Do we need democracy?

India, at all levels, goes to enormous lengths to conduct elections and then choose governments. Extraordinarily, following the elections, defeated leaders, people, and communities loudly proclaim their disapproval of the verdict and the new leaders. This reiterates what Ananda Coomaraswamy, one of India's most profound and largely ignored thinkers, said about democracy: it is finally a tyranny of the majority, where the defeated minority is always unhappy.

The near-permanent unhappiness of the defeated overwhelmingly raises the question of whether democracy is indeed a beneficial model for governing any country. Philosophers have questioned whether liberal democracy, with adult suffrage and the opportunity for any individual to rise to positions of power regardless of education, is the most effective model for placing the 'wisest and the best' in power since Socrates' time. Greek philosophers cited nepotism, oratory skills, celebrity swaying, money power, and corruption as the major consequences of democracy, where votes are the only method to choose the government.

Surprisingly, these criticisms of democracy still apply to our governments today. Like God, corruption is pervasive and ubiquitous in our civic lives. The state of the roads in most parts of the country is the most graphic example of this collective incompetence of governments at all levels since independence, when we thought democracy was the best way forward.

– Dr Pingali Gopal, Hanamkonda