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Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

Do you seriously think that the average Indian citizen is less politically empowered than the average American citizen?

The average Indian is likely making less than $2 a day [1] and likely illiterate with not having the ability to read or write ANYTHING[2]. Is a dirt poor, illiterate person "politically empowered"?

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_India (the numbers here are severely underrepresented - there is consensus among most NGOs that more than 50% illiteracy prevails)

Why does one have to be literate to be politically active? Do you think that most US voters base their political decisions (or their decision whether or not to vote) on something they read?

I don't know why this got down-voted to hell. You raise a very valid point. That democracy has to be representative is one of its basic tenets, and you cannot have that if you shut out a large fraction of your citizens. It is very patronizing to assume that the uneducated do not know what is good for them and the educated class knows what is better for them.

Another basic tenet of democracy is that its citizens must be informed. I think it's fair to assume that those who lack access to written knowledge are at a disadvantage in this respect. For what it's worth, I upvoted the comment. Downvoting it to the point of invisibility strikes me as rather undemocratic.

You shouldn't have been downvoted to hell because you were right on some account. Literacy is only part of the problem. Even if you have 100% literacy it won't stop corruption. Case and point: Kerala -> The only state in India with about 94% literacy and yet there is still a good amount of corruption! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala

bad example. Relatively speaking, Kerala has pretty low amount of corruption. I'm not sure that high literacy is the cause. I have a hunch that the high literacy is a byproduct of the common cause (whatever it is). Most people in Kerala have strong political opinions, politics is debated in an intellectual atmosphere. Isn't just literacy, the median Keralite is also a graduate (Bachelor's degree).

As the son of a military officer who has stayed everywhere in India (north/east/west/south) from childhood to adulthood, I can confidently and un-equivocally state that Kerala is amongst the _least_ corrupt states in India. My personal view is supported by several reports of corruption in India (Google them).

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