An uphill battle for protecting the essence of liberal democracy

It is vitally important particularly at a time when the Achilles Heel of liberal democracy everywhere looks grievously exposed

In the book The Political Economy of Development in India, I had referred to the 19th-century British example of the industrial bourgeoisie allowing an extension of franchise to the working classes, not necessarily out of love or fear of the latter, but more to checkmate their elite rival in the landed aristocracy. (Roughly similar, episodic, cases have been cited by political scientists in the history of Denmark, Greece, Spain and France in the 19th century, and of Argentina and Portugal in the early part of the 20th). In Federalist Paper no. 10, James Madison looked upon a great number of