Contents: Acknowledgements --
1. Introduction --
2. The complexities of Indian politics and difficulty in putting them into an existing framework --
3. Understanding liberal philosophy --
4. Locke, civil society and exclusion --
5. The emergence of democracy from liberal philosophy --
6. What is democracy really? --
7. Can an Electoral Representative Democracy be a true democracy? --
8. India and its political system as they appear today --
9. Who starts agitations and why? --
10. The mythology behind projecting plutocracies as democracies --
11. Power and substance of democracy --
12. Ineffective political leadership, collapsing public institutions and a nation whose future is in jeopardy --
13. Corruption, civil society activism and other impedimenta of progress --
14. Understanding policy paralysis --
15. Elements of paralysis --
16. The repercussions of policy paralysis within the organs of government --
17. Caste and religion in the higher education system --
18. Living in an illiberal and increasingly intolerant Indian society --
19. Why deliberative politics and deliberative democracy are now a must --
20. Deliberative politics is the way forward despite the existence of hurdles aplenty --
21. For the betterment of Indian society and Indian politics education reform will be the key differentiator --
22. The new cocktail of politics and academics: armed with deliberately created semantic confusion and making giants out of the understanding --
23. Education in India is not only illiberal but also completely meaningless --
Time to reform the illiberal education system in India --
25. Regional media and the problems they create in imparting education --
26. Let us remind ourselves of the USSR and its spectacular failure again.