Democracy Essay example -- essays research papers

Democracy may be a word familiar to most, but still I would like to mention the fact that demos means pertaining to people and kratios means to rule. Thus this word original coined by the Greeks means rule of people as a whole and not by an individual or a privileged soul. It is a concept still misunderstood and misused in some parts of the world where totalitarian regimes and dictatorships have witnessed popular support by usurping democratic labels like in Iraq and Pakistan. By the dictionary definition, democracy is government by the people in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system. In a famous phrase of Abraham Lincoln, democracy is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.Freedom and democracy are often used in place of each other, but the two are not the same. True, democracy is a set of ideas and principles about freedom, but it also consists of a set of pract ices and procedures that have been founded through a long history. In short, democracy is the institutionalization of freedom. For this reason, any society must possess time-tested fundamentals of constitutional government, human rights, and equality before the law to be properly called democratic. Democracies can be typified into two fundamental categories, direct and representative. In a direct democracy, all individuals, without the elected or appointed officials, can participate in making public decisions. This system however seems to be impractical possible only with relatively small numbers of people, say for example in a community organization, village of a developing country, tribal council, or the local unit of a labor union, where members can meet in a single room to discuss issues and arrive at decisions by consensus or majority vote. In rural India the head of such committees are called pancha and the place where issues for a small population of the concerned area are discussed is called panchayat.These meetings are held mostly under a village tree with the maximum number of people who can physically gather in one place and practice direct democracy.Modern society, with its enormous size, complexities and ramifications offers few avenues for direct democracy. Today, the most common form of democracy, whether for a town of 50,000 or nations of 50 million, is represe... ...titutional provisions to intervene in the administration of the States. The response of the Central Union Government to the growing economic and political crisis in India has been in terms of greater centralization strategies and interventions.Another equally important limitation of the Indian parliamentary democracy has been that below the state level it was not mandatory to have elected bodies at district, sub district or local level till 1994. In other words it was a system of parliamentary democracy at the central and state levels and bureaucratic governance at the lower levels. Grass root level democracy visualized in terms of selfreliant and selfgoverning villages was an important nationalist ideal. When the new constitution was framed, elected local bodies at the local levels were not made part of the mandatory structure of government, but enshrined in the Directive Principles of the constitution. By and large the Indian democracy is still in a phase of evolution and chang e. It seems that the concept of democracy is interpreted in a subjective manner and changes in nations from time to time according to the whims and fancies of the contemporary affluent and powerful people.