It’s election time in many countries that are in the news for different reasons.
Indians have been voting for almost a month now to decide which alliance of parties will rule the second-most populous nation in the world for the next five years. Afghanistan has voted and the world is watching with bated breath to see whether a popular government that emerges after the elections will withstand the onslaught of the Taleban.
In Algeria, Abdelaziz Bouteflika won over 81 percent of popular vote to win a fourth term as president, although few could understand what he said at his inauguration. In Iraq, Nouri Al-Maliki claimed victory even before the Iraqis went to the polls. He said he and his party were waiting to see only the margin of victory.
Emboldened by recent battlefield gains, even Bashar Assad in Syria announced plans to hold elections to legitimize his rule.
Democracy and elections have come to mean acceptability in the wider world. No country wants to be seen as undemocratic by not holding elections even if that means vetting candidates or allowing candidates of only approved parties or a single party to contest.
It’s no wonder then that we see widely varying state of human rights in so-called democratic countries of the world and their rank in the human development index. Some countries have stayed at the bottom of the index even after being run by elected representatives for decades.
In their defense, many Third World or emerging-economy nations argue that democracy did not evolve in their countries and therefore had to be tweaked to suit the needs of their peculiar societies. True, but surely not to make a mockery of it.
Democracy, or the rule of the majority, itself is not flawless and John Adams rightly called it the tyranny of the majority. The existence of racism and the caste system in the two biggest democracies of the world, the United States and India, are the best examples of the tyranny of the majority.
Democracy does not safeguard the rights of minorities. If anything, it prolongs the wrongs the minorities are subjected to by the majority.
Call it by whatever name — the human development index or Bhutan’s gross national happiness index — it’s human betterment that ultimately matters. In the absence of a better system of governance, we need to stick with democracy, but not see it as an end in itself.
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