India is a democracy and it will grow too
THE ASIAN AGE
There is no evidence to indicate that the presence or the absence of democracy in a country is directly correlated to economic growth in the broadest sense of the term
Once upon a time in the not-too-distant past, this correspondent admired medical doctor Mahathir Mohamad who was the longest serving Prime Minister of Malaysia for 22 years. Not any longer. Not after his stupid — yes, there is no other word more appropriate — remarks on democracy and development while speaking in New Delhi on December 2. He may be described as the architect of modern Malaysia and a man under whose stewardship, this southeast Asian country became an economic powerhouse. But, at the age of 86, the doctor seems to have clearly lost the plot.
Most visitors to Kuala Lumpur are greatly impressed by its environs, its famous twin skyscrapers, the Petronas Towers, not to mention the apparently super-efficient manner in which everything seems to be administered. Unlike the chaos and anarchy that any visitor encounters on Indian streets, Kuala Lumpur is an orderly study in contrast. During a visit to that country more than two decades ago in 1990, one met a person of Indian origin, a humble waiter named after Subhash Chandra Bose, who mentioned to me that Malaysia’s tranquil surface was deceptive, that the country’s leadership was not just paternalistic but authoritarian and, what is worse, also racist. When I reproduced his views in an article published here, a representative of the Malaysian high commission was most upset at what I had written and wrote an angry rejoinder to the editor of the magazine that had employed me.
Malaysia has indeed become more economically affluent, but its Bhumiputra (or “sons of the soil”) policy is clearly biased in favour of the influential Malay community to the exclusion of others (including Indians of Tamil origin). For decades, Dr Mahathir and his followers have ruthlessly suppressed voices of dissent within his own political party and in the Opposition. Even then, one could not help but admire a man who spoke in such an articulate manner at international conferences about the manner in which the developed West had exploited the developing East. One thought he had become more than a worthy successor of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter and her son, all of whom had ranted against the depredations that decisions by governments in advanced capitalist societies inflicted on the poorer parts of the planet we live in.
Dr Mahathir’s famous fulminations came as a refreshing breath of fresh air at a time when India’s political leaders were bending over backwards to appease the North and who had made “non-alignment” a dirty phrase in popular discourse. Malaysia’s former Prime Minister, on the other hand, was an outspoken critic of American policies although the US was Malaysia’s biggest trading partner, foreign investor and provider of military training. It is said that in 1998, the then US vice-president, Al Gore, left an international conference of the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference held in Kuala Lumpur in a huff after Dr Mahathir sarcastically remarked that “among nations suffering economic crises, we continue to hear calls for democracy, calls for reform, in many languages…” (This was a time when Dr Mahathir had clamped down hard on Anwar Ibrahim, his one-time deputy who became his bitter political opponent.)
