Monday, June 6, 2011

Why I think "Civil Society" drafting laws is elitist

My understanding of democracy is that it is off the people, for the people, by the people. In any decent sized country, people are too many so they chose their representatives which are legislatures and executive.
In India member of parliament (and assemblies) are law makers and ministers, prime ministers and chief ministers are executive.
Now if people of the country want something to be done, they will chose people who would get those things done and that's how democracy works.
We see ourselves in a situation where a section of society thinks that they are better than rest of the people, who are too naive to understand the stuff that is going on and they assign themselves to be protectors of rest of the people. They go ahead, blackmail the government and become pseudo-lawmakers without any responsibilities. This behavior is driven from the belief that rest of the voters who peacefully go and vote in every election are fools and idiots and do not comprehend bigger and better things.
Just think about it, if government drafts a bad law, after five years they are answerable to the people and can be voted out, but "civil society" is now answerable to anybody.
If the "Civil Society" was really representative of society and believed in democracy, they would just go ahead and fight the next election, get elected and then do the right thing.