1) Democracy is always a work in progress- not a 'finished state of affairs. To make democracy work, people will have to constantly work together to make it work. Leaving it to its own default devices often mean, subversion of democracy- and democratic values. Democracy is about dignity, dissent and discussions. Democracy is about the values based on political equality of all- and ensuring human rights for all. There are liberal and illiberal democracies. And unless people are vigilent liberal democracies can end up becoming illiberal democracies.
2)Democracy as a system of government may not ensure the democratisation of society. Many countries that adopted democracy as a system of government also had societies that practiced discrimination.
3) In Europe and the USA it took more than two hundred years of multiple efforts and two wars to usher a more democratic society.
4) In South Asia, Democracy is still an aspiration than reality. This is because liberal democratic system is superimposed on a semi-feudal, hierarchical and caste/creed driven society. When liberal democracy is super-imposed on an illiberal society, the promises of democracy gets annulled. Though there is electoral democracies in South Asia, most of the political parties are hardly democratic. Power- politics is controlled by a cartel of political families+ business families and media families. Due to the semi-feudal and caste/creed character, seats to the assembly or parliament are often based more on identity affiliation rather than any ideological conviction. In India, caste-driven and caste-dived society is the sub-text of all electoral politics and arithmetic. We have a liberal constitution, a top-down colonial bureaucracy, threatening and coercive police and semi-feudal polity. This also means once they get elected ministers and those in the government often unconsciously behave as feudal chieftains
5) In most of the African countries, electoral democracy is super-imposed on tribal- culture.So 'tribalism' is the sub-text of democratic experiments in many countries. It is the affiliation to various 'tribal identity' that determine the legitimacy and 'winnability' of the leaders. And once they elected many behave like Tribal Chiefs.
6) The key challenge for democratization of societies is this: In most of the societies and cultures there are different modes of internalized power-hierarchies.Most obvious form of internalized power-hierarchy everywhere in the world is Patriarchy. And there are also other internalized modes of power-hierarchy based on race, caste, religion, ethnicity etc. These internalized notions of power-hierarchy is in constant struggles for normative principles of democracy. This is also the reasons for the constant 'disfunctionality' of democracy in institutional spaces- from family to the parliament.
7) Economic and Social inequalities lead to political inequalities. Economic- social and political inequalities often lead to the real or perceived disenfranchisement of those who are marginalized. When there is economic, social and political inequalities linked to an ethnic/religious/linguistic/racial identity, there will be various kinds of conflicts and violence in the society. Governments end up spending more money to buy guns than redistributing resources to reduce multi-dimensional inequality. In an unjust and unequal society, the promises of democracy get annulled - and electoral democracy become a veneer to conceal injustice and inequality.
9) Democracy by design and default has a potential to be always subverted. Democracy is often subverted or hijacked or annulled by the troika of three Ms- Market, Media and Military. - and all these three are controlled by rich corporations who seek to use this to take control over the natural resources and economy in a given country. This leads to the 'elite-capture' of democracy in many countries- and consequent corporatisation of political parties. In semi-feudal and tribal societies, this lead to crony capitalism of the worst kind. In established capitalist societies, corporates subvert through multiple channels of influence with money is seen as investment in politics and policy - as 'stakeholders' in the business of economy.
10) Democracy in most of the countries is nurtured and promoted by an aware and assertive middle class. Most of the political leaders too come from middle class all over the world. Even when they happened to be from working class, they acquire the characteristics of a middle class. So often the sustenance of a democracy is to large extend determined by the perceptions, perspectives, locations and anxieties of a given middle class in the society.
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