Democracy in India

Sept 22 2014

Democracy in India

It is important to consider democracy in India for many reasons, most notably including its size and population. India is the seventh largest nation by area, and it is the second most populous. It is interesting to note that it holds one of the oldest civilizations and yet is a fairly new country. As the world’s largest democracy by electorate it is important to consider because of the ways it effects its population, which at 1.2 billion people is roughly one-sixth of the entire world’s population. Therefore, it is crucial for democratic India’s independence, initial post-independence, and current democratic state to be examined in order to further understand the demands of democracy.

Independence from the British

India was first introduced to the western world by means of British imperialism. As the ‘jewel’ of their country, Britain took as much advantage and profit from India’s vast stores of natural resources as it could while exercising its strength over the country as its colonizer. Already having deep-rooted ethnic cleavages, India was further exploited by the British through their division of Indians according to those that the British deemed soldier-worthy. Britain did this out of need for man power during World War I. As Mihir Bose explains in his article, “India’s Wildest Dram”, “unable to believe that all Indians were capable of being soldiers, the British had divided Indians into martial and non-martial races. Recruitment was restricted to certain communities, generally from the north, such as Sikhs, while those from the east and the south were seen as fit only to be babus, the derisory term for clerks” (3). This only resulted in the perpetuation of numerous cleavages both socially, economically, politically, and ethnically. Thus, the British were entirely under the belief that the Indians were not capable of forming a coherent and autonomous government because there was so much bickering amongst the Indian...