Word of the Week #43:
Now, isn’t this a word we’ve been hearing for years? We remember reading about it in school. CBSE even has a subject Democratic Politics dedicated entirely to the idea.
Surely, it would not be wrong to assume we would all know what the word truly represents, would it?
And, surely, it would also not to be wrong to assume that we, as a people, would strive hard to uphold the ideals our forefathers chiseled and cherished for the past centuries.
Of course, most of us have seen enough of the world to know this not to be eternally and entirely true.Now, as one watches the world in the throes of injustice, intolerance, indifference, and worst of all, ignorance, one cannot help but wonder how far we have come, as Sovereign Democratic Republic, and what lies ahead of us.
Upon the eve of our 67th Republic Day, the words of one of founding fathers comes to mind.
“On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality.
In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value.
In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value.
How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?
How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?
If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.”
― B.R. Ambedkar
