{"id":3029,"date":"2008-06-12T19:23:40","date_gmt":"2008-06-12T13:53:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200806\/why-is-democracy-a-good-thing\/"},"modified":"2008-06-12T19:25:01","modified_gmt":"2008-06-12T13:55:01","slug":"why-is-democracy-a-good-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200806\/why-is-democracy-a-good-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"Why is Democracy a Good Thing?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nilakantan Rajaraman <a href=\"http:\/\/themaanga.com\/2008\/06\/12\/roads-journeys-and-destinations\/\">asks<\/a>. Well,\u00a0 because it provides stability&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;for the ruling class. Dictators can get deposed and they can get executed, especially by other dictators.\u00a0 Bad rulers like Mayawati, Lalu Prasad Yadav or Y S R Reddy can at worst expect to lose the next election and continue to enjoy their ill-gotten gains. Likewise, if you are running a major political party and you aren&#8217;t a strong and charismatic leader like Indira Gandhi, allowing intra-party democracy at the local level is a good bet to protect you from the convulsions of periodic splits and rebellions.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It\u00a0is debatable\u00a0whether a dysfunctional democracy like India is good for its citizens, but I rather think that India&#8217;s democracy has been better for the Nehru-Gandhi family than Pakistan&#8217;s system has been for the Bhutto family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nilakantan Rajaraman asks. Well,\u00a0 because it provides stability&#8230; &#8230;for the ruling class. Dictators can get deposed and they can get executed, especially by other dictators.\u00a0 Bad rulers like Mayawati, Lalu Prasad Yadav or Y S R Reddy can at worst expect to lose the next election and continue to enjoy their ill-gotten gains. Likewise, if [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[35],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3029"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3029\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}