THE two major events of the last month – the terrorist attack in Mumbai and the elections to the five state assemblies – invite us to once again examine the relationship between democracy and development. So far both events are being analyzed in isolation which is a mistake since there is a deep structural connection between the two. Both serve as diagnostic events. By analyzing them we can learn something significant about the state and quality of Indian democracy. By investigating their internal dynamics we can pronounce on the ability of Indian democracy to deliver the key public goods of safety and security, material development, effective governance, and political liberty.

In this essay I shall say something about the evolution of our democracy and also about the general link between democracy and development. I shall do this first by summarizing the many observations made about the two events referred to earlier. I shall then review the academic discussion on the link between democracy and development. And finally, I shall place for further discussion issues that we need to address to improve the quality of Indian democracy.

The Mumbai terror trauma has been presented by the media, especially the electronic media, as a failure of Indian democracy and of its political class. The charge is that this class, because of its self-centred political behaviour, has failed to protect the life and security of Indian citizens. This failure is because of deep corruption, both personal and institutional. The state machinery had been emasculated by political interference, a weakening that has allowed the terrorists to get through the barriers.

 

Coupled with such widespread corruption is the new phenomenon of insensitivity if not callousness of politicians, the new culture of public life, as sadly seen in the remarks of R.R. Patil (the ex-home minister of Maharashtra) that the loss of life would have been in the thousands and hence a few hundred dead was a measure of the competence of the state, a remark that added to the pain of the city. Or again, soon after the security operation, the inclusion, by the ex-chief minister Deshmukh who had gone to inspect the severity of the damage to the Taj Mahal Hotel, of a film producer in his entourage as if there was no one else who merited a place.

The audacity of the terrorist attack on such high profile targets, the high casualty count, the large number of fatalities among the security forces, the nine hour time lag for the NSG to arrive, the two hour response time for the fire engine to reach the site, the inadequate equipment of the police force compelling the brave ATS personnel to face the well-armed terrorists with outdated guns, the pathetic bullet proof vest and helmet ‘protecting’ the chief of the Mumbai ATS, the absence of broadcast codes which may have compromised the security of the operation, the neglect of advance intelligence information, and the general absence of coordination between the different state agencies – all spoke of the ineptitude of the system to deliver the public goods of safety and security.

If the episode says anything at all it is that public institutions, especially those that deal with law and order, have been rendered ineffective by the intervention of politics. The ability of politics to play this pernicious role has been made possible by the social expansion of our democracy, by the entry of a class of politicians who speak for, and claim to represent, the hitherto excluded social groups. Between their articulations, and the institution’s procedures to deal with their demands, lies a minefield of vetoes. Special interests constrain the capacity of the institutions to act impartially. Since the general argument, and one that is endorsed by the academic class, seems to be that the general interest is the sum of special interests, it is considered impermissible to suggest that the general interest can be something more than the aggregate of the parts.

 

If this is true, and impersonal law is a fiction, then more institutions to deliver law and order will just not help. And this is where the problem lies, for all institutions have become fronts for special interests, especially those of dominant groups. To state the problem pithily, the logic of hamara aadmi has replaced the logic of hamara Bharat. And thus we now have to ask: Is Hemant Karkare an exception or is he the rule of policing in this country? If he is an exception, as I suspect he is, then we need examine ways of getting back to ‘hamara Bharat’ and of reforming practices. We need to explore how we can build a different public culture – one that could be seen in the debates of the Constituent Assembly – that constitutes the operating codes of political behaviour, codes that enable impersonal institutional rules to trump parochial interests. This old fashioned argument may appear to have become somewhat anachronistic in this post-modern world, but is possibly the only option available for us if we want to restore the legitimacy of our political institutions.

Karkare must become the norm, not remain an exception. Hence having another layer of institutions after the navy, the coast guard, and the coastal police, will not help to seal the coast if we do not attend to the basic problems that any student of public administration will recognize – of coordination, of assigning responsibility, of holding accountable and finally, of reward and penalty. These key features that should be present in any system of public institutions are infirm in India. Political interference, in the form of the political veto, makes them infirm. This ability to veto comes from democracy, is in fact a product of the evolution of Indian democracy, about which more later.

