Challenges of Political Development in India

We are proud to be the largest democracy in the world. For more than sixty five years we have witnessed the conduct of successful elections, peaceful changes of government at the Centre and in the States, people exercising freedom of expression, movement and religion. India has also been developing and transforming economically and socially. At the same time we, quite often, listen complains about prevalent inequalities, injustice or non fulfillment of expectations of certain sections of the society. These people do not feel themselves participative in the democratic process. You may ask why it is so. You have already read in earlier unit that democracy means -‘government of the people, for the people, and by the people'. It means democracy is not limited to just a process of election, but also fulfilling social and economic aspirations of the people. In India we keep on debating these various aspects of democracy and its achievements and challenges. What has been called the “largest exercise in democracy”—eight weeks of voting in which over 800 million people participated—has concluded in India with a victory for the opposition, the Indian Bharatiya Janata Party BJP led by Narendra Modi. Although it earned slightly less than one third of the vote nation wide, the Indian single party district system magnified the scope of the win. The BJP, along with its allied parties, has almost doubled the number of seats it holds in the Lok Sabha lower house of parliament . Moreover, the BJP on its own now holds 282 out of 543 constituency seats, enough to allow it to form a government without any coalition partners. Meanwhile, the Congress Party suffered an historical defeat, now relegated to just 44 seats. Rahul Gandhi, the Congress Party's prime ministerial candidate and scion of the Nehru Gandhi family that has led the Congress Party since independence, barely won his own constituency in Amethi district, Uttar Pradesh. Dr. Irsad Ali Khan "Challenges of Political Development in India" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-6 | Issue-6 , October 2022, URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd51888.pdf Paper URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/humanities-and-the-arts/political-science/51888/challenges-of-political-development-in-india/dr-irsad-ali-khan