Is Democracy The Best Policy?

[The below article is open to interpretations. You  may also find this article analogous to the Indian democracy. You may also want to read Jawahar Lal Nehru's speech: Tryst With Destiny]

Once upon a time a large group of children used to stay together in a house. Most of them were too young.  They were of such age when the parents decide what is good or bad for them – what they should eat, what they should read, what they should do.  One fine day, at the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, the children awoke and found that all their care-takers have left them alone. They decided to form a managing body to manage the activities and the house. Quite a few children wanted to manage the house. Who wouldn’t like to boss around the house? This created a kind of chaos and the children concluded on a convenient solution – to ‘elect’ the managing body. The idea was that whoever gets the maximum vote gets to be the Big Boss and he can choose his own team to manage the house. So far, so good.

Right from the dawn started the (almost) unending quest to win votes. Everyone tried to please the others.  Most of them got involved in other activities – like watching movies and playing cricket. They got tired of managing the house long before they actually started managing. Only a handful of them remained in the race to get votes.

Those in the race started trying all kinds of things to get votes.  Some promised personal television sets, while some promised increase in pocket money if/when they get to be the boss. Some offered aerated drinks to the others to ‘bribe’ them to vote for them.  Some tried partitioning the group depending on the hero they liked – so there was a pro-SRK group, there was a pro-Aamir group and there was a pro-UdayChopra group. The member s of these groups were great fans of their respective heroes to the extent that they worshiped them.  However, there was a group which was pro-allHeroes – the members of this group were free to worship any hero they wanted to.

The D-day came. The children went to vote.  Harry, being an SRK devotee, voted for proSRK group.  Ron, being an Aamir devotee, voted for proAamir group. Longbottom, who liked watching television a lot, voted for the person who promised TV. Draco by voting for the person who gave him aerated drinks paid it back. Hermoine, who was busy mugging ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars’, thought it’s waste of time to vote and didn’t vote at all.

If on one of these criteria a manager is selected, you can only imagine what the condition of the house would be. Even after periodic repeatation of this process – the house was in total chaos. Fuelled by the vote-seekers, the proSRK, the proAamir and the proUdayChopra groups kept fighting among each othet for no real reason whatsoever. No proper management was provided: perhaps because that was never part of the agenda - perhaps, because the ‘voters’ never really asked for it.

On the other hand, the same pre-condition prevailed in another house. The difference, however, was that most inmates of the house were educated adults. This house also followed the same process for management as the children’s house (described above). They brought to the table the issues that really concern them and their progress. The inmates of this house, after some time, had better quality of life, made good progress in their fields and were staying peacefully with each other. The same process, when applied to two different contexts gives completely different results.

The question remains - Is democracy the best policy?