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DavidKep
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Democracy is not something readymade and finished. It grows,evolves and passes through stages of failures and unsuccesses. Anti-democratic and un-democratic forces are never absent from any human society. Man is not a perfectuly rational animal. Reason and un-reason are in constant conflict.
All writes on the subject of democracy have dwelt on the difficulty against which the aims and ideals of democracy have to contest. Socrates and Jesus Christ were victims of a mob-minded majority. In India such monstrous and atrocious customs as the sati System, untouchability, the caste system, enjoyed popular support for centuries. Rule by a brute majority is not democracy. Sidgewick speaks of a democratic minimum, namely those irreducible and inviolable natural rights which majority rule cannot touch. Democracy is an all-ebracing comporehensive system, very carefully an understandingly built-up and modified or liberalized from time to time. England was a democracy pretty old in the 19th century, and yet Macaulay failed to get a Bill passed against child-labour which he wished to be limited to ten hours a day. Monstrous and cruel practices even in England, the mother of Parliaments, were legally permitted for decades and centuries. The novel of Dickens are an eloquent testimony to the cruelties, to the legalized and injustice under which poor men an women and their children suffered in Victorian England.
Let us consider some of the conditions requisite for the success of democracy. Our Indian democracy is among the youngest deomocracies of the world. Since 1947-48 and the first general Elections in India, some crying and glaring facts have come to light. Our soldiers in the land, the naval and air forces are generally very low-paid and not quite well-treated. Our police force is discontented, poorly-paid and highly inadequate in number. Our teachers, except in a few cases, are neither properly trained nor adequately paid. Men appointed as anti-corruption officers are so ill-paid that a small birbe makes them connive at food and medicine adulteration. Our authorities have woefully failed to hold the price-line which is the life-line of the nation and the encourager of bribery and corruption. The major part of the money allegedly spent in the name of our five-year Plans and other public sevices goes to line the pockets of supervisors and other authorities. None is free from and in a position to resist temptation. Hegel says, “Wars are the outcome of latent wardom” The world is passing through a period of imminent explosion. Every one lives under the fear of danger and insecurity. The abiding values of life have been allowed to die or almost die. Idealisim, novel impulses, sense and sanity have been given the go-by. Home-life, the cradle of civilization, is breaking up Inspiring literature and art have been replaced by he literature and art of cynicism and denial. The generation is hungry generation and therefore an angry generation with a bleak future. The healthy restraints of life, the necessary checks and balances of life have all but gone.