Degeneration of Indian Democracy
I am ashamed of myself for being one of the citizens in the degenerated Indian democracy. Late.Rajiv Gandhi openly admitted that out of one rupee the Government spends for the peoples' welfare only 10 paise reaches them. It means 90 % gets eroded on the way. It shows clearly how far the Indian political and administrative machinery has become thoroughly corruptive.
India became independent from the British colonialism thanks to our great selfless leaders. Even in Tamil Nadu, we had excellent leaders like Kamaraj. He was such a great leader that he did not even permit to equip his thatched house with an electric fan when he was the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. His mother was eking out her livelihood as an agricultural laborer. During his Tamil Nadu visit when Jawaharlal Nehru wanted to meet her, she came out of a field as an agricultural laborer. Nehru was speechless.
I wonder how and when things went wrong in the Indian politics. I was racking up my brain. Of late, politics has become one of the fertile sources of earning for the unscrupulous people. People who find themselves otherwise useless thrive by entering politics. Amass wealth and money in crores and crores of rupees. Even save their excess unaccounted (black) money in Swiss banks. Apart from the political culture that we are used to in India, the contemporary politicians have developed their own political culture that has become unassailable to any other Indian machinery.
After observing politics very closely from my childhood days, I found the major difference between our erstwhile leaders who fought for our freedom and the present day leaders who just remain in politics with an ulterior motive. It is nothing but selfishness that motivates them to come up in politics by capturing party posts and then to amass wealth in right earnest. For them, politics is a permanent fertile source of earning and it knows no lean period.
People with a flair for politics, who are ready to follow its etiquette and lose their self-respect, enter politics. They eye for party posts according to their capacity and their ability to mobilize money to bribe their favorite leaders in politics.
While those in the lower stratum of politics manage to get government contracts, the middle-level people manage to get posts at the grassroots level. Those who have a greater bargaining capacity, with a close access to their leaders and who can mobilize crores of rupees get higher posts in politics. If their party wins the election with the requisite majority and comes to power, the people who have close access to their party leaders become ministers. Once they are sworn in as ministers, they thoroughly learn the source of making money in their respective portfolios by illegal means and amass wealth in hundreds of, if possible, in thousands of crores of rupees and in order to evade tax they use their close relatives as binamies as a safe haven to hide their illegally gotten wealth.
These political people, who have become thorough professionals in politics by this time, are more concerned about the common people and their welfare, once the elections are announced by the Election Commission. It is a pity that the freebies promised by a party in the previous election are distributed to them on the eve of the forthcoming election with an eye on their votes. Besides, these corruptive politicians during the elections also convert the common people into corruptive voters, by bribing them with money to poll their votes in their favor. The money paid to vote is based on the number of voters in each house. Despite the active canvassing done by the officials of the election commission through pamphlets, handbills etc not to get money for voting, the political parties managed to bribe them through clandestine means. After getting money from the party candidates, a voter makes his choice to vote for a candidate who pays him more. Thus the process of voting in the election has become rather a farce. The political party which spends more in the elections and bribes more to the voters, notwithstanding the curbs imposed by the election commission on their spending, is bound to win the election.To the political parties, the election process in the democracy has become a business, in which, when they invest more their profits are more.
Thus the Indian political scenario, especially the political parties scramble for power and their manipulation of the voters through illegal gratification in the course of the election is the worst feature in the Indian democracy. It shows how far the Indian political system including the election process is a farce and how far the politicians have become corruptive and the hapless voters have also become the victims of corruption. Above all the politicians, in their bid to save their illegally gotten wealth and carry them forward to their next generation, employs a stratagem of bringing their wards into politics, thereby virtually converting the popular democracy into hereditary democracy.
The politicians groom their wards in politics in a preplanned manner by gradually introducing them to small party posts at the lower level and by making them familiar at the grassroots level. When their party calls for younger blood, the politicians considering it as a god sent opportunity, throw their wards into the main political fray claiming seats for them to contest in the elections. The party politics turns into hereditary family politics and the juggernaut rolls on and on.
Thus party politics in India has become a farce by becoming thoroughly corruptive in tune with the political dictum 'power corrupts power; absolute power corrupts absolutely.' In the process, we, the common people have also become scapegoats of the political corruption.
Now we are in a dilemma whether Indian politics can be redeemed. Of course, only noble souls can do it! Let us wait for it hopefully.
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Tags:#Democracy, #degeneration, #election process,#votes, #money, #bribing,#hereditary democracy