History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v7.c96.s2.33.1

v7.c96.s2.33.1

The third item in Lincoln's definition is 'for the people'. That is, the Government must look to the good of the people as a whole and not to that of any class or a community in the country. Modern democracy has come to mean parties and it has to work on decisions of the majority. It often happens that, there being several parties, no one party has an absolute majority over all other parties put together. It may often happen that one party secures 40% of the votes actually cast and the other parties (that differ in ideologies) secure, say 25, 20, 15, percent of the votes, then the first party with only 40 percent of the total votes cast rules, though it does not represent the majority of the whole country. The party system generally leads to a struggle for power and lowers the moral standards of the whole people, particularly when hardly one-fifth of the voters (both male and female) can read and write their own regional language. The present author does not hold that illiteracy necessarily means absence of intelligence. But, unless a man can read for himself and ponder over what he reads, he can hardly be a good judge of the pros and cons in relation to a measure or policy placed before the voters.