Re: Is India a model Democracy?

[Padmanabha Rao <kvprao@igidr.ac.in>]

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Please help make the Manifesto better, or accept it, and propagate it!
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On Mon, 8 Jan 2001, Srinath S wrote:
 analytical power of the population grows only by exposing it to
 different views and not by protecting it from views, incorrect or
 otherwise.

Absolutely. The ban is not on documentaries and political reports,
merely
on CurrentNews. Even there I think it's proper that consumers have a
choice. In the occurence of a violence too I mean. The problem is of
course that the government cannot be expected to sit waiting while the
FM
consumers got the immediate piece of news about the muslim lynching in
Chandni Chow and the points and counter-points by the lynchers and the
lynched and took their decisions, and finally sat home without picking
their own swords. The government is expected to act and it is
constrained
in the sense it doesn't know from where the twenty folks who have
listened
and decided and taken their swords out, are marching to the local-Chowk
to
avenge. No one might take such a decision too, they are all rational.
*Who
knows ?*  Mind you, the lynching can still be made an analytical report
a
month later and viewed from all angles. That would be desirable and
certainly wouldn't come under the ban.

Thanks.

Padmanabha Rao



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