Review: Burden Of Democracy

Burden Of Democracy Burden Of Democracy by Pratap Bhanu Mehta
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Indians love to exhort in the fact that India is a nation of contradictions. In fact, it is readily apparent to the outsider, the contradictions that embody the nation state called India. From the very birth of this nation, people have raised hue and cry that it won't survive at all. And they were are all, in their own way, justifiable. But India chose to beat those odds, and for extra points, settled on Democracy as its chosen mode of government.

And it was the most important choice that was ever made. Perhaps, it was, as P.B.Mehta cheekily points out, the result of the British Colony having produced too many lawyers affluent in the Western model of governments. But the choice of Democracy was not intuitive nor was it the result of a revolution as in the case of France or America. It was much a vehicle of social change as it was the result of one.

The idealism associated with State and Democracy in the beginning days of independence, was very high indeed. But now, it has devolved to a point where

There are very few people you can come across that won't fault the government for whatever issue they have, on in some manner, indirectly imply that the state should be more authoritative and have more punitive powers. And it is not surprising that recently, the Modi government is looked upon to provide exactly that kind of governance. Never mind that India survived only because BJP was kept at bay.


There are various contradictions in India's choice of government. And more to the point, there is no clear consensus on what Democracy actually means. There is the issue of Politics of Inequality, politics of caste, Identity politics, low caste mobilization, and the issue of widespread corruption.

P.B.Mehta examines all of these, claims that India needs a much stronger moral anchor for the Democracy to be better than it is today, quoting the US as an example. He deconstructs the psychology of both lower caste mobilization and also studies why there isn't actually a social reform happening every time an oppressed society is elected to power. The pointer at the fact that there is a goal of power and not equalization or of opportunity to their community, is succinct.

The exploration of the results of India's in-egalitarian society effacing it's individuals and the derivation of the micro politics of corruption based on this injustice, as an effort to prove their worth and to assert their authority, is particularly mind-blowing.

This is the smallest book on my shelf, yet the one that made me think the most. What I have mentioned here is really a miniscule amount of what is contained in the book. It is sure to make you ask uncomfortable questions and at times, merely make your jaw drop in the awe of scholarship of P.B.Mehta.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to see if he has written anything on Nationalism.

View all my reviews

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

High throughput Site to site VPN on commodity hardware - an adventure with Wireguard, bonding and ECMP

At work, I recently had an interesting challenge - we needed a high throughput site to site VPN between two of our co-located DCs. The existing one was not cutting it with the increasing demand for bandwidth every week. Normally I'd opt for the tried and tested IPsec tunnels using strongswan. One of my mentors had done this in the past -  here  is his own write-up. But I wanted to do something different this time. Enter Wireguard, the newest kid on the VPN block. What follows is a brief write up on the attempts to push decent amount of traffic on WG - enough to meet our needs. Here comes the 'interesting' part of the challenge - One side only has 1G LAN - the final ISP uplink is 10G - but the server is only connected to a 1G switch. We need to push more than 1Gbps over the tunnel.  Here is how it looks: +---------------------+                +----------------+ |                    ...
Read more

Review: This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor

Image
This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay My rating: 5 of 5 stars Thanks for the recommendation @Gokila! This is a brilliant, light heart-ed read. However, most of the entries in this Diary will sound strange to the Indian reader. Surely Doctors are not this humble, are they? And what is this blasphemy - a patient conversing on equal terms with the doctor? But the other side is not so pretty either. Here in India, we have a different kind of Patient - Doctor relationship than the rest of the world. We simultaneously adore them and loathe them. A significant portion of the population wants their off-springs to try their hand at being doctors - but an equally large portion of the population thinks the doctors conspire to put them through painful and expensive procedures to mint money. (Or worse, to "train" at their expense) We all have read about doctors getting attacked by mobs because someone passed away and the crowd thought it was bec...
Read more

Review: The Kite Runner

Image
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini My rating: 5 of 5 stars Goodreads is such a strange place. It has given me much happiness, of course. I have marveled at the fact that someone halfway across the globe can feel the same way I do about a book and it's characters. Yet, it is sometimes almost painful when someone doesn't like the book you liked and for precisely the same reasons you liked it. I have not read many books. I am young and in an engineering course to boot, so there is not much time to indulge in leisurely reading. I have read about a book a month for the past two and read three in the february, and 12 in January. You get the idea. I cannot criticize effectively, with neither the academic bent that some goodreaders are gifted with, nor with the reader's review some so eloquently write. But, what I can do, is concede when a negative reviewer makes a good point and supports it with logical arguments. I can see reason. And that is w...
Read more