phir bhi dil hai Hindustani India theocracy Democracy Index Sri Lanka Nepal Sorry, not watching the Independence Day parade on Doordarshan does not make us an anti-national. And chest thumping todoes not make us patriotic. Because this is not the essence of freedom. The crux of freedom is responsibility and conscience. Lack of it dishonours the idea of. Democratic responsibility also includes empathy, compassion and kindness.Democratic responsibility is not just arithmetic but morals science, a subject that was mandatory when my generation went schooling but many of us forced schools to drop it since those marks did not ‘count’ for higher education. Moral science talked about conscience, responsibility, accountability and the passion to pursue our beliefs and an equal degree of passion to not sanction caustic contempt in name of disagreement. We need to get our moral science back; we need to nurture our conscience because lack of it weakens our ethical legitimacy for democracy.Responsibility means encouraging a civil society, a movement that may not always be in sync with the government. The social fabric of India gets disintegrated every time a lynching happens.Threads have to be woven in. They cannot be pulled out to give a façade. Freedom in a democracy also means collective functioning.Representative democracy is not about one person ruling us or determine where the Nation is going and this differs it from, oligarchy, plutocracy, monarchy and despotism.Democracy is not perfect. It often becomes a tool, as George Washington said, ‘by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”Here comes conscience which is the soul of a democratic political tradition. But the soul gets into picture only when the stomach is full and the mind is at peace. In absence of literacy, employment and nutrition to expect soulful behavior is not only unpalatable but impractical and illogical. When human worth is ignored in the guise of communalism, casteism or capitalism and we let the poor get poorer, the ill-effects of democracy get amplified. That is the reason the poor in India do not vote en masse as a solidified block. Unlike many democracies, India is still a caste-based society and not a class based. So before every election, the poor who are a majority in this country get conveniently labelled as Thakor, Patel, Dalit, Devi pujak or Rajput and they vote along caste-lines than class lines.The concept of conscience sounds abstract when an individual does not have a job or is not sure of his daughter’s safety on public roads or about his next meal. Regardless of the party, when a ruling party is convinced that an individual who earns Rs 36 a day (that would make it Rs 1,080, a mere $15.47 a month) does not fall in the category of poor, conscience of those in the category cracks up.We cannot expect accountability from the illiterate, the underprivileged and the marginalised. No, this does not mean that we are okay with those who become terrorists after their family members are torched to death and women gang-raped; violence can never be a tool to assert faith.Still worse, when justice eludes, whoever it is can lose faith not only in the nation but themselves. Unfortunately in our country, most of the minorities experience this in the present times.But for all of us blessed with a daily meal and literacy, the need of the hour is to listen and heed to our conscience and not let others less fortunate than us stagnate themselves as mere cogs in an impersonal machine in which values, goals and aspirations are subordinated to the Majority.Metaphorically speaking, the invisible fence that prohibits those who do not align with a particular ideology are branded as anti-nationals. This is not just sad but dangerous. The idea of human dignity is downsizing even as we make space for multinationals and offer subsidies to a large class of conscience-less capitalists. The point of setting up a school after destroying the ecology of the area and snatching livelihoods maybe Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) for industrial houses but to hail it is not an ethical idea of freedom.The role of the State in a democracy is to establish equality and be concerned about the welfare of all instead of sanitising it. Now, four years after a change in regime, a detailed quantitative study of democracy around the world has confirmed some of our worst fears. According to 2,500 social science experts who compile the Varieties of Democracy report, India, the largest democracy in the world, is at risk. As per the latest report, India ranks 81st among the world’s countries on the LiberalIn the South Asian region,andrank higher than India. Moreover, India has seen a significant fall of over 27% compared to its historical score ever since 2014. The report also highlights the shrinking space for civil society in India: Democracy is getting demoscary in India. But we are Indians, we are resilient and we love our scars.That the positive aspect of our democracy.Happy Independence Day!

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