Democracy means bread and freedom

On the night of July 25, 1975. Indian democracy came within a hair breadth of extinction. A people who, thirty years earlier had wrested their freedom from the greatest Empire on earth. came close to losing it for ever.
That India had been given a second chance to make democracy work is due entirely to the miscalcu lation of the would-be dictator. Mrs. Indira Gandhi believed that the Indian people, cowed and crushed by nine teen months of unbridled tyranny, would be too enervated by fear to oppose her but Mrs. Gandhi was wrong. The people of India discarded Mra. Gandhi's well-ordered and regi mented dictatorship and opted for the flawed and imperfect liberal model.

If the democratic concept came close to being destroyed, it was because the people of India had taken it for granted, delegating power to representatives undeserving of their trust, and looking on their rulers on their masters instead of what they actually were-servanta on electoral sufferance,
The author, a victim of the coup, had enough time during his 161 months in jail to ponder the causes that had led up to it. What he found most difficult to awallow was the olib explanations offered by his col leagues in jail about their woefully. shallow understanding of democracy itself.
It is this realisation of pervasive ignorance and apathy that led him to write this book-an attempt to trace the genesis of democracy and search for the origins of the attitudes and institutions that sustain it. The book tries to explain the virtues of demo cracy and how they were arrived at it also tries to warn its friends against the onslaughts of economic and political controls and those who would advocate them
At times this book will prove heavy going but human freedom is so precious that the fact that Plato or Hegel or Marx need effort and concentration for a proper under standing should be accepted cheer fully, their right postulates acclaim ed, their wrong conclusions rejected, and an independent assessment arrived at. Finally, the book has an inspiring message: if people are ready to live democracy earnestly enough, they will never have to die in order to preserve it.