Is India’s problem too much democracy or a Soviet-style prime minister?

Does India have too much democracy and would it be better off with less? The question is inevitably raised whenever comparisons are made with China, where a lack totalitarian rule has enabled growth and economic development that has been dramatically faster and more efficient than India’s since the two countries began to liberalise controls 20 years or so ago.

Alongside that, does India have a strong enough political leadership, and does the current Sonia Gandhi – Manmohan Singh (together above) split between party affairs and government work? The answer of course is “no” to the last two points, whereas the democracy point is debatable.

The past few days have been a good time to revisit such topics because of the petty politics and democratic chaos and official mismanagement surrounding the Indian government’s attempts to open up its supermarkets to foreign direct investment (FDI) - which I wrote about last week. That has coincided with a visit to Delhi by one of Asia’s most effective critics of too much democracy, Mahathir Bin Mohamad, Malaysia’s former prime minister.

Mahathir, now 86, ran Malaysia for 22 years from 1981 till 2003, accumulating power at the expense of both individual freedoms and an independent judiciary and media. But he nevertheless maintained the semblance of democracy, winning five general elections, and he won acclaim for building his country into a strong and successful economy, and for bucking some of the demands and advice thrown at developing countries by the West.

“Sometimes democracy can paralyse decision-making because people oppose for the sake of opposition,” Mahathir told a Hindustan Times conference in Delhi last Friday, hitting the spot at a time when the government’s fractious coalition partners, especially Mamata Banerjee, chief minister of West Bengal, have been playing political games that threaten the FDI plan.

“Democracy is the best form of government mankind has ever invented but it is important for the world to understand its limitations. India could be China if it were not for too much domestic politics and abuse of freedoms to protest and argue at will,” he said.

That is undoubtedly correct. India’s combination of noisy fractious democracy, plus its coalition governments and mostly pliable media, spells disaster for reforms that challenge vested interests, whether those interests are the rural poor rightly trying to protect their livelihoods or rich businessmen trying to protect their often illicit sources of wealth. Add widespread corruption to that mix and the result is often negative.

Mahathir’s truncated democracy was much more effective – as is China’s undemocratic authoritarian system. But India lacks something else that Malaysia also had, namely strong political leadership to manage the problems arising from the pushes and pulls of democracy

This was raised at the Hindustan Times conference by L.K.Advani, 84-year old leader of India’s main opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Scoring a neat political point, he suggested that Manmohan Singh was a weak prime minister. He was, said Advani, “not able to exercise all the authority of a prime minister” because of his “acceptance of a communist model of governance, namely where it is the party chief who is more important than the prime minister”.

He mischievously likened that to the way he had been told to give precedence to the Soviet Union’s Communist Party chief Nikita Khrushchev rather than premier Nikolai Bulganin when the two leaders visited India in 1955. “I was surprised to hear this,” he said.

Neither Gandhi nor Singh are natural leaders. The former likes to lead from behind while the latter believes it is neither his job nor wise to lead from the front. Singh has broken out just once – on India’s nuclear deal with the US three years ago, where he led from the front with Gandhi’s support.

So given that there is no chance of India abandoning democracy, nor of accepting a Mahathir version, it is to Advani’s remarks that one has to turn for a solution to the current muddle. The Gandhi-Singh duo is not working. India’s coalition government desperately needs a leader and until it has one, the worst effects of democracy will continue to prevent the country being run effectively.

For a longer version of this post, go to John Elliott’s Riding the Elephant blog wp.me/pieST-1ve

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• http://www.yahoo.co.uk/ Firozali A.Mulla

  John, You are wrong in your judgement on Neither Gandhi nor Singh are natural leaders. Remeber she from the man who walked naked but had the VISION> DO WE HAVE THAT? What do politicians promise us? Once, a man saw a mad elephant, running behind him. The man forgot everything, as we would do, and ran. He saw a small well and dived in the well, held the small branches that were there. When he thought that he was safe. He looked at his surroundings. He was safe. Or was he? He saw in the bottom a snake open mouth inviting him, “Come I am waiting for you.” He looked up; he saw two rats, one white one black cutting the branch. The black denotes for our purposes, night, and white, day. Then there was another small branch near him that had honey. Man forgot all his problems and started eating the honey. The moral of the story. We are all having problems but we want to go for the honey forgetting all, everything. Assad denies ordering bloody crackdown,  China arrests 600 in child-trafficking bust; 178 children rescued  Bill Gates in discussions to develop nuclear reactor with China,  Greek lawmakers approve austerity budget,  Chinese Are Among Best Capitalists in the World:  In a private call with allies, the GOP warns against a certain type of criticism of the president. , PM: I Will Veto EU Treaty Plan To Defend UK Search results Sarkozy, Merkel to meet Monday on Europe proposals There is at that time no EURO,  Putin and the crowd still fighting the election of the blasts in Afghanistan. May be this is farfetched story but is it true? “In most countries, national governments or provincial governments enforce criminal law. [In the United States], local institutions – chiefly city police forces and
  county prosecutors’ offices – do most of the enforcing, while locally selected  juries judge those criminal defendants who take their cases to trial. Likewise,
  in most of the world prosecutors and judges are civil servants. Here, local prosecutors – the ones who try the large majority of cases – and trial judges (appellate judges, too) are, with few exceptions, chosen by voters of the counties in which they work. At least in theory, these features of the justice system give citizens in crime-ridden neighbourhoods a good deal of power over criminal law enforcement in their neighbourhoods. QUOTATION OF THE DAY -
  “We felt we ran a good course for 70 years. Fought a good fight.”
  HARRY R. KERR, a leader in the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, on the decision to disband on Dec. 31. I thank you Firozali A.Mulla DBA

• http://twitter.com/simondenyer Simon Denyer

  John, India would probably not even exist as a nation as we know it if it weren’t for democracy. If you want to know how much democracy has benefitted India, just look at Pakistan, split in two and facing huge economic and social problems under authoritarian rule. 
  China is not a relevant comparison, and the lovers of autocracy in any case conveniently forget the huge suffering inflicted by the “Great Leap Forward”