I have always wanted to come to India not only because it has comparably splendid history to China, but also because it is the world’s most populous democracy. In early 1990s, a lot of people predicted that India will surpass China as the largest developing economy owing to its democracy and legal system. However, 20 years have passed, it turned out that China, which is ruled by dictatorship has achieved greater success than India.In the past few days, I have learned about the history of democracy in India and how does it serve the poor. In 1947, India gained independence from Britain, thanks to Mahatma Gandhi’s national movement of non-violent civil disobedience, and in 1950, India became a republic with a new constitution, ensuring an elaborate parliamentary democracy. But I personally think that democracy has hampered progress of India.
What history demonstrates is that democracies should be introduced or developed only after economic take off; the early development of the United States had strong leadership and was already active in world markets from the start. Strong leadership can be the active form such as in Japan and Singapore, or passive as in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Any economy has to get up and running before much of anything else can be done. Active leadership means that the government takes an active role in directing and not just creating opportunity" for economic activity. The passive form is where the government ensures that impediments to economic developments such as bureaucracy and corruption are effectively removed. In return, there will be sacrifice of economic efficiency.
India received its democracy before it had developed a strong economic base, and because of that, it can hardly take off economically. Democracy did not have to be inevitable in 1947. It came to India at the wrong time. The financial support of the infrastructure of democracy in a first world industrialized nation is daunting, not to mention to maintain the infrastructure of a democracy in an already poor nation. A large percentage of a developing nation’s financial resources are spent on “party” support to campaign expenses rather than on producing goods or even providing other services which could be marketed.
In addition, the people who have been chosen by the Indian people are not educated enough and capable enough to run the government properly. In some sense, because of the way the system is built, lots of regulations and formalities come into picture. The bureaucracy leads to delays.
Democracy does not work in India. That is not to say that the fault lies with the idea of democracy. It is
because its necessary conditions are not met.
--Bei Chen, MPIA '12
That's a very interesting and insightful post, and I agree completely with you that strong leadership is a key to success of any country, in particular democracies. Even successful democracies, such as the United States, have faltered in the area of governance. But comparing the United States post-colonialism with India is impossible. The American Colonies were populated by Europeans and not indigenous people, and most of the Europeans there at the time were British. When they fought for independence they already had many systems in place which were historically natural to them, and even with that it still took 11 years to create the constitution and the presidency.
ReplyDeleteIndia is a more typical example of post-colonialism. The people there were discriminated against and made into a subservient class. Poor, colonial business practices were in place by the British because they didn't completely trust the locals, so there was no real example of a successful system, let alone they controlled themselves. And when they overthrew the British and gained independence, India had to face a world where it's people needed to govern but didn't have true understanding of how to govern. Also, India was MUCH BIGGER than the American colonies.
I believe that while economic takeoff may be important in some situations, governance is the key point. Democracy can not flourish without good governance. America had the benefit of its creators becoming the first five presidents, and while they didn't all agree on things, they all wanted to see the country grown and were true to the idea of public service over personal profit. This usually isn't the case.
Overall, good governance is much more important than economic takeoff when it comes to successful nation building.
I made a comment about democracy elsewhere in the blog. The counterfactual is India w/o democracy. Maybe it would be more equal, but this is not a homogeneous country (I understand neither is China, but India is twenty times as heterogensous). It would split badly, just like so many African states and be consigned to the category of weak or failed states. China has help together as a one party state, but India has never rejected its heterogeneity and could never become a one-party state that could engineer equality, socially or otherwise. kg
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