Who should be blamed for the failure of democracy?

Today many states of India including Delhi are conducting General Election 2014. For the last one month the whole society was submerged in election talks. Election Commision of India is doing huge effort by making citizens of India aware of the value of their votes. Media is playing a crucial role in the same. Facebook, FM radio channel, Twitter, news channels, newspapers etc every aspect of social media has been used for these inititives. Moreover this is brining a positive attitude in the society towards the voting. Definity this is a good sign for a democary that citizens are showing interest in the election to choose most appropriate candidate of their choice.

But the questions still remain the same “How the social problem like curruption would be handled?” or “Would the pepole we are going to elect run this democracy honestly?”. If we ask these questions from any citizen of India no one has answer to these questions. Every year if we see union budget of the India we are under many thousands dollers deficit. That means we still do not have knowledge of why our democracy is failing?

Let’s look back into the history of India. For many centuries there was monarchy and was quite sucessfully. But it’s been only 66 years since Indian independence and we are facing lot of system problems in running a democarcy. Let’s try to figure out why. I think in monarchy king used to be the owner of his empire and that was his birth right. The prince used to be prince from birth. No one was there to remove him from his postion. On the other side any political leader has the thought “I am not a king of this courntry. I am here for defintely interval of time.”. I know the above comparison will bring many questions to your mind like everyone would not get equal rights in monarchy. Well that’s right. But that is another topic for debate. What I want to highlight would be clear form another example, suppose someone is a head of a family he will put his best to make his family prosperous and happy irrespective of his personal profit or loss. But if he is working in a company he will definity think personally first then for the company. The reason behind this is he is not owing the company.

According to the definition of democracy (A political system in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who can elect people to represent them.) who is owning the democarcy is its citizens and political leaders are eleted to get work done for the citizens. That means we the citizens(owner) are assigning some work to our political leader (employee). Now if suppose I am the owner of company I have hired an employee and I have given full power to him to run my company. And I am not asking from him what he was supposed to be done whether he is doing that or not or how he is spending my money. Do you think my employee would work in my favor when he is not accountable for anything and have rights to access all my resources? Most of you will answer “No, definitly not”. So in this case problem is with me not with my employee.

Actually our political leaders are not problem. We should not question their loyality. That is human nature. Where the change is required is in citizens. Being citizens(owner) we should account our political leaders(employees) for their work. I think we should work towards the accountibility of political leader’s work instead of blaming. But the question is how. I don’t have much understanding of politics but I know there are some tools in our constitution with which we can achieve this, for example RTI (Right to information). Similar kind of tools are need to be created to make political leaders accountable. Instead of punishing the corrupted we should focus on making them accountable. I think this is the only positive way to achive a healthy democracy.

We have started taking first step by voting. Let’s move forward.