… India, freed from British rule in 1947, and China, remade as a people’s republic under Mao in 1949, began their modern histories within two years of each other with similar legacies. Both were poor, hungry, in poor health and mostly illiterate. Neither had much of an industrial base. Almost eight decades on, the two countries could hardly look comparable in any matrix. …
China and India approached the education of their citizens from opposite ends. China built the roots first; India reached straight for the treetop. …
China’s one-party system, whatever its other costs, proved unusually good at pushing policy through without the encumbrances India faced of coalition bargaining and judicial review. …
By contrast, India’s federal, multiparty democracy makes for messier progress. Education is a shared responsibility of states and the center, a recipe for turf wars over money and curricula. Each change of government, in Delhi or in the states, tends to scramble the previous administration’s plans. …
None of this is an argument against democracy. It is an argument that democracies pay a price for federal squabbling and short electoral cycles when the policy in question, universal schooling, takes decades rather than years to bear fruit. …
…except, maybe, when education of the young is one on the impeti for the founding of a democratic republic, as it was in America.
The main reason William Bradford wanted to leave Holland, where his Puritan sect was tolerated and left to themselves, was that, as he wrote in his journals, they were losing control of their young.
Chalk another one up to “American exceptionalism”!
For almost the entire period from independence to Rajiv Gandhi, India was a one-party state ruled mostly by the Nehru-Gandhi family. One notable exception was the brief premiership of the untouchable, urine-drinking Morarji Desai. India in that forty-year period hardly qualifies as a democracy in any meaningful sense. Even some of the later opposition PMs started off in the Nehru’s Congress Party.
None of this is an argument for democracy. However, the analysis whitewashes Indian political history. Not every country that calls itself a democracy or republic actually is; the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea comes to mind. This is more a case of comparing two commie, one-party states, one of which did better than the other. There are more relevant differences besides the political systems, i.e., ethnicity and culture.
Fair enough. But it misses the big point that accomplishing important things take time – a decade to get to the Moon; two decades to turn illiterate young children into educated young adults. The issue is what kind of political structure is best able to (1) choose the key matters on which to concentrate, and (2) stick with the plan long enough to make a difference.
It would be tough to make the case that the current form of Western democracy does a good job on either of those points. India supposedly had the benefit of English law and English political mores – but then, England itself has not done so well since 1947.
It is clearer with every passing day that - to the extent citizens are being transformed into subjects - like every other word under statist authoritarians, the word “democracy” no longer means what it used to? (even if the “media” [another such word] hasn’t told us yet). In fact there seems to be an evolutionary convergence of technocracies and bureaucracies which actually control the daily lives of populations under both systems. It’s another facet of “globalism” and democracy has little to do with it. I would go so far as to say that most advanced economies are run by multi-level interlocking bureaucracies who serve themselves and their own utopian-sounding (if not functioning) internal processes with no interest whatsoever in the substantive wellbeing of those who were their clients, customers, users, patients, etc. at the time they were first organized. This is the locus where the reality between the nominal form of government and actual reality, breaks down completely. In US “democracy”, for example, are we served by government, or do we serve it?