Chapter 4: Indian Media: The Jewel In India's Democratic Crown

Overview

Under the most adverse conditions of poverty and illiteracy, India has adhered to a democratic form of government. As a fifty-year-old democracy, the country rates as the first outside the Western world to nurture and cherish the value of freedom. The Indian success gave the lie to a school of Western academic thought that believed democracy was a rich nation's privilege. Propagated by America's prestigious Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in the late 4960s, this assessment of the prospects of the Third World drew from the USA's troubled experiences in Latin America and Indochina. Its proponents were liberal social scientists who supported the American crusade for democracy but were disillusioned by repeated US foreign policy failures in the Third World. Shorn of its academic sophistry, the SSRC viewpoint was simplistic: American championing of democracy in the Third World ran up against a wall of poverty and ignorance. Conclusion: the Third World did not have the economic wherewithal to support the four estates of democracy. In reality, it was Washington's rabid anti-communist foreign policy that failed to take into account the aspirations of Third World countries to an independent standing in the world. In practice, US foreign policy sought to divide the Third World on ideological lines. In the US worldview, therefore, a country had to choose between democracy and communism. When the nations of the Third World balked at the US ultimatum, they were dismissed as undeserving of democracy.

The SSRC scholars...