It is this feature of the modern age that makes the preservation and steady growth of democracy in India so important. If democracy fails in India, it will be replaced not by an undemocratic rule of the old type which would leave open the road to freedom, but by a dictatorship which would block it for an indefinite period of time. At the same time, the attack on democracy is no longer military alone. It is also ideological—exaggerating the defects of democracy, and making them appear as the defects of democratic institutions instead of those who run these institutions; arguing that incomplete freedom is in the ultimate analysis, worse than no freedom at all ; and claiming that the journey to freedom requires a surrender not only of our partial liberties but also of the right and the opportunities to work for their extension. Along with the theoretical attack on democracy, the totalitarians also carry on a ceaseless campaign of intellectual seduction, offering justice to the oppressed, security to the poor and power to the intelligentsia.
Both the attack on domocracy and the campaign of conversion are made to appear persuasive by a free use of pseudo-rational argument based on half-truths, falsehoods and selected facts, and counts for its success on man's natural love of freedom and equality. In societies in which the evolution of democratic institutions had already proceeded sufficiently far before the rise of modern totalitarianism, the totalitarian attack on democracy as a way of life and the campaign of conversion referred to above were met with indifference or amusement. For the people there had a tradition of working for and extending the frontiers of their freedom, and were therefore not taken by the propoganda of its enemies.
But in societies like ours, with no indigenous democratic traditions of their own, totalitarian propaganda can find favourable ground in the authoritarian cultural heritage of the people.