India's democracy after 50 years

India is commemorating its golden jubilee today. Political scientist J. Soedjati Djiwandono, from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, takes a look at the future of the world's largest democracy.

JAKARTA (JP): On the plight of governments in newly independent nations during the post-war years, the opinion of the late British historian Arnold J. Toynbee was quite insightful.

"Among the countries which... have been liberated from authoritarian rule, native or foreign, a number have quickly fallen under authoritarian rule again...," he said. "They are either Communist regimes or regimes... in which the Army has ousted the politicians and has replaced them by major-generals."

Toynbee made this statement 35 years ago in a lecture titled The Present-day Experiment in Western Civilization.

"... there is not a single case in which a regime of either of these two kinds has been a liberated country's first choice," he continued.

"Invariably its first choice has been Western parliamentary democracy...".

Toynbee was right in many cases but if he had India in mind while delivering the lecture he might have been surprised. India is now the largest democracy in the world and Toynbee was right only in regard to the final words he uttered.

There are those who choose to be cynical about Indian democracy. In the good old days, the golden years of the Congress Party, India looked like a one-party system in the same way Singapore has been all these years under the People's Action Party. The fact is, however, that the Congress Party has more than once conceded defeat at a general election.

This is not to suggest that Indian democracy has been free from turbulence. Indeed, the country has been racked with ethnic, linguistic, religious and other sectarian strife and violence. But, rather than blaming the colonialist's "divide and rule" policy, one Indian leader quipped during the country's struggle for independence: "We divide and they rule".

Nor is this to suggest that the country has got rid of its acute problem of poverty that has continued to characterize many nations of the developing world. And corruption is aplenty among the political elite. But they do not always get away with it, a fact epitomized by the case of former prime minister Narashima Rao. India's laws seems to work much more effectively than in much of the developing world.

In fact, with its population rapidly approaching one billion, and other characteristics marking most countries in the developing world, the description of India as the "Third World writ small" seems appropriate indeed.

Yet, in contrast to many of its counterparts in the Third World, as observed and foreseen by Arnold Toynbee, India continues to move steadily along. It is not without ups and downs, trials and tribulations, but India continues on its path of democracy with a "devil may care" determination.

It is interesting to note that in India, even communists seem to believe in parliamentary democracy. Apart from the tiny republic of San Morino, in the North of Italy, India has been the only other country where communists have won a genuine victory at an election. This occurred in the state of Kerala without any attempt to seize power by force.

And if one is to believe the existence of the so-called "national communism", it was the leader of the Indian communists, Roy, who argued bitterly with Lenin in the early 1920s. They argued over what Roy regarded as the inappropriateness and the inapplicability of the "united front from above" strategy to the prevailing conditions in India at that time.

India's contributions to the world have been its great culture, religions, and civilization, as well as great philosophers and thinkers such as Kautilia, Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi, to name just a few.

On this 50th anniversary of its independence, India has given its people a lot to be proud of as a nation.

Editorial -- Page 4