Nepal: Is India democratic?

Niraj Aryal

Kathmandu: Often termed as “The Largest Democracy” by the West and overwhelmed by its international approval in handling successfully the so-called poorest people’s democracy, India though in the recent times and as well in the past has shown the ugly face of democracy that exists in the country where almost a quarter of 1.2 billion plus poor of the world make their home.

Mrs. Indira Gandhi, on June 26, 1975 imposed an emergency, thus bringing about a total collapse of the so-called largest democratic setup into a classic dictatorship. A slap to the Nehruvian dream of democracy by his own daughter, the illustrious Indu.

The reason this time though was different than the traditional Indian line of the "security is in danger" because of foreign aggression but due to internal destabilization. Thanks she was not afraid of Bhutan in the neighborhood, her father's carefully nurtured sibling. The baby though a matured one has been carefully yet being nurtured to send threatening signals to other smaller some what “hostile” teens.

Indira Gandhi tried to convince the people that the emergency would be a boon for the poor living in India for greater social change and common economic development.

But leaders were arrested, press was suppressed, and telephone lines were cut.

The minority Muslim community living in majority Hindu, India were specially targeted in the name of population control as they were always first to be sterilized, writes a Muslim writer based in India. Many an even unmarried ones were vasectomised in the Indu’s “democratic” India.

Witnessing the brutal killings of the Muslims in the state of Kashmir, separatists groups in Assam and the state led forces conducting mass murders in the Naga majority areas in the northeast do indicate that India’s farce preaching of democratic ideologies is merely a double standard that is still valid.

Mr. K.Subramaniyam, often called as an Indian security guru who had lead the National Security Council Advisory Board (NSCAB), India to draft the Indian Nuclear doctrine, wrote a few years back in the Indian Express, a leading newspaper that, “Although recent developments in Goa and Jharkhand have caused much outrage and the politics in Bihar and leadership elections in Haryana have reduced the exercise of democracy to a farce, there is no introspection in our media and academia as to why democracy in a country that boasts of being its largest practitioner has been reduced to this appalling state?”

He writes further, “The culture of our major political parties is authoritarian and not democratic. That is demonstrated in the scant availability of inner party democracy in the majority of our political parties and their behaviour in the legislatures. One would believe their democratic credentials only when the leaderships’ would impose discipline and respect for the rule of law on their legislators within the legislatures and permit the parties at the state level to elect their own leaders and form their own coalitions. If elected legislators are kept in custody pending confidence votes in legislatures, there is no need to be surprised about the kidnappings of children and doctors in Bihar and elsewhere. It is far more important to discipline our political parties to respect the rule of law than to allow them to make opportunistic deals in the name of democracy, which will lead neither to stable democracy nor to good and effective governance.”

Better India keeps her house in order than interfere in the affairs of her modest neighbors.

A small piece of advice to the largest democracy: Move towards Bhutan with Kalash Yatras so that democracy could dawn in that oppressive and repressive regime currently being rule by India’s “baby”.

It would also be advisable that India moves towards Yangoon-the Suki’s land. But India will refrain from going to Yangoon. But why? The answer is simple: India need above all natural “GAS”. This India and this farcical democracy that is.

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