Piliavsky, Anastasia. "India's Human Democracy". Anthropology Today, Vol.31, No.4 (2015): 22-25.

Piliavsky, Anastasia. "India's Human Democracy". Anthropology Today, Vol.31, No.4 (2015): 22-25.

• Vasundhara Raje, contemporary Chief Minister of Rajasthan, is a career politician from a wealthy Oxford-educated political family. During an interview with the author she denounced Indian politics as "feudal", referencing its corrupt, caste-based, and nepotistic nature (23).
• The author reports that interviews with Indian politicians and elites have demonstrated a general contempt for the belief that India is a democracy, a notion that often incites snickers. One unnamed source complains, "This democracy of ours has been kidnapped by goons, hijacked by money and muscle. It is no more. Perhaps this never really was a democracy" (23).
• Some claim that India's high electoral turnouts and massive elections are the result of a severely dysfunctional political system whereby the poor sell their votes to those who promise material goods and services, often given in literal form through kickbacks, private social programs, or community meals (23).
• Getting work done in India, including accessing government services, requires contacts within government who can arrange deals and manipulate events. When these people do not exist in organic relationships, then they are arranged by quasi-professional brokers, who use their own connections to craft deals for a price (24).
• These political fixers are roughly one in every hundred adult Indians, and up to one in five adults may be recruited to political campaigning or participation during election seasons (24).
• The author concludes that democracies are reflections of the societies which generate them, pointing to the particular forms of slave-owning democracy which arose from ancient Athens and the antebellum United States. Accordingly, India's heavily personalized democracy is representative of the particularities of Indian society (25).