Spit On This Democracy!

New Delhi, May 12, 2008, 0830 hrs
I was horrified to wake up to a front page photo in The Indian Express showing two ‘cadres’ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), one carrying a GUN, and the other a big knife, who were apparently going about ‘intimidating voters’ during the West Bengal panchayat elections.

Please do read the complete report – and reflect on the great ideal of local self-government.

Here, it is coercion, coercion and more coercion – from the ‘cadres’, from the local police and administration, and also from the central government’s CRPF paramilitaries.

Is this ‘democracy’ – which must always rest on local self-government? Like the Swiss landesgemeinde.

Read my “Against Centralized Democracy”.

And also “We Need Mayors Not Panchayats”.

And then reflect on this:

This socialist State has lost all moral authority. Hence all this coercion. It has lost all moral authority precisely because all its political and economic ‘theories’ are wrong. Hence all its practices are wrong – including panchayati raj.

We must never compromise with wrong theories.

And I hope all of you WAKE UP to the horrifying and extremely ugly reality that confronts all us Indians.