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democracy through that entire period. However, the conditions for democracy
would not have predicted that the success would have been ordained. If you
look at India in 1947, we were an extremely poor country. We were a largely
illiterate country. We have tremendous diversity in terms of language, ethnicity,
a whole bunch of other factors. And we reformed in the middle of bloodshed
when religious conflict resulted in the division of historic India, the subcontinent,
into India and Pakistan and the migration of peoples from one side to the other
resulted in the loss of more than a few million people in our own holocaust.
Anyway, so that is the kind of less than fertile ground for democracy, but our
freedom fighters had the legitimacy that goes along with having struggled for
decades for the principles without compromising, fighting nonviolently. And what
India managed to do was come up with a constitution that has served us
extremely well. That constitution was written by elites just like the Bhutanese
constitution was. And democracy has come in at the behest of its monarch.
But the constitution was inclusive, and it paid attention to ensuring that various
stakeholders would have a concrete and tangible stake in the evolution of the
country.
So, one other thing that we did was we introduced the separation of
powers and a federal structure. This enabled the separation of powers, of
course, means similar strong executive, stronger judiciary, and a strong
legislature. But also put in place institutions, for example the Election
Commission of India, which ensures that during the electoral process we move
as close to a fair election as possible. We’ve had a very vibrant and free
media. So, all of these formal institutions and informal institutions have played a
role in taking things forward.
We also had federalism. Initially, India when the British left, we had
British India. We also had 560 kingdoms at the same time. So, there was a
huge task of integrating the country, and that was successful. But very soon
we started to see democracy in practice when there were various kinds of
demands from different groups. For example, people who spoke the same
language demanded that they have a state, have a political entity within the
larger country that represents people just from who spoke that language. So, if
you imagine Europe think of transport it to India. And as a result, if you look at
India, we have English and Hindi as our administrative languages. But we also
have 22 national languages, alright? So, everyone is giving respect, and over
time, in response to various demands we’ve created states according to
language basis. And we’ve a map of India which I grew up with as a school ²£ ´£²¢¡¸¡¡Á¥°£°ª²£l²h²£°À¨
student 30, 40 years ago, is not the same as what we have today. Because if
people of the region feel they need a separate political entity, then the system
somehow responds. So, that’s part of the challenge of nurturing a democracy.
Will you have a system that responds to people’s demands, that works with
