Democracy is non-negotiable

One measure of democracy is the voice and accountability indicator developed by the World Bank, based on civil liberties, political rights and press freedom. This has a minimum value of – 2.50 and a maximum value of + 2.50. The HDR2002 tells us that in 2000-2001, India had a score of 0.66. This places us ahead of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and China, but considerably behind Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. We are more or less in the same league as Trinidad and Tobago, Chile and Surinam. Does this tie in with our perceptions of how democratic we are? Probably not.

And this indeed illustrates the intrinsic problem in quantifying anything as elusive as democracy. Objective data will rarely suffice. And subjective data, based inevitably on perceptions, will be criticised as being biased. As far as I can make out, Murli Manohar Joshi has criticised the Human Development Index (HDI) for not capturing the democratic dimension. The HDI is based on objective data — on per capita income (in purchasing power parity terms), education (literacy rate, gross enrolment ratio) and health (life expectancy) and has evolved over time. While HDI does not capture the democratic dimension, I don’t think it is meant to. If we want to measure democracy, we need a separate indicator, such as the World Bank’s one.

If we stick with the World Bank indicator, the democracy tax argument suggests that Indian democracy is an obstacle to higher economic growth. And one can cite Bahrain, Syria, China, Russia, Malaysia, Jordan, Morocco and several other countries to drive home the point. Sanjaya Baru argued in these columns that given the trade off, he prefers to stick with the democratic alternative. I agree. I wouldn’t like to live in China. But I want to make an additional point. The trade-off doesn’t exist. Without democracy, we might also have become Congo or a Mozambique.

One has no means of judging a priori what the autocrat’s objective function is going to be. Hence, autocracy does not necessarily improve governance. If one is going to use statistical correlation, has India become more or less democratic in the 1980s and 1990s? I think the answer is unambiguous. India has become more democratic, whatever criterion one uses. And economic performance has improved, not deteriorated. The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library has a new journal, Contemporary India. In the first issue, there is an extremely interesting paper by Ramachandra Guha on the biggest gamble in history, the Indian general election of 1952. ‘‘A newly independent country chose to move straight into universal adult franchise, rather than — as was the case in the West — at first reserve the right to vote to men of property…’’ Once the election was over, Nehru said, ‘‘My respect for the so-called illiterate voter has gone up. Whatever doubts I might have had about adult suffrage

in India have been removed

completely.’’

Despite all the imperfections, the scope for vertical mobility in India is far more than in many relatively autocratic countries. Both Abdul Kalam and Dhirubhai Ambani are now topical. There have been several news reports about students from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds making it to IITs. Take a random sample of Indian students in universities overseas and compare it with random samples of students from several African, East Asian or even other South Asian countries. The Indian sample will be far more representative of the Indian polity, regardless of the socio-economic backgrounds of the students. This phenomenon, and the underlying structure that sustains it, ought to be non-negotiable. Despite its warts.

Because of warts, vertical mobility is imperfect and some people are beneficiaries of the present system. Typically, this means the urban and often Western-educated elite, belonging to relatively richer sections of society. Arguments about the democracy tax invariably emerge from this segment. It is never very clear what they would like democracy to be replaced by. Presumably not a dictatorship. Perhaps they would like a controlled democracy, with voting rights restricted to the literate, income-tax payers or property owners. These are people like us (PLUs).

However, the democracy tax argument has also been advanced in the context of the political economy of reforms. And if you track this political economy, you find the opposition is usually articulated by PLUs, not by the rest of society, which has always been marginalised and has, so far, been untouched by most liberalisation. If we want to push reforms through and push India ahead to the Chinese growth rate of 7 per cent, the PLU argument won’t work. That leaves us with the dictatorship option. This is a recipe for disaster and, thankfully, India will never accept this option. All things considered, the democracy tax argument doesn’t work.