When people ask me this, I usually turn to an immortal phrase of Hindi film actor Johnny Walker. In a film in which he plays the leading man's sidekick, he answers every query with the remark, 'Boss, phipty-phipty.' I would say the same thing about Indian democracy.

In many ways, I am discouraged (with) Indian democracy. The hardware is intact: There are free, regular and reliable elections. That is one feature of democracy. There is relative freedom of the press, of intellectual work. And there is independence of the judiciary as well as freedom of movement. In many totalitarian regimes, like in China, you cannot move freely from one city to another.

The software of democracy is lacking... There is also an excessive, sometimes arbitrary use of State power in dealing with dissent. So there are serious failures within Indian democracy.

If you regard Indian democracy as fifty-fifty, (it is because] the citizen or activist or democratic reformer will always complain about the deficiencies in Indian democracy -- and rightly so. The fact that you may have to pay a bribe to get a passport, that our jails are so badly run, that our courts take so long to get a decision through and the fact that corrupt politicians are hardly sentenced to jail all weigh against democracy. The glass, then, is half empty to some.

Image: A child, with the national flag painted on his face, takes part in the Independence day celebration at a Mumbai school. Photograph: Pal Pillai/AFP/Getty Images Also read: Five decisions that changed India

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