The Century Times

State Legislative elections are around in Uttarakhand, the place where I live at present. But I don’t have any Voter ID card mandatory for the voting. Seeing an advertisement in the local newspaper, appealing to apply for the card to those who don’t have it, I asked my father (who too don’t have one) whether he would like to apply? He answered “No, I don’t even know the address of the office where it should be applied for. I have seen numerous advertisements appealing for it but not even one which can guide me to get one easily. I don’t want to go from one office to another and look for the concerned officer who is always difficult to find in any Govt. Deptt. Moreover…”, he continued “why should I take pain to do all these at my age? Being a citizen of this country for over sixty years, I expect Government to provide me the Voter ID card at my door step.” And I feel that he is absolutely right in his position. Most other citizens might be having a similar feeling and they opt not to vote rather than being harassed at the hands of the Govt. Officials. And in this age of consumerism, where consumer is treated as a king, every citizen expects a royal treatment everywhere. After all, the principle of democracy states that Citizen herself is the ruler and not the ruled.

Well, what is the principle of democracy for that matter? I, personally, don’t advocate it. Democracy is always in the favour of majority, assuming that the majority is always right! Democracy trusts the collective wisdom of all its adult citizens. But in many cases, majority has proved themselves wrong. Majority will always ignore the extremes of talent at either end. This way the views of the most & least talented minds of the society are rendered useless. Democracy takes into account the interest of majority and ignores the rest. But the people whose opinions are mostly against the majority, losses all the privileges of democracy. Why? Democracy can never support this breed of people. Don’t these people have any right to live according to their will? They are living in this democratic world as second citizens and are deprived of most of the benefits democracy showers upon its primary citizens i.e. majority.

India is the largest democracy of the world. But majority of its citizens are illiterate or poorly educated. When we consider the majority, it is this segment which rules over the better educated breed. Whatever good decisions are taken are on the account of the better educated people who have the additional skills of influencing and thrusting their opinions in the minds of majority. Similarly, there are people at other extreme, who has the additional ability to influence the majority of people. Whatever wrong is done in the society can be credited to these breed. More or less, majority doesn’t has any opinion or initiative of its own and depend on the rest for it. But it has the power to choose whatever it wants to. Its like a blind being asked to choose the best of paintings. Isn’t it?

We need a system where the top breed (though a small part proportionately) is assigned more voting power than the common man and much more than the lowest / ill-talented breed. Can Democracy provide this to our society.

Most of the time I feel, I don’t belong to the school of thought of the majority of the society. And always am at the receiving end of this democracy principle. But if you are among the majority, you will probably discard all these as the junk from some mindless person. You have got every right to do that as you are in majority. But through this, I would like to appeal to all those brilliantly minded persons in minority to consider my opinion towards democracy and devise a better alternative system of governance. Ganatantra is not guna-tantra but ganana-tantra.
(meaning that Republic doesn’t support quality but only quantity.)

Anyways, there is always some discrepancy in each system, atleast we have a system which is better than most others.

WISHING YOU ALL A VERY HAPPY REPUBLIC DAY!

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