 

In contrast to this failure of democracy to provide the public goods of safety and security is the success of democracy to give voters an opportunity to choose between parties and candidates, to express their preferences on issues of governance, and to endorse the governments they like and remove those they dislike. The elections to the five states is an indication that Indian democracy has become routinized. This has happened despite the deep insecurity engendered by the many terrorist attacks that have taken place over the years and the considerable economic uncertainty following in the wake of the global economic recession.

Elections take place on time. Peaceful succession follows. New leaders emerge and acquire authority and legitimacy. Political recruitment into the political class remains vibrant as does the public scrutiny of this class by the media. There is an active public discourse on issues of governance, and voters, after receiving all the available information, make deliberate choices. The playing field is fairly level and democracy, seen as the process by which citizens choose their leaders, is business as usual. Even in these trying times.

So there is both the failure and success of democracy. There is both accountability at the macro level and its lack at the micro level, both aspiration for the goods of governance at the voter level and rent-taking at the representative level, both delivery of development in some sectors and also widespread corruption across all sectors. As the two episodes so poignantly demonstrate, democracy has a mixed record on development. In all the muddle of Indian democracy, the traffic chaos at the Paharganj side of the New Delhi railway station, the traffic still moves forward. We still seem to be doing better than our western neighbour who after several decades of military rule, has only now got democracy.

 

Is democracy or authoritarianism then better for development? I was reminded of this question when, travelling by train some days ago, I met an army officer with whom I started a conversation on the Mumbai tragedy. He remarked that the level of commitment of the terrorists is so high, something the counter-insurgency forces are trained to recognize, that even when they know they are to die they are prepared to take a few others with them. We, he said, are soft because we are taught to turn the other cheek, a Gandhian legacy, and hence do not have the same determination and ruthlessness to respond to violence as do the terrorists. This is why we have to face such a high casualty rate. That is why we are soft targets.

Has democracy made us soft? Would authoritarianism make us tough? Are these options? I remembered Vilfredo Pareto’s remark (pace Machiavelli) that an elite has to rule with the cunning of a fox and the force of a lion, and that an elite that is unable to do so has lost the capacity to rule. It will soon be replaced by a new elite. Were our institutions ineffective because of democracy which had place for neither fox nor lion? To answer this question I thought it appropriate to turn to the academic literature on democracy, authoritarianism and development.

 

Let me begin this excurses by referring to a cross-national study based on the national income statistics of 135 countries over a 40 year period from 1950-1990. The study shows that there is no positive correlation between democracy and development, if development is here seen in the narrower terms of ‘growth in total income’.

‘Political regimes have no impact on the growth of total income when countries are observed across the entire spectrum of conditions. Contrary to widespread concerns, democracies do not reduce the rate of investment even in poor countries. Indeed, it appears that when countries are poor there is little that governments can do, so that it makes little difference for economic growth whether rulers are elected or hold power by force. .... Thus, we did not find a shred of evidence that democracy need be sacrificed on the altar of development. The few countries that developed spectacularly during the past fifty years were as likely to achieve that feat under democracy as under dictatorship. On the average, total incomes grew at almost identical rates under the two regimes. ... These findings also imply that the recently heralded economic virtues of democracy are yet another figment of the ideological imagination. Democracy has other virtues, but, at least, with regard to the growth of total economies, political regimes are not what matters.’¹

The conclusion here is unambiguous. There is no special impact of democracy on development. The evidence is mixed with both democracies and dictatorships having a record of successes and failures. This statistical data on national income, however, gets complicated when it is confronted by cross-national attitudinal data. A survey done by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), shows that people in India see development as an attribute of democracy.² More than 35% of respondents, when asked to choose one from five attributes as the essential attribute of democracy, chose ‘basic necessities for everyone’ over ‘freedom to criticize those in power’ (4%), ‘opportunity to change the government through election’ (21%), ‘equal rights to everyone’ (20%), and ‘no opinion’ (20%).

 

So although the conclusion from national income statistics is that democracy has no impact on development, in the people’s perception development is an essential attribute of democracy. When people in India think of democracy they see development, what a commentator after the elections to the five assemblies called the bipasa – bijli-pani-sadak – factor.

