engleski

Implementation of liberal democracy in India

India began her independent democratic career over fifty years ago with universal adult franchise, legal equality between the sexes, minority protection acts and positive discrimination laws designed to help the historically deprivileged. The last was uniquely Indian ; the rest India inhereted, borrowed, from liberal democracy of the West. In the fifty years three broad phases of democratic polities can be distinguished: the consolidation of the state from late 1940s to the late 1960s ; the centralizing trends in governmental power in the 1970s and 1980s ; the third phase opened in the 1990s with the politics of the regional states gaining new importance. In short, over a dozen general elections and over hundred state elections since independence have produced a high degree of politization among all segments of population, wherein the poor have more faith than the privileged in democracy and in importance of their vote.

India; traditional culture; elections; functioning of democracy; economic liberalization; class and caste

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