India's false choice: Autocracy & development

I was at an event yesterday where someone made a case for Autocracy. Not one, but two people made the argument that a period of autocracy is needed for a country's 'development'. The example given was China as it powered itself into the world stage in the aftermath of the Tienanmen Square massacre, but also that of South Korea, Japan and various other East Asian states. The point was that India's democracy, which some Indians see as the source of India's 'soft power', is more of a burden than an asset: Would it not be better if India was rich and autocratic, rather than what it is now, a poor democracy?

We were talking about how courageous the makers of modern Indian state were in choosing democracy with universal suffrage just when India became independent notwithstanding the widespread poverty, illiteracy and pangs of partition. The Western nations ridiculed the ambition then and predicted its failure as soon as it started. Pakistan proved the point, but India managed to develop strong institutions and embed democratic norms in its polity. But the naysaying never stopped: For example, watch this BBC show on the 50th anniversary of the Republic and the implicit question whether India can exist in its current form still remained.

 

And yet, the pride that my generation of Indians once had about proving the pundits wrong is not as common today. India is richer today than it was then (at the 50 year mark) and the public conversation has changed drastically. Yesterday's conversation, therefore, made me think: Is it the same conversation we are having, or the new arguments are different? And, was the decision to be democratic wrong-headed?

For a starter, today's questioning of democracy is very different from those which I confronted when I was at the university. Then, it was about the state failing the people. The fault, we presumed, was not in democracy, but the elite subversion of it: India was not democratic enough. The standard argument ran that if we can't even provide safe drinking water for millions of people, what's point of being democratic. In contrast, yesterday's conversation was fundamentally different: That India is not rich enough, its companies are not big enough, it does not have enough economic heft in the world market - because it is democratic. The argument has turned on its head: The state, and the elite, is doing everything it can, but its system of government, which gives voice to too many people, is at fault. 

This also flips the perspective on the other question. When India became independent, no country measured its success or failure in terms of the GDP. This came later. In college, we did indeed talk about GDP per capita and National Income, but it was one among many metrics. I would remember being more embarrassed about the illiteracy figures and that India still had Polio (when it was eradicated in many other countries) than about low GDP per capita. Yes, we can project our current anxieties about economic growth onto the framers of the constitution and blame Nehru for his democratic dalliance, but he lived in a different universe of ideas.

I think this stems from a form of memory lapse. We have chosen to forget Colonialism in economic terms in India while we vent against cultural colonialism all the time. I don't know when it flipped in public consciousness, as colonialism was primarily an economic phenomenon, till it was made to be a cultural one. Referring back to my college days, when we tried to enumerate the pros and cons of colonialism, the impoverishing of India, extraction of resources and unfair terms of trade were firmly on the negative side, whereas development of the judicial system, reform of religious practices and exposure to science and development of Indian cosmopolitanism were seen as positive. In fact, the critique of the cultural imperialism was rather a left-wing affair: That the laws were wrong-headed, courts were unjust, religious reforms mainly entrenched the caste system and favoured the upper castes still! But no one questioned the extraction and unfairness of the colonial economic system. No one in their right mind praised the English for giving India industry, and instead blamed deindustrialisation on colonial policy. 

In this ideas environment, it made sense to distrust monopolies and big companies, mostly owned by the Europeans and the Indians who collaborated with them, which were part of that extractive system. Therefore, the Soviet-style planned economy, which reverted back the control to public ownership, under a democratic government backed by popular mandate: Political democracy first, which would have translated into economic democracy through a system of enlightened public ownership! If all of this sound quaint now, it is because we have flipped the switch in the 1990s, under the assumption that companies will take the lead, big companies will create general prosperity etc.

The only problem with this supposedly fashionable point of view is that it is so out of fashion. Indian middle class is still enamoured with it, but the bottom has fallen out of these neo-liberal ideas. The big businesses only formed monopolies and the resultant inequality has caused not only democratic decline, but also the loss of economic rights of the people, destruction of environment, administrative and political corruption, inefficiencies and nepotism etc. If someone doesn't know that, they are not following the news. Authoritarianism only worked for big businesses, and big businesses fed the authoritarian and corrupt governments! Once it could have been explained away as a Sub-Saharan Africa problem, but now we know that the market-led economic system, which erodes democratic authority in favour of big businesses, not only undermines public welfare but also creates unstable economic environment.

My point, therefore, is that authoritarianism leads to better economic outcome for the country is a non-argument. The obvious counter-example - the authoritarian countries which are poor - has now been supplemented by all sorts of examples of environmental destruction, growth of monopolies, inequality and fall of the standards of living, misinformation, political corruption, etc. In this argument, I felt comfortable with my former self, that democracy is indeed the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.