Is democracy a commodity that can be quantified, weighed, assessed and even assigned a worth? Is it some thing which, as Chief Executive Officer of NITI Aayog Amitabh Kant asserted not too long ago, a nation can have “too much” of? Speaking at an on line occasion final Tuesday, Mr Kant, in response to a query, had stated that it was hard to carry out what he termed as “tough reforms” in India simply because the nation was “too much of a democracy”. Although he subsequently denied producing such a remark – a denial belied by video recordings readily available of the occasion exactly where he can be observed and heard producing such a statement – the unstated assumption behind his assertion is worthy of more really serious consideration, not the least simply because it is 1 that is broadly shared by several in our nation.
That assumption is that the democratic procedure of selection-producing, involving as it necessarily does a plurality of voices and interests and the equal weight that all such voices theoretically carry in a democracy, is inherently inimical to speedy or effective selection-producing, and the potential of an administration to execute big-scale transformation.
Mr Kant is a profession bureaucrat with the government, but is designated CEO in the corporate style, to greater anxiety possibly, the non-bureaucratic method that the organisation he manages would like to bring to its assigned job of “transforming India”. The remarks possibly also reflect the aggravation felt by most CEOs in the corporate planet at 1 time or the other, of possessing to deal with an organisation that is either unable or unwilling to execute their vision, and becoming hampered by becoming simultaneously answerable to several stakeholders with conflicting ambitions – promoters, investors, creditors, vendors, prospects and personnel – “too much democracy” in other words.
But such a belief betrays each a lack of understanding of what a democracy is, as properly as an inability to see the accurate root trigger for the failure to have absolutely everyone fall in line with one’s vision and selection. In each corporate organisations, as properly as noisy democracies, a thriving leader is 1 who manages to convince the majority of the “greater good”. Democracy is fundamentally about discussion, debate, and yes, even dissent. But at the finish of the day, it also about compromise, consensus and cooperation.
Achieving this is not effortless. Mr Kant is, in a sense, really ideal in saying that difficult reforms are not effortless in a democracy. But it also equally accurate that a accurate democracy is about a guidelines-primarily based order. A working democracy is about, right after recording one’s variations and striving for modify, in the end accepting the majority view and complying with it. And India has demonstrated that it is a thriving democracy time and once more. We have the world’s noisiest and most hotly-contested elections – but when the final results are in, we accept and work with the winners, even if we didn’t vote for them.
To somebody who is convinced that she or he has all the essential answers, the procedure of reaching consensus and acceptance in a democratic manner could seem unnecessarily cumbersome. Mr Kant, in that exact same speak, had gone on to quote the instance of China, and asserted that it would be hard to compete with China without having “hard reforms” – carried out, presumably, in the Chinese way, by means of central decree. But Mr Kant has forgotten an critical bit of Chinese history. Who knows how potent China could have been today, if it hadn’t been for the grievous error of Mao’s “cultural revolution” and the “great leap forward”.
Mao was a potent leader, with a clear vision and the drive to make China the greatest energy in the planet. But that did not imply he had the ideal answers or knew the appropriate way forward. The lost years of the “cultural revolution”, when more than 1-and-a-half million people today lost their lives, was to set China back by decades. If governance by diktat was the remedy, Stalin’s Soviet Union would have won the Cold War. If the democratic program was inherently inefficient, then the world’s top economies would be “efficient” dictatorships, not liberal democracies.
Blaming the democratic program for the failure to realize speedy development is, at finest disingenuous, and at worst, duplicitous. Democracy is not the purpose India failed to provide on its prospective all these years. Rather, it is the workaround that we have devised for our failure to realize accurate consensus – selective appeasement of interest groups and the subversion of guidelines-primarily based selection-producing via corruption and governance capture. To paraphrase Mr Kant, it is not the quantum of democracy which is the difficulty, but its high quality. For democracy to work, all stakeholders have to commit to producing it work. Yes, the government “worked” through the Emergency – but that did not imply the nation progressed. India’s reforms could have been slow in coming, but they have lasted – simply because of democracy, not in spite of it.