Context: India must change, from a darkening elected authoritarianism to building institutions for citizens’ inclusion in governance.

• What distinguishes democratic nations from authoritarian ones is the liveliness of citizens’ participation in the governance of their nation. In healthy democracies, citizens participate effectively in the shaping of the policies and laws by which they are governed. 

Democracy

• It is a form of government in which rulers are elected by the people in a free and fair elections, on universal adult franchise and governed on the basis of certain fundamental rules like a constitution.
• It means rule by the people; democracy implies both popular participation and government in the public interest, and can take a wide variety of forms.
• A democratic nation, or any nation, is also composed of structures — its constitution and laws. 
• Democratic constitutions provide elected assemblies for citizens’ representatives to shape new policies and pass laws. 
• Open-minded deliberation in these forums is necessary to meet the requirements of democracy. Constitutions, elections, and assemblies are not all that a democracy needs to function. 

Advantages of democracy

• It allows negotiation: Democracy allows for forms of negotiation and compromise that can bridge across interests and even balance otherwise conflicting imperatives for growth, justice, sustainability and social inclusion. 
• Inclusive growth: What it is and how we achieve development can only emerge out of sustained societal deliberation. Democracies are better at promoting inclusive growth. 
• Accountability: Democracies are in fact more likely to meet the necessary conditions for successful decision making. Elected representatives have to win re-election, which means answering to the electorate.

Preserving human rights: India’s democracy has preserved individual liberties, group identities and religious and thought freedoms, all the things that confer recognition on human beings. 

• Democracy is associated with higher human capital accumulation, lower inflation, lower political instability, and higher economic freedom. 
• Democracy is closely tied with economic sources of growth, like education levels and lifespan through improvement of educational institutions as well as healthcare.

Contemporary challenges to democracy

• Poor functioning of democracies: The U.S. houses of Congress are hit by party politics; debates in the Indian Parliament have degenerated; and citizens of many European democracies are dismayed by the performance of their elected institutions.
• Missing dialogues: We have forgotten how to listen well, especially to those who don't agree with us. In schools we are taught how to speak well and win elocution contests and debates. Dialogues are explorations of complex issues by combining the knowledge of diverse people.
• Partisan politics: When these democratic forums become chambers for close-minded partisan politics, they cannot find solutions to the complex, systemic problems that all nations must address in the 21st century: climate change, historical inequities, increasing economic inequalities, and violence.
• Division in civil society: The cracks in the Indian nation dividing ‘people like us’ from ‘people not like us’, are widening in institutions at the top as well as in relationships on the ground. 
• Majoritarian electoral systems of democracy will harden these divisions in India, as they are in the United States.
• Biased media: The media, which used to provide space for diverse perspectives to be heard, is divided along partisan lines. And social media, which enables citizens to freely listen to many points of view, has turned out to be a hardener of divisions. 
• Lack of Diversified dialogues: There is little room for thoughtful, non-partisan deliberations among citizens. Therefore, stronger processes are urgently required for democratic discourses amongst citizens themselves to bind the national fabric before it frays further. 

Road Ahead

• It is time for the next step in the evolution of democratic institutions. Consent of the governed is about more than periodic elections or referendums. 

Citizens’ inclusion in political process: A civil society movement, Citizens for Europe, has proposed a solution: a European Citizens’ Assembly — a permanent transnational forum for citizens’ participation and deliberation. 

• But the drawbacks of purely online methods are the risk of deepening ideological cleavages and excluding groups affected by the digital divide. 

Online forums must be supplemented by real meetings: Citizens’ meetings, online or offline, must be properly designed and professionally facilitated to enable all points-of-view to be listened to for new insights to emerge.

Diversified dialogues: Monocultures of thought can be dangerous as monocultures in Nature. Diversity in the composition of the participants is essential for ensuring that complex issues are fully understood and new insights can emerge.

• The time has come to learn to listen well, not just speak well; and to conduct dialogues, not debates. The soft power of India, the world’s most richly diverse nation perhaps, will increase when it returns from the presently darkening elected authoritarianism to lead in the evolution of institutions for citizens’ participation in democratic governance.