There are democracies and democracies. There cannot be any blanket definition for democracies. Every country's needs, and social and political conditions, are different. Transparency and accountability are essential for democratic governance. In the Indian parliament, the proceedings, each and every word said, is open to scrutiny.
Nothing is hidden.
When an MP puts a question, the ministers are bound to answer it, and they are accountable to parliament. Indeed, at the Cairo Conference of the IPU, we adopted the Universal Declaration of Democracy, in which we emphasized that it is an essential pre-requisite of democracy that there should be transparency and a right to information and accountability. The democratic system is the best, as long as all parts work. The parliament works, the legislature works, there is an independent judiciary, and the bureaucracy works independent of everybody. But each is accountable to each other.