My Pensieve

I guess most of us get the basic hang of democracy. Its not much, I guess. Its basically about people having a say about who represents them while making laws, etc., Basically, since governance is about so many things (Making laws, up keeping them, thinking about common infrastructure..., executing the basic operations - tax collecting, using collected tax for various things...), people should also have their say, by having some bunch of people represent them.

There representatives are supposed to understand the needs of the people and do their job such that, all things done by the government will have the nicest effect on the people.

At least, that's what I understand.

But, the fundamental problem is choosing the representative.

Lets say there are many nice guys among us, who will be great leaders, and will make great representatives. Now, how can they become one?

Firstly, people who will eventually vote for our budding representative should 'know' that they our guy will make a great representative, which means that joining a party is not going to help our guy much. (I leave reasoning for the last statement as an exercise).

So, lets assume that he starts from the grassroots. Basically, he should start with representing the smallest group of the society, which makes sense. Maybe his ward, or panchayat etc., Assuming that most people have at least an inkling of idea as to who he is (assuming they have lived long enough in his area).

And he easily becomes the representative of this micro-society. (again, i you reason it out. He does not win, then technically, only a guy who people 'know' to be a nicer guy than him will win - here 'nicer' means 'better guy for the job').


From then on, we can iterate over this model, saying that he 'widens' his micro-society. But, this is not a very feasible approach, more than some size.

Hence, we need a method of having representatives choose higher level representatives (like MPs having a say on who the prime minister can be).

Assuming all the people chosen by the people at the grassroots level are nice, we can inductively say that this will work up for higher levels in the hierarchy. (maybe, the representatives will choose one among them for the next level).

But, this is what fails in India. There is no freakin' way that people can be good at choosing their MLA. (Forget about PM, PM post has lots of abstraction from the day-to-day people details. He works on macro structures like our national energy security, international relations, macro economic conditions etc.,)

But, they can be very good at choosing their ward member. But, they don't care. In many villages, people sell-off their votes in groups, to some wealthy guy in their panchayat. Most people in the city don't even know that there is such thing as a ward election.

The people closer to them are the ones who can do the best to them. And this, people fail to understand in our country.

Now it all makes sense to me as to why Mahatma gave so much importance to panchayati raj.