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Democracy is the great leveller in diverse India

Indians are taking great pride in holding the biggest democratic exercise in history. The rest of the democratic world is also heaping praise on India. But in my mind, the applause should be muted because Indian democracy is seriously flawed. No, there is no widespread rigging of the electoral process, as used to happen some years back. Some polling booths would in those days be captured by criminal elements and ballot boxes stuffed with fake voting slips.
But with the introduction of the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM), these illegalities have been virtually eliminated. India also has a three-member Election Commission, consisting of senior civil servants, that has acquired a reputation for integrity and impartiality.
Then, there is the social media, much maligned in some ways but where an election is concerned, a wonderful watchdog. Take the smart phone, now owned by a large number of Indians. Everything can - and is - recorded fairly accurately for posterity and, if necessary, for the courts if there is a disputed election. So, electoral fraud, even if it existed to some extent earlier, is not there at present.
Democracy has benefited India in another way. It has kept the country, the most diversified in the world after the demise of the Soviet Union, united. Democracy could have kept the Soviet Union united. Also Pakistan. Perhaps in Pakistan's case, a country - West and East Pakistan - separated by a huge mass of Indian territory, united only by religion, it was not a feasible proposition from the start in 1947. But the breakaway of the eastern wing and the creation of an independent Bangladesh was not the handiwork of Indian manipulation, however much many Pakistanis believe that to be the case. It was mainly the fault of the Pakistan military regime, aided and abetted by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
A democratic election had just taken place in Pakistan and the party of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, the East Pakistan leader, had got a majority. Sheikh Mujib should have been asked to form the government. Instead, Bhutto was able to persuade Pakistan's army commander, the unlamented General Yahya Khan, to crack down on East Pakistan. The rest is history.
Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi may have used the opportunity to help in the creation of Bangladesh, but it was Pakistan's failure to carry through the democratic process that really led to the break-up of the country, for which most Pakistanis, especially the military, have never forgiven India.
Contrast this to what happened in India, specifically Tamil Nadu (earlier Madras).
In that Indian State, in the 1960s, a separatist Dravidian movement had been set in motion, mainly due to the Indian government's ham-handed attempt to force Hindi down the throats of Tamilians, who were proud of their own language. Many of them felt their Dravidian culture was in danger and there was serious talk of breaking away from the Indian union and forming a separate homeland. Democracy came to the rescue, as it had not done in Pakistan.
A Dravidian party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) came to power in the State in 1967 and the separatist demand melted away.
That's the good news about Indian democracy. The bad news is that muscle and money power still play a major, perhaps dominating role, in Indian elections. A survey showed that close to a third of those elected to the Lok Sabha, the Lower House of the Indian Parliament.
In the 2014 General Election, had criminal cases against them. They were able to stand and get elected simply because they had not been convicted in those cases, a sad reflection on the Indian judicial system, whereby even criminal cases drag on interminably. As for money power, it is common knowledge that most successful candidates spend much more than the permissible limit for standing for a Lok Sabha election. Much of this is "black" or unaccounted money. Politics in India, instead of being a public duty, as it is in most successful and vibrant democracies, is for a large number of Indian politicians a way of enriching themselves.
Nevertheless, all said and done, I would go along with the great British statesman, Winston Churchill, who once said, "Democracy is the worst form of government - except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
Rahul Singh is a former Editor of the Khaleej Times