On Wednesday, Justice V. M. Tarkunde chaired PLENARY VII - DEMOCRACY AND HUMANISM.

Dr Jai Prakash Narayan of Hyderabad and Campaign Coordinator and founder of the Lok Satta Campaign, a popular movement in favour of democracy, spoke on Global Threats to Democracy. He outlined the slow progress toward democracy - in 1983, 36% of people lived in democracies. In 1989 the figure had increased to 39%. Democracies are hard to build and easy to demolish. It is ironic that in Turkey the arbiter of democracy and the enforcer of secular government is the army.

Democracy is the ability to disagree without fisticuffs - to trust people. It means respect and dignity - to accept a common fate - altruism. Economic Liberalism may or may not facilitate democracy. There is a problem of an increasing nexus between criminals and politicians seen in Delhi, Karachi, and many other cities. [Also business leaders and not just in India.]

There is a need to decentralise. We need to understand how the money is spent. In India, 1,000 crore [10,000 million] Indian Rupees a day [NZ $450 million] is spent on government. [New Zealand spends about $14 million per day. This is more than eight times the expenditure of India on a per capita basis.]

Referring to the former USSR he noted that Gorbachev is a hero in the West but enormously unpopular in Russia. The mighty empire collapsed in no time but today Russia is much worse off. India is in a similar state. Lots of evil is promulgated in the name of governments. There is a danger that India could disintegrate. Sadly when we have to act, the impediments to action are fear and ignorance.

Manoj Datta of the Indian Radical Humanist Association talked about going Beyond Traditional Democracies. He outlined the development of democracy from the Direct Democracy of Greece to the traditional representative parliamentary democracy and possibilities for the future.