As I was reading through the thought-provoking essay 👆🏿, I found myself induced to go on mentally, or rather imaginatively, replacing the American play-actors and institutions described in it with those that I know are principal actors and counterparts in Indian democracy … !
In the many instances and situations described in the article, I could easily identify the striking similarities between the American and Indian Tyranny of the Minority. In other words, only the dramatis personae seemed different but the basic plot of the political drama remained so very much the same, to my mind at least, in both democracies today.
Any thinking Indian today reading this essay will be able to easily relate do what it describes as the Tyranny of the Minority—- which manifests itself in varying forms of travesty, or what the essay calls “misapportionment” of democratic citizens’ rights, in every democracy all across the world today — and indeed so very starkly in so many of the States within our own Indian Republic as well as in our near neighbourhood … Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Myanmar.
Thus, woe-begone are the people, alas, who have reposed so much of their trust in Democracy … Whether it’s the Majority or the Minority that may come to rule them, there really is no escape from suffering Tyranny.
Sudarshan M K