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Sagot :
India is a federation, the Indian Union, made up of 29 states (since May 2014), to which are added 7 territories administered directly by New Delhi. It had 814 million voters during the last national election in 2014, of whom 551 turned out to vote in the last legislative elections in April 2014. These voters elect their representatives at the federal and state levels, during elections at the Universal suffrage. India's 1,687 political parties, both national and regional, offer a wider range of choices than in any Western democracy.
Outside the Indian Union, the questioning relates to the explanations of the "exception" of a lasting democracy in such a large and populous country, having lived through decolonization, and with a relatively low level of socio-economic development. . Inside, the certainty of living in a democracy is coupled with many questions about the representativeness of this regime, when the country experiences such a level of illiteracy, corruption and inequalities of all kinds, and about its effectiveness in implementation of the development process.
Indian democracy was not born in 1947 when the country became independent. It is not the fruit of the indigenous struggle against an implacable colonial system. Rather, it is the result of nearly six decades of learning, which began at the height of the golden age of British India, at the behest of London. This was already the aim of the educational reforms of 1835, which had introduced education in English for students over the age of ten, thus allowing the emergence of an anglicized Indian bourgeoisie. This new elite, embodied by the figure of the "bhadralok", the Bengali bourgeois, English-speaking and of high caste, was employed in the powerful Indian Civil Service which administered India, even if not at the higher echelons, reserved for the British.
In 1877, sixty years before the departure of the British and the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, Queen Victoria became Empress of India, a country already under the direct control of the Crown since 1858. The following decade was marked by a desire for reform. Some Indians had already been appointed by the Viceroy to the Legislative Council, the highest organ of government in India, since 1861, and to the newly created provincial councils, but none of them had been able to stand for election. In 1882, the Local Self Government Act began a series of reforms designed to devolve some of the powers of government to Indians at the local level. In the next two years, 1883-84, the electoral principle was introduced in the municipalities. For the first time, Indians could be introduced to a form of local democracy, learn the mechanics of voting, the formation of representative groups, and election campaigning. In 1909, a new reform modified the composition of the Legislative Council, the real government of India. Of its 67 members, 27 were now elected on the basis of indirect censal suffrage, and part of the provincial assemblies were elected on the basis of censal suffrage. Indians could then begin to participate in the affairs of their country according to their level of income and their membership in what the British conceived, thanks in particular to the censuses since 1891, as "natural units" of Indian society.
Motilal Nehru (1861-1931), co-founder of the Congress Party, like his son, the future Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, experienced election and campaigning in this context, holding a seat in the Assembly of the United Provinces (present-day Uttar Pradesh in the north of the country). These men, whose family history is so closely linked to that of Indian democracy, thus had their experience in the colonial era. In 1935, to meet these expectations, the Governing of India Act was proposed by London, although the Congress Party had refused to participate in its drafting in protest against the colonial system. The Act laid the foundation for India's present democracy by transferring the majority of political decisions to Indian ministers, except in the fields of defence and economic strategy, thus proposing a quasi-federal system.
On the eve of Independence, the country could therefore count on a "proto-democratic" system and a class of politicians relying on several parties: the Congress, of course, but also the Communist Party created in 1920, the Socialist Party in 1934, the Independent Labour Party, the first party of the untouchables founded by B. R. Ambedkar in 1935, and the Hindu Mahasabha, a Hindu nationalist party, created in 1937.
(Pièce jointe : Schéma de la mise en place progréssive de la démocratie indienne)
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