The world’s largest democracy sets a wretched example: its people are poor its politics venal and its potential wasted In Asia’s race to develop India is a clumsy laggard advancing to be sure but with an exasperating lack of vigor for a country so blessed with vigorous people. Life expectancy is less than China’s; the infant mortality rate is twice that of the Philippines the literacy rate is half Sri Lanka’s.
The list of failings is long. The half a billion Indians preparing to vote in this month’s election have reason to be dissatisfied And outsiders have reason to worry.
India risks fragmenting in ways that threaten not just its own people but its neighbors to. The pacifism of Mahatma Gandhi was always a faith likely to breed sinners now the Nehru ideal of a secular. Indian union is starting to look similarly unreal. To the Sikh extremists of Punjab’s Akali Dal are added the Hindu chauvinists of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Assamese separatism in the north-east coincides with Tamil self-assertion in the south. In Bihar it is the gangsters not the police who command respect. This election may become in the words of one Indian editor “a referendum on the country’s unity”. The less the vote confirms India’s unity the more the central government will be tempted to use any means even martial law to keep its realm intact. And the less popular a central government feels at home the more it may feel tempted to curry support by adventuring abroad.
If that sounds unduly alarmist note not so much that this month’s election like others before it takes place on three days-May 20 23 and 26th to ensure that the army can be deployed in enough strength everywhere to protect the voters. Look instead at secession minded Punjab and Assam so insecure that their voting (assuming it is allowed by the next government) is being delayed until June Muslim-dominated Kashmir is so volatile that it is being excluded from the election altogether. Thoughtful Indians remember Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency in the 1970s” anxious neighbors remember India’s wars more recently its trade sanctions on Nepal and its dispatch of soldiers to Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
It is not democracy that should be blamed for India’s troubles but the politicians who distort it with back groom deals and electoral fraud. Some who should know better are putting electioneering ahead of principle witness V.P Singh’s calculating advocacy of increased quotas for the lower castes and Rajiv Gandhi’s manipulation of the incumbent Prime ‘Minister Chandra Shekhar. And of all of them share the cursed belief of Nehru-that Fabian socialism central planning and self-sufficiency are the way for India to grow to greatness. Across the world the evidence shouts back that this is nonsense.
With a lie shove from its friends.
This mantra of Nehruism will not fade of its own accord because those who prattle it are 100 privileged to feel its ill effects on their fellow Indians Admittedly Mr Gandhi and Mr Singh advocated economic openness in the 1980s but only a little and not for long. Now that they are more experienced they practice politics in the traditional way squabbling to supply the voters with slices from an economic cake that will never be big enough to satisfy all.
Unless that is India’s foreign friends intervene. The best way to promote secular democracy as an antidote to pernicious sectarianism is to boost the “Hindu rate of growth” to the speeds accepted as normal by the successful economies at East and South-East Asia. That probably means allowing India’s states greater economic autonomy and the freedom to experiment. It certainly means dismantling tariff barriers abolishing production licenses encouraging private-sector competition all reforms that Mr Gandhi and Mr Singh (still the two least bad bets for India’s future) failed to deliver when they had their tum in power.
But governments can be made to deliver The lie of “self-sufficiency” is that India now owes foreigners over $70 billion and needs emergency help to balance its books Past governments have spumed loans tied to economic reform. The next government should be given no choice. Let the World Bank the IMF the Asian Development Bank and every donor government belatedly insist on the structural adjustments and curbs to public spending which alone can promise economic health. That way the world’s largest democracy can avoid becoming the world’s wobbliest.
THE ECONOMIST May 11
Article extracted from this publication >> May 17, 1991
