Democracy: How to go about improving it in Indian setup?

India represents the largest democratic setup in the world. History has witnessed many democracies ending in many countries giving way to dictatorship, but India’s democracy has not changed at all. Nevertheless, a long-awaited question expects its answer: Should we be satisfied with this fact?

Actually, Indian democracy has no Indian origin as such. It is based on British democracy. In fact, compared with the UK, the king of London is only in name, on the other hand in India the party leaders become all-powerful once they get elected through the elections. All the parties openly become private properties belonging to either a few individuals or some families just like private limited companies.

Forget about fake outside democracy, something like internal democracy also does not exist within the political parties, neither after getting in power nor prior to that. What will then represent the government which gets formed through elections? Ironically, parties do not even get twenty to thirty percent votes out of the total voters and they successfully form governments.

The main political party and the opposition turn our Parliament and Legislative Assemblies into a wrestling arena. Billions of rupees are the budget for the expenditure on elections, and on the other hand, they make politicians corrupt -prior to polls and post-polls. Why is it so?

Keeping the people of the country in view, India does need to change the election system itself. Instead of the present election system, every party should be given the right to send MLAs and MPs in proportion to the party’s membership.

This much-needed change certainly will bring many benefits through this. Election expenditure will stop. Corruption will end. Crores of people will also become politically active. At present, the membership of all the parties is around 15 to 16 crores. Then it can be up to 80-90 crores.

The biggest advantage of this new system will bring a true democratical setup of people’s representation through the parties. No matter what government is formed, all parties will get representation in it. That government will be then a perfectly national government. That government then will not represent a political party but it will represent people. 

How many shortcomings of this revolutionary system can be removed, this topic is also worth considering. Until this new system is introduced, many improvements can be made in our current system as well. The first reform is that unless a candidate gets more than 50 percent of the votes, he should not be elected. Similarly, the government of the elected parliamentarians will really be the government of the majority.

The age of the candidates should be increased from 25 years to 40 years and they should be made ministers only after attaining the age of 50 years. The number of Members of Parliament should be increased from 1,000 to 1,500. The details of income and personal assets of all public representatives in the government should be made public every year.

The system of ‘Referendum’ and ‘Recall’ should also be implemented in the country. All the laws should be made in the official language and all the courts should give their decisions in their own languages. The pension of MPs and MLAs should be abolished. There should also be a ban on the expenses of them, officers, and ministers. And yes, the process of suggestion and consideration should also go on simultaneously.