This entangling of the two, democracy and development, gets further complicated by Amartya Sen who reverses the gaze and sees democracy as part of development which he regards as a process that increases the opportunities for choice and of the capabilities to make them. Development is hence more than economic growth.

‘Development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states… Freedom is central to the process of development for two distinct reasons – (i) the evaluative reason: assessment of progress has to be done primarily in terms of whether the freedoms that people have are enhanced; and (ii) the effectiveness reason: achievement of development is thoroughly dependent on the free agency of people.’³

 

A further complication to the discussion is added by D.L. Sheth when he suggests that the present path of development is skewed in favour of dominant classes and hence the need to ‘democratize development’. His is a critique of the model of development followed till now (perhaps driven by economists located in multilateral institutions) which has kept the people out of the planning process and resulted in policy choices that place unfair burden on the marginal and vulnerable (such as displacement and loss of traditional means of livelihood) and give unmerited benefits to the powerful (such as permissions to build special economic zones).

Sheth argues for ‘creating a new system of multiple and overlapping governances, functioning through more direct participation and control by concerned populations (i.e., by those comprising these governances).’⁴

By looking at the literature on development that has dominated the global discourse, and by concurrently evaluating the positions articulated by the movements, Sheth seeks to retrieve the concept of development from the hegemonic discourse and make it more people friendly. Retrieving the idea of development from the powerful classes is what Sheth regards the various popular movements and people’s struggles as attempting.

‘The main effort of the movements today is to keep the debate on development alive, and recast it in terms which can effectively counter global and national structures of power. They are thus formulating old issues of development in new political terms, although their objective remains the same as before, namely, those at the bottom of the pile find their rightful place as producers in the economy and citizens in the polity...

‘Consequently, their politics is about making development a bottom-up process, directly relevant to and an edifying experience for the poor and the oppressed. Thus, rather than altogether "opting out" of development they now seek to change the power relations on which the conventional model of development is premised. In the process some new elements, essentially political in nature, have entered in the grassroots movements’ thinking and practice of development.’⁵

 

On the basis of the literature, a sample of which has been referred to above, we can make four observations on the impact of democracy on development. These are: (i) that there is no necessary link between political regimes and development defined narrowly as growth in national income; (ii) that in spite of the finding from this statistical data the aspiration of citizens in the global South, as in the case of India, is to consider development as an essential attribute of democracy; (iii) that the notion of development must be expanded to include the removal of major sources of unfreedom, thereby rendering infructuous the comparison of whether democracy or dictatorship serves development better since, by definition, development is antithetical to dictatorship; and (iv) that for development to be more people friendly, we must democratize the structures of development.

 

To democratize development we have to bring a large number of actors into the political process, some of whom are individuals but many of whom are groups and communities. These actors must change the ways they act in politics. They must act in ways which are consistent with the operating norms of a democracy and of the institutions of the polity. A consolidated democracy is one where there is, by and large, a consistency between norm and practice. But can they? Do they? Which brings us back to the tragic event in Mumbai wheresuch a consistency was absent, where, in fact, there was a big gap between norm and practice. Which brings us back to the hard question: Is Hemant Karkare the norm or is he the exception?

This brings us to the question of how to see deficits. There are two ways to look at them. One is to see them as the result of an incompleteness in the architecture of democracy, as design flaws that can be remedied by the introduction of additional design, i.e., by creating more institutions, devising new policies and so on, as is being suggested after Mumbai. The second way is to see these deficits as themselves arising from the working of a democracy. They were not there before but have, in fact, emerged because of the working of these institutions and because of the opportunities made available by democracy. They sometimes emerge, in fact, because of the initiatives taken to deepen democracy.

For example, the NREGA scheme has been initiated to tackle the problem of persistent poverty and hunger in rural India. The scheme targets the really poor in the rural areas who need incomes to meet their basic livelihood concerns. It guarantees 100 days of employment at minimum wages to those who apply for such work. The cost of the scheme is borne by the state.

