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We Indians tend to be a little too glib about our democracy. We take it for granted, assume it not just exists but is renewed whenever elections take place. Some even believe we have an excess of the stuff, slowing down decisions and suffocating reforms, in contrast to China, which makes up for its deficit of democracy with rapid growth and popular enrichment.

In reality, does India qualify as a democracy? Regular elections to form a government, multiple parties that compete and a multiplicity of media outlets are necessary parts of a democracy, but not sufficient ones. Protection of fundamental rights of individuals and groups and the rule of law, active participation of the citizenry in public life, apart from institutional dispersal of power and the ability of the people, the ultimate sovereign, to hold all arms of the state to account are other essential ingredients of democracy. On these, we fall short.

When groups take the law into their hands, and beat up individuals or even kill them, the rule of law disappears. When teachers appointed to village schools play truant and get away without being sacked, citizen participation in public life and popular ability to hold parts of the state to account break down. When Christians are attacked for proselytisation, minority rights are breached. When Dalits are attacked by socially more powerful groups and the state fails to prevent or penalise such attacks, not just the rule of law but equality before the law also breaks down.

Democracy in the Making In those parts of India where sections of the people challenge the authority of the state, such as in Kashmir, the Northeast and the tribal belts of central India, individual rights and liberty are abrogated not just of the militants but of ordinary people as well.

When a member of the higher judiciary pronounces, in court, the cow to be his mother, he puts personal values and custom in place of the law of the land he is dutybound to uphold. This is as much breakdown of the rule of law as a legal dispute taking decades to be settled beyond final appeal.

Individual liberty is rviolated when undertrials languish in jail for years, only to be pronounced not guilty by the courts later, after their youth and vitality have drained out of them and their dear ones have passed on, broken by grief, if not old age.

India is better understood as a democracy in the making, rather than as a full-fledged democracy. And this is not a particularly uncommon thing in the history of nations.

When the American revolution produced its first constitution and provided for elections, about 6% of the population qualified to vote. Slaves, women and those without property did not qualify. Just like in Athenian democracy. Europe had to go through wrenching revolutions, multiple rounds of them, to achieve universal adult suffrage. Women got the right to vote much later. Black Americans continued to be disenfranchised till after the civil rights movements of the 1960s. Even today, some southern states make it difficult for black people to register as voters, leave alone take part as equal citizens in public life.

Challenge and Opportunity Democracy must be understood as an evolving system of expanding rights of the ordinary people. Its defining virtue is that its governance structures offer the space for people to add to and enhance their realised rights. In theory, this should be easier in India than it was in the countries that first secured democracy. Indians got their democracy gift-wrapped, when they got Independence. If democracy were a building with many rooms, Europeans had to struggle to build those rooms one by one, before occupying them, whereas Indians already had those rooms designed for them by Europeans and built for them by the framers of the Constitution, but still have to train themselves to move into them. This is not all that simple. When you design and build a room yourself, you know what it is for. When you stumble upon a room that you never knew you could enter, you might be intimidated into staying out.

The good news is that sections of the traditionally excluded are asserting their right to be part of national life on an equal footing. The Dalits are an obvious example. But they encounter violence, as in Una in Gujarat and in Sahranpur, in UP.

Muslims are being intimidated out of a key traditional occupation, of butchering animals for meat. Transportation of cattle, whether legally or illegally, runs the risk of violent death at the hands of vigilantes. The sale of cattle for slaughter now stands banned by fiat.

These are instances of extreme violation of democracy. But they are also invitations to expand democracy by resisting them. The resistance could take multiple forms, ranging from legal challenge to popular protest. Organising such resistance is a way of building democracy and leadership credentials.

Democracy has to be earned, through struggle to acquire and enforce rights. Whom does this challenge beckon, is the question.

Views expressed here are the author's own, and not Economictimes.com's

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View: Recent violations of democracy also offer a chance to build a new India - Economic Times