Democracy for India

India Shining” was a major campaign slogan of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the incumbent political party that suffered a resounding setback in the recent parliamentary elections in the subcontinent. The party no doubt was basking in the sunshine because the economy of the country was roaring ahead with a 10.6 percent growth rate – among the world’s highest – due to the recent economic reforms and the boom in jobs coming to India from abroad. Yet, the glowing slogan did not widely resonate among the mercurial electorate in India, noted for its traditional anti-incumbent voting preferences.

What really shines in India today is something profound: democracy. The hope and promise that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Just look at some of these astonishing facts and figures:

Here is a nation, which is the largest democracy in the world today with more than a billion people. The majority are very poor: the per capita income being less than a dollar a day in spite of the fact there is a very large affluent and highly educated middle class. About 26 percent of the population live below the poverty line.

Until 1947, the country was a victim of foreign domination and economic exploitation as a British colony. The unquestionable leader of the freedom movement was Mahatma Gandhi, an apostle of peace and nonviolence, who refused to hold any political office in the new government. Instead, he chose to walk among the poor and downtrodden alleviating their pain.

The Hindu Gandhi was a true Christian indeed: He showed the other cheek to the colonizers thereby forging a cordial relation between the conqueror and the conquered, the victor and the vanquished.

The real political leader of the freedom movement – the one who can be singled out – is Jawaharlal Nehru, the architect of India’s democracy and a towering figure in national politics and on the international stage. It is primarily due to the vision of this Jeffersonian idealist that India continues and survives as a democracy in spite of its multifarious and multitudinous problems. This Cambridge-educated secular humanist was the quintessential Renaissance man, a perfect product of the Aufklarung, who took the ancient country to freedom and democracy.

Thus democracy in its infancy in India was nurtured from within by the spiritual guidance of Gandhi and manifestly by the secular values of Nehru; probably the only reason why democratic practices got so deeply entrenched in the subcontinent during the last five decades.

Here are some bizarre statistics:

There are 18 officially recognized languages and 1,652 mother tongues in India. English, the “lingua franca” of the colonial era, is the authoritative legislative and judicial language. All the major newspapers are in English, which is also the medium of instruction in almost all institutions of higher learning.

Yet, there is no officially recognized religion in India. Nearly 80 percent of the people are Hindus of various sects and castes and 11 percent are Muslim. About 3 percent are Christians and 2 percent are Sikhs; plus a small minority of Jews and Zoroastrians.

The president of India is a Muslim and the new prime minister is a Sikh. The leader of the party in power is a Roman Catholic. Nowhere in the world do we have a country where the president belongs to one religious minority and the prime minister is from another – this secularism is what really shines as a beacon in India.

Can any fiction match the variety of the romance of this reality?

V.K. Balakrishnan, of Veazie, a professor at the University of Maine, migrated from India and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1976.