The delivery of the scheme, however, is left to a bureaucratic system which in many places has been found to be defrauding the state in collaboration with the ubiquitous system of contractors used to deliver development. By paying wages to non-existent workers, the system, in several places, has served to transfer public resources to private hands. It has been found to strengthen the contractor system and thereby the economic power of the local elite.

 

The simple solution seems to be to create more institutional safeguards, checks on checks, resulting in a set of so many safeguards that the system becomes overly bureaucratic. Ethnographic studies show that complex bureaucratic structures, more rules for every contingency which instead of strengthening the rule of law, actually result in strengthening the bureaucrat who now acquires the power to interpret and hence the power to facilitate or inhibit any activity. Power shifts from the office to the person of the bureaucrat since there are now so many rules, and since the authority to interpret them lies with the bureaucrat. Here lies the irony. More rules, paradoxically, seem to produce more arbitrariness.

These are some of the emergent deficits of democracy’s working. Because democracy gives access to state power to individuals and groups who may not have had such access – and in the context of state formation this power is considerable – slips occur in the exercise of this power. Such individuals and groups change the rules of the game, sometimes marginally, sometimes radically, as can be seen in the functioning of the judicial, policing, regulatory, redistributive, and legislative systems.

Since democracy gives new groups, and individuals from these groups, membership to the political elite, their entry results in altering the internal dynamics of the elite. They are able to change the internal dynamics since they have not been socialized into the conventions of democracy and hence have fewer constraints of form or behaviour. They primarily see only parochial interests and are thus unable to defend the universal character of the institution in the eternal struggle between the parochial and the universal. Some of the changes which the new elites bring do not meet the norms of democracy and that is why we regard them as deficits. They produce challenges, even dilemmas, prompting one to ask whether the goalposts were in the wrong place at the very beginning? What does a level playing field look like?

 

In what follows I discuss two such challenges that are a product of the working of democracy and which need to be discussed by us if we want to deepen democracy. The first such challenge emerges from the opportunity for ‘voice’ that democracy gives to its citizens, an opportunity that is rights based. This sets into motion a political process of claims, demands, aspirations for recognition, and protest, especially among those who hitherto had no such opportunity. In a plural society this opportunity produces patterns of mobilization that results in a politics of community.

 

In countries such as India, and in most of South Asia, the politics of community develops around group identity because leaders emerge who speak (or claim to speak) on behalf of the group and hence the rights of individuals develop into claims for special rights for groups. Often these, because they are mostly minority groups, acquire a shrillness that begins to pose a challenge to both democracy and the process of nation-state formation. A jat for chief minister. One direction in which this moves is ethnic outbidding. If we look at the politics of South Asia, especially places where democracy is in some turmoil, ethnic outbidding has been at the source of much of the conflict.

India, it is argued is a democracy of communities. While there is a positive aspect to this, in that the state must be more attentive to neglected groups, such politics of ethnic outbidding which a democracy of communities produces has four negative consequences for development. (i) The state is under pressure to meet the immediate consumption demands of groups because of the politics of securing vote banks. Policy planners are, therefore, unable to give as much weightage to the longer term goals of the polity as they do to the immediate demands of special interests.

(ii) A politics of competitive populism is produced with group leaders promising better and more, resulting in a waste of scarce resources and in a gridlock. The option of arguing for the longer term benefits increasingly becomes unavailable to the group leaders since they have to satisfy immediate demands.

(iii) The unintended consequence of such identity politics, and the ethnic outbidding that it produces, is that it insulates the political leadership from criticism and creates a ‘loyalty’ disposition among the followers which becomes so strong that it raises the threshold at which ‘voice’ and ‘exit’ will be exercised. ‘Hamara aadmi’ trumps ‘hamara Bharat’. In the context of state formation, therefore, implementing the law, when it is violated by powerful community leaders, places at risk the fragility of the state itself. This is not a cost that the state is able, or feels that it is able, to bear. As a result the Raj Thackerays thrive on such a scare.

