The biggest Democracy in the World
India is a democratic state.
As a democratic state you follow special rules like:
Freedom of opinion
The right to choose
Free healthcare
Three separate powers: legislative, executive and judicative power.
In India you are allowed to do and say what you want as long as it does not hurt anyone. Otherwise you can be punished like being killed by a Hindu because you say something against him. As a rich man or woman you can do whatever you want in India as long as you can pay for it. When you are poor you can do nothing and you often live on the streets. You live from one day to another.
If poor people become ill, they can go to the doctor’s, but they may have to pay a lot of money for healthcare. Therefore they might not go to the doctor’s, but only buy medicine.
If a man is killed during the night on the street maybe no-one would ever notice. Nobody would be willing to investigate a crime committed against a poor person. If the man had been rich everyone would go and search for the murderer.
Poor Indians never call the police because they are afraid of being accused of being the perpetrator and be locked away forever. For poor people in India, the police are the legislative, executive and judicative power.
In a democracy everyone is a legal individual and everyone has the same rights. It should not matter whether you come from a rich or a poor family, a criminal or a law-abiding family or something completely different. All are the same before the law. Before you go to prison you must have done something illegal. Then you have the right as a human being to be arrested without being hurt, and in the end be defended by a lawyer and judged in a court of law.
At the beginning of the book “Slumdog Millionaire“ you are confronted with the fact that it is just not like this. Ram is arrested for winning in a quiz show, because he is accused of cheating. In the police station he is tortured by a skilled torturer. No lawyer is around, until a young female lawyer saves Ram. He is tortured, but there should be no torture in a democratic state. For some people the rule in India is democratic, but for the majority it is not. From a democrat’s point of view, the Indian law and legal system are not democratic.
So torture is not a democratic treatment of people. But India’s crime problems extend to more than torture of people. In the book, Ram tells a story, in which he and his friend Salim are sent to a children’s home. Children are all able-bodied, when they arrive at the home. Here the cruel owners of the house burn out their eyes, cut off their leg or treat the children in similar ways. They carry out these atrocities because disabled children earn more money by begging than healthy young boys or girls. From a democrat’s point of view there are two crimes involved with disabled children begging. First of all one is not allowed to hurt people, and secondly begging as a job is regarded as organised crime.
In the book, “Slumdog Millionaire” there are more crimes than the two used as examples to show that there is something wrong with a state which is called democratic, but which still has these domestic problems.
Here is a short list of crimes that the reader encounters in the book:
– prostitution at the age of 12
– robbery on trains
– murders
– drinking causes domestic violence, including wife-beatings and rape of offspring (normal in slums)
– contract killing
– illegal tourist guides
– riding the train without a valid ticket
– W3B betrayal because they do not wish to give the money away
The last example is for some people in India the cruellest, because it shows that the rich want the poor to remain poor. From a democrat’s point of view, this is one of the worst problems in India. Poor people will often stay poor while rich people earn money from their poverty.
India has democratic aspects, but something is wrong; therefore it should not be called a democratic state.