Respect for human dignity is the essence of democracy. If you care for your dignity and believe in human dignity, you do everything possible to sustain, strengthen and refine democracy.
People often confuse democracy with its form and remain oblivious to its essence. A true democracy finds its operating procedures. Even actors, often highly acclaimed for their contributions to upholding and promoting democracy, and electors have limited roles.
It is the two intertwined values, rationalism and humanism, that generate the essence, i.e., the general respect for human dignity.
It is a historical process by which these values get embedded in the human mind and the race evolves into a democratic commonwealth.
Now the question comes what led to and sustains democracy in India? Primarily it is the Sanatana Dharma. The Dharma has a fair mix of concerns for noumenal and phenomenal. It cares both for the earthly and the heavenly. At times it prioritises the collective but mostly brings individuals to centre stage. Most importantly, it very unambiguously asks for reliance on self-intelligence. Unlike all religion cum philosophical enterprises, the Sanatana had high compatibility with modernism. Europe which happened to have birthed modernism had rejected its religion to embrace modernism. Let me remind here that humanism and rationalism are also the core values of modernism. It is modernism which evolved into democracy.
Modernism realises itself through systematic administration and free enterprise, i.e., bureaucracy and capitalism. Bureaucracy should not be confused with feudalism-fused pubis order of patronage. It is about managing both public and entrepreneurial affairs. Capitalism brings the spirit and substance of democracy into a society and bureaucracy makes it operational. The unavoidable features of the whole enterprise are efficiency, economy, and accountability.
What we can do to strengthen democracy, which remains a fragile order globally?
For this, we must recognise the merit of individualism and have faith in their faculty and agency. But we would be able to do this only by doing something else.
Here comes the role of education, to speak more precisely, of pedagogy. The nation must spend more on STEM. And secondly, we must let educational institutions evolve autonomously. The collegium of academics alone should have the responsibility of running an institution, preferably with self-funding.
Niraj Kumar Jha
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