But (iv) the worst consequence that such competitive identity politics produces is a politics of hate, where a group is targeted, constructed as ‘the hostile other’, to mobilize and consolidate one’s own group. As electoral politics becomes more competitive, as the need to consolidate vote bases becomes more urgent in a plural polity, mobilization increasingly moves from a discussion of governance issues to a discussion of identity issues and this produces a level of public excitement (even hysteria when issues of language and religion are invoked) that results in assaults on ‘the other’. Ethnic outbidding, if not controlled, can descend into ethnic cleansing.

 

In development terms this requires the state to divert scarce resources to maintain law and order to now provide people with security. If one looks at the expenditure of many states in the global South on internal security, it is quite substantial. Is this ethnic outbidding a necessary consequence of democracy in the plural societies of the global South? Is it the result of democracy being introduced into polities where the preconditions have not been met? Should one perchance revisit the debate on ‘sequencing’ and ‘preconditions’ for democracy? ⁶

The second challenge is the persistent inequality which democracy seems unable to reduce, especially among the most marginal communities who are unable to access ‘voice’ because they are so fragmented and lacking in the capacity to organize and produce effective political groups. Such a population strata faces persistent hunger and malnutrition, illiteracy and homelessness. The numbers seem to be growing and not diminishing (those under $1.25 a day according to a recent World Bank study) even in India which is a democracy.

 

We need to examine the constraints to democracy and development under conditions of globalization where, within each polity in the global South, enclaves of wealth are growing that compare in disposable income and lifestyle with similar elites in the global North. Globalization seems to be producing a global elite that shares a life situation, a consumption pattern, and an attitude to the policy regime which places their interest several notches higher than the collective national interest. These elites, some argue, have seceded from the nation. Because of their enormous power they are able to determine the nation’s policy programme with the economic elite and the political elite joining hands.

In When Things Fell Apart, an account of state formation in Africa, Robert H. Bates paints a grim picture of how political elites take control of state institutions, how they distribute them among family and cronies, how clientalism and patronage work, and how state resources are used for private gain. The state become predatory.

Cases of such predation are found in every region of the world, prompting one to ask the question: what kind of deficit does this represent? Is it one that can be successfully addressed by more institutions such as the Central Vigilance Commission in India, i.e., a movement from a less to a more consolidated democracy. Or is it a product of the expansion of democracy?As the competition to get access to state power gets more intense predation gets more blatant. Since time horizons in democracy are short, large war chests have to be accumulated in a short period to give the predator an advantage in the electoral process. Is predation then a product of democracy?

 

Democracy in India seems to be moving in the direction of a predatory state as more groups enter the political process and as new leaders remain unmindful of the conventions and constraints of institutions. These leaders veto the decisions of institutions which are harmful to their special interests. Institutions hence become feeble and infirm. Fewer and fewer public persons stand up for the general interest. Special interests dominate.

Hamara aadmi trumps hamara Bharat. This is part of the lesson of Mumbai. We need to reverse this trend. Democracy gives us the means especially now that it is becoming routinized. That is part of the lesson of the five assembly elections. The task is clear. The choice is ours to make Hemant Karkare the rule and not keep him as an exception.

 

* Some of the arguments of this paper were earlier presented at the International Round Table on ‘Democracy for Development – Development for Democracy’, New York, 12 September 2008, organized by UN-DPA, UNDP, IDEA.

Footnotes:

1. A. Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-being in the World, 1950-1990, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, p. 270-1. Their study is in response to the seminal article by Mancur Olsen where he argues that democracies are better for development. ‘Dictatorship, Democracy and Development’, APSR 87(3), pp. 567-576.

2. CSDS, State of Democracy in South Asia, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2008.

3. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1999.

4. D.L. Sheth, ‘Democratising Development’, background paper for Round Table on Democracy and Development organized by CSDS and IDEA, June 2008, Delhi, p. 80.

5. Ibid., p. 65.

6. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, ‘The Sequencing "Fallacy",’ Journal of Democracy 18(3), July 2007, pp. 5-9; Francis Fukuyama, ‘Liberalism Versus State Building’, ibid., pp. 10-13; Sheri Berman, ‘The Vain Hope for "Correct" Timing’, ibid., pp. 14-17; Thomas Carothers, ‘Misunderstanding Gradualism’, ibid., pp. 18-22.