Pranab Bardhan
On the general issue of democracy and development, while many liberals believe in a positive relation between the two, increasingly with the phenomenal success of China, there are some who believe in what is now sometimes called the 'Beijing Consensus': that at early stages of industrialization, authoritarianism is helpful. Even in India we hanker after 56-inch-chested strong leaders. But a moment's reflection tells you that authoritarianism is neither necessary nor sufficient for development. It is not necessary because we know there are countries which have developed reasonably well without authoritarianism. Forget about the rich Western countries or Japan. Take some developing countries that have done well with democracy for a long time. They did not need authoritarianism. If you start with small countries, Costa Rica in Latin America is a major success story of democratic development for a long period. Similarly, in Africa, the country of Botswana gives us a successful story of democracy and development. Among large countries, India is an example of democracy with sustained economic growth in recent decades. That authoritarianism is not sufficient is obvious from cases of stagnant authoritarian countries in Africa and Latin America. There are also examples of countries where democracy exists but where there has been not much progress in development. Thus democracy is also neither necessary nor sufficient for development.
Let me now talk about the pros and cons of the rather complex relationship between democracy and development. Let's take some pros first, namely democracy helping in development. Democracy enriches individual autonomy and freedom, participation and deliberation, which some would regard as an important part of development itself. In fact, if you read Amartya Sen's book Development as Freedom, there he identifies such freedom with development. So in this view democracy itself is a part of development. You may, however, look at democracy more in an instrumental way, so may want to find out, does democracy help or hinder development?
Democracy is, of course, slow, but its deliberative and electoral processes manage social conflicts better and lend some stabilizing legitimacy to policy decisions. Here, the major contrast is with China. In post-liberation China, for a long time, what helped to bring the country together was socialism. That's long gone for many decades now. I have gone to China many times and observed that 'socialism' is no longer the social glue. The glue today that increasingly the Chinese leaders are trying to use is 'nationalism', trying to portray China as a great power and to portray the pride associated with the fast economic growth that China has achieved in the last three decades. I remember in 2008, after the big financial crisis in the world, I was in Beijing and talking to many of my Chinese friends and they were worried. I asked them why they were so worried. One of them told me that all these years, Chinese annual growth rates had been very high, often double-digit. Now, because of the global financial crisis, the growth rate was going to come down. They were worried that this was going to undermine the legitimacy of the regime, and there might be social unrest. I joked with them, saying that if in India the growth rate even falls to zero, nothing big will happen because our political regime derives legitimacy not from the growth rate, but from democratic pluralism. That is what makes us alarmed today when this democratic-pluralist idea of India - as visualized by Rabindranath Tagore, Nehru, and others, and as embodied in the Constitution - is being undermined in India. If you read newspapers, every day you can see how it is being undermined. So, in a sense, it is an assault on the basic source of political legitimacy in India.
Even when it comes to social conflicts, we are among the world's most heterogeneous countries, yet a great deal of social conflicts are handled with some degree of success through a pluralistic political culture (though there have been important exceptions). The Chinese, on the other hand, are part of a much more homogeneous country. They are mostly Han Chinese except in Tibet and Xinjiang where the Tibetans and the Uighurs are in a tense relation with the Han Chinese. The Chinese government is managing those conflicts very badly. When they regard the slightest dissent in China as sedition or as 'anti-national', they only exacerbate conflicts. This is a lesson our Hindu majoritarian ruling party needs to learn. Narendra Modi's hollow homilies on our Constitution being a 'holy book' are not enough.
Democracy also usually avoids colossal mistakes (like those in Mao Zedong's China - the Great Leap Forward with the associated disastrous famine, the Cultural Revolution and so on). When mistakes are made, corrections and the healing process are also somewhat less difficult in a democracy.
Democracy also tends to curb the excesses of capitalism and thus render development more sustainable, for example, by encouraging social and environmental movements as watchdogs against environmental despoliation. If we just compare cases, again with China, let me give two examples. We all know that, in West Bengal and elsewhere in India, land acquisition has been a big political issue. There have been agitations, changes of government and so on. The Chinese government has been acquiring land in a much more dramatic, high-handed and arbitrary way for many decades. Although there have been localized protests, these are nothing compared to the kind of protests in India. In fact, a Chinese friend told me, in China, if the government decides to bulldoze your house, they will sometimes not even tell you. One day, you wake up in the morning - and this is in Beijing - and look at the front of your house. In the night, somebody has put a big white Chinese character on the wall, and that one character means 'raze' or 'bulldoze'. In other words, your house has been marked for being bulldozed. That is the only information you are getting; you better get out soon. Now just contrast that with the amount of political agitation that goes on against land acquisition in India. So democracy substantially curbs some of the excesses of capitalism. China is much more of a wild, frontier capitalism today than India is. Even more striking than peremptory land acquisitions are the data on coal mine fatalities or accidents. Coal mine fatalities in China are 15 times more numerous than in India. In India, working conditions in the mines are quite bad; many accidents happen and people unnecessarily die because of a lack of safety precautions. However, this is nothing compared to the Chinese case; safety standards are routinely violated through a collusion between the local Communist Party officials and local businesses.
So these are pros for democracy. Now, let us look at the cons or the negatives of democracy from the development point of view.
