Entertainment Jogi trailer: Diljit Dosanjh fights for his community in Ali Abbas Zafar's Netflix thriller about 1984 anti-Sikh riots.Gujarat riots cases: SC disposes of all pending pleas seeking intervention.Cities CBI found nothing in my bank locker, says Sisodia.Even if this possibility is averted this time by the combined effort of the opposition parties, given the logic of electoral politics, this threat will become more acute after five years. In the upcoming parliamentary elections, the fate of India would be sealed quickly and decisively if the Hindutva parties are returned to power. The Hindutva movement is poised to create a unified “Hindu religious group” and a consolidated “Hindu vote bank”. But the Hindutva movement and its ascendency that is feeding on this tendency, is now threatening to convert Indian representative democracy into a majoritarian democracy. This tendency is, as the logic of the system demands, exploited by all political parties. It is inevitable that in such societies, different groups would vote for the parties/candidates who they think are most likely to protect their interests. Moreover, in a multicultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious society like India, representative democracy has the inherent propensity to generate “vote banks”. This resulted in parties working for the private interests of the person(s) “owning” the party and in the process, the interest of the masses often got ignored. Gradually this had a domino effect on the other parties as well. This tendency first manifested in the Congress with the ascent of Indira Gandhi. Intra party democracy thus stands seriously compromised. Except for the left parties, all other political groups are either owned by an individual, a family or an institution for all practical purposes. Money, other incentives and the presence of criminals play a significant role in the elections. Like American democracy, this is also a managed democracy. The dark underbelly of representative democracy is out there in the open for everyone to see. To most of us this may not have come as a surprise. In the democracy index of 2017, India has been categorised as a flawed democracy. Implicitly, he was suggesting a model of development that could have been more successful and humane than the Stalinist model that was adopted (which emphasised the development of heavy industry, etc.).” That would have been very healthy for India. In an interview Chomsky said: “There were some positive things - for example, his (Gandhi’s) emphasis on village development, self-help and communal projects. One of the persons who thought it would have been wonderful if India had paid heed to Gandhi was Noam Chomsky. Was this a reasonable proposal? Or was Gandhi’s proposal reactionary and unintelligible, as Nehru said in a letter to Gandhi on January 11, 1928. Gandhi was the first theoretician of democracy to foresee this danger. This dislike for representative democracy sprang from his conviction that it would in no time degenerate into an anti-people institution in a multicultural and multi-religious context like India. However, for Gandhi, the idea of a nation state was itself a trap and he feared that once India adopted it, it would forever be forced to run a representative form of government in order to avoid the menace of a possible dictatorship. It certainly looks dignified in comparison with the alternative - dictatorship that could potentially lead to fascism. Representative democracy is a product of an idea of a nation state that developed after the French Revolution. But the democracy that Gandhi supported wholeheartedly was the direct form of democracy as opposed to the representative one. Throughout his life he remained a champion of democratic rights and lent his voice and support to democratic associations, wherever he happened to be. Gandhi was undoubtedly a thoroughbred democrat.
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