[twinaircant]

This is a disease, like malaria, where a person, a group, a country or a whole civilization thinks that democracy is the cure for all ills of society. The basic tenet of democracy is that collective decisions must be taken according to the majority wishes. Of course there is a competing view that collective decisions must be strictly according to the wishes of God Almighty but God is an anathema to the philosophy of democracy and to bolster this many democracies qualify themselves as secular democracies. But we digress. Every democratic society has so far ignored the fundamental instability of the idea of democracy. The simple statement of this instability is the question what if the majority decides to do injustice to the minority. Then what? The situation is completely consistent with democracy. It is inconsistent with some thing but not with the fundamental tenet of democracy. Of course the intellectual defense of democracy has been under the control of those people who will, undemocratically-because any intellectual group by and large will be a minority, just not entertain above doubt about the stability of democracy. They would like to push another idea down your throat that democracy also means, as an inherent mechanism, protection of minority rights. This basically does not address the misgivings because the question still remain as to who will implement the clause of protection of the minority rights - the majority being inclined to do otherwise. Curiously there is a practical example where above scenario has been played out in reality-in Germany between the two world wars. This is a modern miracle where an empirical evidence has been made light of by profound theories. The irony being that events of Germany are very much part of the collective memory - for certain obvious reasons. In fact in the west, the nursery and the breeding ground for this experiment, the things reached a certain level of smugness in this regard where people started predicting the end of democracy or end of history. On the face of it these two things, indeed it is one and the same thing - just two sides of the same coin, might sound antagonistic to the idea of democracy but they are not. These ideas, nay this idea, is just a complacent evaluation of democracy-a declaration of success of the idea of democracy. The end of democracy idea belongs to Fareed Zakaria, ironically son of Dr Rafiq Zakaria - a man who had worried about the state of Muslims in India in most of his life, while the idea of end of history belongs to Francis Fukuyama. In the latter avatar this idea gave rise to the idea of clash of civilizations a la Samuel Huntington. This is, in line with American obsession with the most grand scenarios, the pinnacle of the instability inherent in democracy. The largest stage on which you can play the game of democracy is the world stage and Huntington occupied that-in his thought space. The target happened to be Islam and Muslims. And the idea was not completely devoid of complete physical implementation. European and American civilizations (with tacit approval or express approval) via the instrument called NATO have played havoc in many locations belonging to the society that was Huntington's target. To some extent these forces are in the retreat mode, and God make their retreat complete, but there is another similar instability that has been looming large on the horizon of a sizable population adhering to Islam. This is the case of India. There is an organization that has been functioning for around ninety years and whose spiritual guide thought that actions of Adolf Hitler, to them, were worth pondering and profit by. To complete the irony these elements have full support of the survivors of the earlier manifestation of the democratic instability.

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