WHEN DEMOCRACY CHANGES TO AUTHORITARIANISM

Democratic freedoms breed authoritarianism. Consolidation of power, achieved through democratic means, is a tempting phenomenon when regimes are slowly being wrapped up in totalitarianism.

Nationalism is aroused, and the fear factor is introduced by scapegoating foreign enemies and targeting the minorities.

To streamline the influence of fear several practices and arrangements are mobilized. Judiciary, the intelligence agencies, the income tax department, the police forces, state-sponsored ‘terrorism,’ and the disciplined media are the channels to move democracy towards fascism.

It is a camouflaged and uneven process which the majority and middle class naively get adapted to acceptable disturbance to fake national security concerns.

However, the fear factor permeates into the culture of silence and apathy.

And this is where the authoritarianism survives as the next elections are corrupted too.

-By Promod Puri

2 Comments

  1. The democracy also has flaws. The Party and the Electoral Systems give rise to misuse of the power. 31 percent votes have the thumping majority. Yes, No or Neutral; there is no fourth option to any issue on earth. Mushrooming of Parties is a stigma on democracy.

    Like

    1. Yes, I agree democracy has flaws, and minority vote rules the majority. But multi-party growth is not a stigma. Rather it is a healthy sign to accommodate diversity in a multi-racial, multi-caste, multi-class, multi-linguistic society. Coalition governments are the norm worldwide in democratic countries. Thanks for your comment.

      Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s