Questionable democracy
Democracy is always a question mark, often an exclamation point, but never a full stop because democracy’s work is never done.
Democracy constantly reinvents itself, and India’s democracy, the largest in the world, is working overtime to reinvent itself, in an exercise that has raised more question marks than there are quills on an agitated porcupine.
The question that our democracy is asking itself is whether it is democratic enough in the size of the govt to implement its day-to-day working, the govt that the electorate votes into office.
As the size of our electorate has increased, to reflect this increase, should the size of our govt also increase proportionately?
The exercise, called delimitation, is proposing to establish what the limits of democracy are, or ought to be. Does a numerically bigger govt mean more democracy, or less? Is democracy subject to the laws of mathematics, or simple arithmetic?
It might well seem so. A polity of a million people with just one person to govern the whole lot of them would not be a democracy, but a monarchy or a dictatorship. However, a polity of one million people in which all the one million deem themselves to be rulers, would stretch the definition of democracy as a govt of the people, by the people, and for the people, to make it indistinguishable from anarchy, in which everyone’s a ruler and no one is ruled.
Like Goldilocks, democracy needs to find a chair that is not too small, not too big, but just the right size to seat itself in.
This is easier said than done. Unlike Goldilocks, democracy requires not a chair but a multiplicity of chairs, which make up the sitting room, called Parliament.
Is the current size of our Parliament democratic enough for democracy, or does the calculus of democracy require more?
Yes it does, say proponents of delimitation. No, say those who think delimitation is de limit. With electoral scales hanging in the balance in four states and a Union territory, delimitation adds another question to the endless question marks of democracy.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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