In this article you will learn about Indian Democracy in Political Science.
Indian Democracy : A Perspective of Challenges Faced
Democracy in India has the distinction of being the world's largest successfully functioning democracy. Ever since independence, India has been living, progressing and developing through a democratic system of governance involving the self-rule of the people. The people have been regularly using their to vote for electing and changing their governments. Around 100 crores of people really enjoy their right to vote and around 65% of them exercise these rights in elections. The organisation of government by the directly elected representatives of the people has been the fundamental rule of Indian democracy.
Despite the presence of a multi-party system, the government-making exercise has been always efficient and orderly. The change of one-party dominant and multi-party system into a real multi-party system and the transformation from a system of single majority-party rule to a coalition rule, have demonstrated the ability and maturity of Indian democracy to change and develop according to the demands of the environment. In fact, the working of democracy in India has been a success story; particularly when seen in comparison with several states like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia and others, in which military dictatorship have been regularly dominating the political systems and running facade or sham democracies. As against these, Indian democracy has been standing apart as a successfully working system of liberal democratic governance and development.
Parliamentary Democracy has been successfully developing in India since the inauguration of the Constitution of India on 26th January 1950. The founding fathers of the Constitution were fully aware of the challenges and problems that Indian democracy was likely to face and they took several steps for meeting these.
The Constitution of India contains several features which stand designed to initiate the process of meeting various socio-economic challenges. It clearly lays down both the goals to be secured as well as the means to be used for securing them. The goals have been broadly defined in the Preamble of the Constitution and fully elaborated by the Directive Principles of State Policy. The main reasons for achieving these goals have been laid down in the other parts of the Constitution.
After expressing faith and belief in the sovereignty of ‘We the people’, the Preamble of the Constitution of India, describes the five features of the Indian State - Sovereign, Secular, Socialist, Democratic Republic. The term sovereign declares the independence of India; then the term socialist and secular refers to the goals which are to be secured, and the term democratic republic denotes the means through which these goals are to be achieved.
As a sovereign state, India is free to determine its internal and external policies and decisions. As a socialist state, India posits faith in social, economic and political justice, equality and socio-economic development of all classes of people. As a secular polity, India stands for absence of a state religion, no special status for any religion, freedom of the people to follow any religion individually or collectively and equal status of all religions. As a democratic republic, India has firm faith in popular sovereignty, fundamental rights and freedoms of the people, equal political rights and opportunities for all the people and their organisations to participate in the organisation and working of an elected, representative, transparent, responsible and accountable government.
This article on Indian Democracy in Political Science is contributed by Dipshikha Anand. If you like LawStudyPoint.com do follow us on our Twitter handle.