Accountability processes to the general public are seriously undermined in a democracy by the influence of money, both in funding elections and in lobbying, protecting and promoting the interests of the wealthy and powerful, sometimes thus entrenching an oligarchy.
Without political centralization, political competition under democracy often encourages competitive populism or short-termism in India. To an economist, populism essentially means short-termism and absence of foresightful or long-horizon planning. For example, come election time, Indian politicians, often promise free electricity and water, which can wreck the prospects of long-term investments in them, or bank loan waivers for farmers, which can wreck the banking system. I recently read about a detailed study, of electricity distribution in Uttar Pradesh. The researcher shows that electricity theft in UP has an electoral cycle. During election years, electricity theft increases substantially through collusion among the people involved with official connivance. We also know that in many cases, for example in south India, colour televisions, mixer-grinders (this is a J. Jayalalithaa speciality) and so on are distributed by south Indian politicians and, of course, in many parts in India, free alcohol and cash are distributed before elections. Many scarce resources are thus frittered away in short-run subsidies and handouts, which hurt the cause of long-run pro-poor investments (like in roads, irrigation, drinking water and electricity).
Finally, I will discuss the issue of local democracy. I have already said that the national-level democracy in India is rather shallow in depth, but there has been a great deal of widening. But our local-level democracy is much weaker than at the national or the provincial level. By local I mean district level, block level, village level. At the district level we have zilla parishads, in the block level we have panchayat samitis and at the village level we have gram panchayats. We had constitutional amendments, the 73rd and the 74th, to promote local democracy. If you ask me, looking at India as a whole, decentralization has not yet succeeded in any significant way. Major exceptions are some municipalities and panchayats in Kerala. Take the municipal governments. The richest city in India is Mumbai, the financial capital. However, the major decisions in running the city are not taken by an elected municipal government. Not by the elected mayor. They are taken by a commissioner, a bureaucrat appointed from the state government above. So when there is so little effective local democracy in the city of Mumbai, what is there to say of villages? Quite often, these local village administrations are captured by local elites and more often by provincial political hierarchies. Even in better governed states like Tamil Nadu, political parties dominate from above the local agenda. More often than not in India, provincial-level politicians hijack that local agenda. Hence there is limited devolution of funds and functions from the provincial government and limited administrative and auditing capacity at the ground level.
This brings me back to Amlan Datta's ideas on decentralization and local cooperation. In fact, Amlan Datta started his book For Democracy by looking rationally at the pitfalls of Stalinism and arguing for human rights and the accountability procedures of democracy. Those of you who want to pursue the evolution of the thought process of Amlan Datta, one interesting thing to me is that here is a person who started as a rationalist follower of M.N. Roy. As you know, there was a great deal of mutual admiration between M.N. Roy and Jawaharlal Nehru. But there was not much mutual admiration between Roy and Gandhiji. Amlan Datta, who started as a disciple of the rationalist M.N. Roy, in the latter part of his life came much nearer to Gandhi's ideas, as you can see from his later books, especially the Bengali books - I particularly remember one book, a collection of essays called Bikalpa Samajer Sandhane (in search of an alternative society). These are thoughtful essays about his vision, looking to the future. Amlan Datta is not happy with the present India, not happy with capitalism, not happy with the kind of democracy that India has. He is looking for an alternative. He is going back to Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi, to decentralized development and rural reconstruction. In those evenings of load-shedding in Santiniketan in the 1980s, when we sat together for discussion, I spent many evenings discussing some of these local democracy issues. By that time, my thought process also had evolved since the days of my early acquaintance with Amlanda. I had lots of differences of opinion with him. However, Amlan da being Amlanda, he would show great respect for differences of opinion. So we used to argue quite a lot. I often used to tell him that his ideas of decentralized development drawn from Rabindranath and Gandhi, to me, looked very utopian. In fact, if you read Tagore, he talks rather wistfully about decentralized development, rural reconstruction and cooperatives. Long before his book in Bengali titled Russia-r Chithi, where he discusses the examples from Soviet Russia, around the 1920s he wrote extensively on the need for cooperatives and autonomous rural development. Both Gandhi and Tagore spoke of changing values: people are selfish and greedy and have to be exhorted to be self-sacrificing and cooperative. To an economist, this selflessness, change in ethical values, if it can be done, is fine and encouraging. But, for a long time, we have to accept that not all people will be selfless. In such a situation, what is to be done? That is where economists propose that even in an imperfect society or an imperfect world how we can manipulate incentives and organizational imperatives to get some things done. There are now a large number of empirical studies on these matters, what works and what does not. I myself, with a team of researchers, have been working on decentralized development in West Bengal. With another team of researchers I have tried to look at when cooperation works and when it does not in water allocation and dispute resolution among farmers. For this purpose in Tamil Nadu, we surveyed 48 irrigation communities. In West Bengal, for the last 15 to 20 years, we are going back to the same set of about 90 villages to understand these issues of decentralized development, cooperation and rural reconstruction. We are yet very far from definitive conclusions, and I plead with the younger people to carry on this kind of research and, if possible, involve themselves in activist social work on issues, which were very much in the minds of Tagore, Gandhi, Pannalal Dasgupta (who founded the Tagore Society for Rural Development in Birbhum) and Amlan Datta.
That would be the biggest tribute we can pay to the memory of Amlan Datta, my teacher, mentor and above all, friend.
No comments:
Post a Comment