@prashanthamine
Mumbai: There are some people in power who get intoxicated by the force, authority and power that it brings along with it. While others start having hallucinations about the ripple effect of events occurring in faraway lands. Of course there are lessons to be learnt from what has happened in the USA on Capitol Hill on January 6 and what has been happening there for the past few months there. Unfortunately some in India began to have hallucinations and began conjuring things up.
There are several differences between the US model of democracy and our Indian model of democracy and hence what happened in the US is highly unlikely to happen in India. There are some whose imaginations are running wild. And that is the danger for any democracy. If the supreme leader himself is guilty of instigating the mob, then god forbid what is to become of any form of governance or polity.
What happened at Capitol Hill was Anarchy let loose by those who did not believe in the very concept or values of democracy, rule of law, power of the constitution and will of the people.
After the 2010-11 so-called Arab Spring that threatened to bring democracy to the Arab world, some people began having delusions about the possibility of social media generated movements taking roots in distant lands. Alien concepts seldom take roots in foreign lands.
Since the massively controversial 2000 US presidential election between George W Bush and Al Gore, presidential elections in the USA have always been controversial. Though allegations of electoral fraud and outside interference in the US presidential elections have been refuted, the smoking gun has always spewed smoke of suspicion.
Americans tend to stretch the notion of democracy to its limits, bordering extreme liberalism. Nowhere in the world can any adult person walk into an election polling booth get him or she registered as a voter and then goes on and cast his vote! Question is how is anyone going to verify the antecedents and proofs submitted by the individual before he is legally declared fit to vote at the eleventh hour? There is no deadline set for voter registration and verification, unlike in India.
Secondly besides the Federal election laws and Federal Election Commission (FEC) which appears to be toothless in the face of State’s having their own set of election related laws. Thirdly, women in America had to wage a fight before they were granted the right to vote. It took a hundred years for a US President (Donald Trump) to pardon Susan B Anthony (then 52 years old) to defy male only voting rights in 1872. It was only in 1920, a good 14 years after her death in 1906, that women in the US got their right to vote.
The fundamental difference between the US system and our Indian model has been that we at our Independence in 1947 granted women the right to vote. Secondly, we have laid down procedures and laws for voter registration and for contesting candidates. There are reasonable deadlines and rules set for voter registration and contesting candidates.
Unlike in the US where of late no one of late clearly knows who has won, our Election Commission of India (ECI) has delivered flawless elections ever since late T N Seshan took over as the 10th Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) of ECI. During his tenure from 1990 to 1996 he redrew the attention to provisions in the electoral laws and ensured that they were enforced in their true letter and spirit. They were treated as Electoral Reforms, restored the faith in our system and restored the autonomy of the ECI.
Another hallmark of our polity and electoral system has been the peaceful transition in governments run by political parties with diverse political ideologies. The Federal structure is such that state’s governed by ruling parties with diverse political ideologies co-exist with the central government.
Only once has the peaceful transition of power been broken in India and that was when the state of Internal Emergency was declared in 1975 after then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did not take the Allahabad High Court verdict in setting aside her election to the Lok Sabha.
But even that aberration in history was corrected by the electorate that understands the power of its vote. It was the same electorate that voted the Janata Party government (1977-79), voted it out and voted Indira Gandhi back to power.
The jury is still out there on which is better, the ballot papers or the electronic voting machines. There have been accusations in the recent November 2020 US Presidential elections of pencil marked ballot papers being erased and remarked. There were allegations of errors in counting of votes using the Dominion Voting Systems machines and presence of dead voters from centuries ago still voting.
The events of November 2020 and January 6, 2021 in the US have exposed the fallacies that their system has. Our system of polity and governance has deep ancient roots in the concept of Janpad’s and has evolved into a more accommodative system where divergent ideologies coexist. Anarchist and dictatorial tendencies have been brutally dealt with by the electorate and shown their place in India.
Moreover, our Judiciary has been our watch guard in protecting our rights and freedoms and dealing with any anarchical, dictatorial or corrupt regimes from causing any harm to our democracy. Mercifully we do not have a social media that behaves and overrides the political executive into banning the political executive. The balance between the four pillars of democracy is still intact and there is mutual respect between them.
We have rarely used the Impeachment process against those who head the legislature, executive and the judiciary. In the US three of the eight US presidents have been impeached until now. Eight of the former US presidents have left behind a tainted and controversial legacy.
What we have as a fallacy is our inability to differentiate between what constitutes domestic policy and what constitutes foreign policy, their correlation with each other and how they tend to affect each other.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi may have subtly campaigned for Donald Trump, but the Indian American voter prefers a more liberal visa, Green Card regime than a one that looks inwards. Foreign policy territory is a minefield that any misstep can cause irreparable damage. Another major foreign policy blunder was our intervention in Sri Lanka by sending the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to disarm the various militant armed groups from 1987 to 1990.
But then you had the US beseeching India for Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) tablets. Besides that most of the third world countries, developing countries and even developed ones are in favor of Indian made vaccines that effectively overcome the Coronavirus. It is a bit tragic to find that some of our own politicians want to belittle the achievements of our own scientists and play into the hands of Multi-National Companies (MNCs)
The disconnect the Indian diaspora abroad has with its motherland is what holds back India when it comes to foreign policy issues. That is why Canadian Indians strike a discordant note over farmer’s agitation in Punjab and the US media that still has fancy and utopian notions about India and always catches the snake by its tail.
We have our fallacies, but at least we do not make a spectacle of ourselves wherein no one for days together knows who has actually won the election! We do not storm the temples of our democracy and desecrate them, though there are some anarchist tendencies that are delusional about it.
