement is further highlighted making it the widely acknowledged global gold standard in conducting elections. Conducting consistent and periodic elections in the country by encouraging large-scale popular participation is a stupendous task. Going by India’s record in this regard, periodic elections as a means of a smooth transfer of power have been a regular and successful feature of India’s democracy in the past 75 years. Not only this, Indians have time and again reposed faith in elections as the most potent means of non-violent and peaceful protest against all acts of omissions and commissions of the government.

This, however, is not to say either that the realm of Indian elections is unblemished or that conducting successful elections in itself satisfies the criterion of democracy. Democracy, as is widely understood, is not a static endpoint but a continuous process and therefore it is important that we stop and reflect upon the various deficiencies and drawbacks of our current state of democracy.

One in every four Indians is still illiterate. We still have high infant and maternal mortality rates — worse than those of some of our neighbouring nations such as Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan and far worse than those of Sri Lanka. Nearly 40 per cent of the children are stunted and more than one-fourth of the population severely malnourished. The rate of unemployment is so high that it contributes to disgruntlement, frustration and even criminalisation among the youth. The youth unemployment, in particular, has been touching a 50-year high. This becomes a breeding ground for disruptive forces of various hues. Drug abuse in some states has reached alarming proportions. The education system has let the country down, producing millions of unemployables, all of which has been severely exacerbated due to the pandemic. Ironically, there is no dearth of policies, programmes and funds to deal with these issues. And many of the policies, ostensibly proposed to reform and improve the current state of affairs, such as the Agnipath scheme or the farm laws, have proved to be highly controversial.

While many old problems persist, we also have new challenges and opportunities. We are a country of young people. More than 70 per cent of Indians are below 35. They have new aspirations. Are we equipping them to meet these aspirations? Let there be an employment mission to coordinate all the relevant programmes. Recent proposals by institutes such as the Azim Premji University for an “Urban Guarantee Employment Programme” similar to MGNREGA are well worth discussing. Nearly 250 million of the young people are adolescents, who have their own problems. They are no longer children but not yet adults. They worry about what is happening to them physically and emotionally. Their curiosity and experimentation make them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. This is the time to give them education in life-skills.

Population issues have gone off the political radar altogether. As a result, India’s population is set to overtake that of China’s next year. The department of family welfare was quietly abolished a decade or so ago. One factor contributing to the population explosion is child marriage. One in every three marriages in India is illegal, involving parties below the legal age for marriage. Yet not a whimper is heard. Early marriage leads to early pregnancy, which creates health complications for adolescent girls not physically or mentally equipped to deal with it. We should adopt an integrated adolescent development programme (and not just for health) and implement it in the mission mode.

Further, the recent trends of entrenched polarisation and communalisation of the public sphere, with a state that is increasingly becoming punitive, curbing dissent and free expression has to be put under check. We must forcefully reassert our democratic conscience.

Since the founding of the republic, India has been considered both the largest and one of the most populous democratic countries in the world. The main reasons for such a state of affairs were largely owing to the ideals that India strove to attain: maintenance of integrity and non-partisanship of the Election Commission, the active public sphere where dialogue and debates are energetically and freely undertaken, non-discriminatory management of religious, caste and linguistic diversity, concern for an equitable and equal society that is alert to the issues of gender and sustainable development, and ultimately a profound reverence towards the promise of our founding document; the Constitution, with its promulgation of fundamental rights and an ideology of national citizenship mandated with the virtues of secularism, liberty, equality and fraternity.

In the 75th year of Independence, we must proudly and persistently strive to enshrine and achieve the values and virtues for which many a million sacrifices were made.