AN UNDOCUMENTED WONDER : The Making of the Great Indian Elections

by S.Y. Quraishi

it took the USA 144 years to confer equal voting rights on women (in 1920), while the UK, the mother of modern democracy, took 100 years to grant such equality in 1928. Switzerland only granted women the equal right to vote as recently as 1971.

Madison concludes by saying in the federalist paper no. 51 that it was of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part since different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens.

political thinkers like Jayaprakash Narayan pleaded for a shift from a party-based democracy to a party-less democracy. ‘Just because some people participate in elections once in five years to choose their representatives, it does not mean there is democracy,’ he used to say.

Clarifying further, he said: ‘But I’m not asking to abolish the party system immediately. It would be foolish to do so because there is nothing to take its place.’ In Everyman’s, a weekly paper that Narayan started to disseminate his views, he reminded readers about the limits of power politics: ‘…politics at least under a democracy must know the limits it may not cross. Otherwise, if there is dishonesty, corruption, manipulation of masses, naked struggle for personal power and personal gain, there can be no socialism, no welfare, no government, no public order, no justice, no freedom, no national unity—in short no nation.’

Plato’s Republic: ‘Mankind will never see an end of trouble until […] lovers of wisdom come to hold political power or the holders of power […] become lovers of wisdom.’