Dance of Democracy

I love this title, which appears on the election page for ToI. The alliteration while being hilarious also successfully potrays a true picture of democracy. From the times of war of ideologies, (Communist Vs Capitalist) Democracy emerged to be a truely sucessful form of governence. But lately it has become more of a belly dancer dancing to the tunes of the seperatists. These seperatists just need a silly whimsical reason to seperate out from the lot. The current sitution in India maked me wonder whether democracy is good or bad.
The basic premise on which democracy works is that of having individuals with strong individualistic principles. But what if your country fails to generate those men with ideals and passion. Or if the structure is such that such ideals are strifled before they can come to a platform where they can be tested and tried. What if you have a moron who is good at giving speeches that tends to divide the society and unleashing mindless passions and a sense of insecurty among men from their own bretherns? Surely he will succeed to get his point across. But in the meantime he will leave a big gaping hole in the social fabric of the country.
What needs to be done here is to make such great democratic structures to overcome high handed behaviour on which people can repose their faith. Swaminathan Aiyar, in one of his articles had mentioned about the importance of having strong democratic structure for the successful running of democracy. He talked about a British colony which had huge trade surplus at the time when it was part of the british commonwealth. But as soon as British left the country leaving it as a democracy it collapsed turning to a trade deficit nation. Mr.Aiyar blames this downfall to the absense of any strong democratic structure/institutions. Unless and untill the democratic structure is strong. Unless the institutions that uphold the democracy like police, judiciary etc. are fair and efficient one can't expect the democracy to run efficiently.
The same has been happening to India, lately. Here, rules are applied on people based on their faith and caste and position. A politician can never get into a jail. No sooner a verdict is pronounced against him he/she develops a chest pain and is sent to the ICU of the best hospitals (Supursinh Naik). Rich people can get away with broad day light murders(Jessica Lal case). Even the judiciary is no good. Eventhough we can say it is fair but the verdict comes after some natural death of the accused.
I often read in the news papers that the Comptoller and Auditor General rapped the government on poor dealings and hadling of fiscal, but have never heard of any response from the government side. Seems that after making the CAG office they turned a deaf ear towards it.
We talk of democracy and the right to free speech, but what should happen to it when every one wants to divide the country to get their won share. The case gets more complicated in this country where there are millions and billions of tribes and castes. What do you do? We have a super large list of political parties in India. If one observes the list barrind 1-2 ideology based parties all the other are based on communal lines, lines of caste, creed and language. Does'nt it simply means that the politicians are hell bent on dividing us? Instead of focusing on issues of growth and development these parties just play the blame game and divide and rule policy.
Where is all this leading us? Where are we going? With all those glitzy malls coming up does anyone even care about plight of the poor. Lets see, where is dance leads us to..till that time let the democracy dance :)