Hundreds of millions of Indian citizens have started voting and will continue to do so for six weeks. Democratic elections in India are the most massive human mobilizations in the world, more than any other election, war, pilgrimage, migration movement or international fair. There are more than a million polling stations and even a team of elephants to transport ballot boxes to the Himalayas. Unlike many other democracies, in India participation is greater among the poor than among the rich, among the less educated than among the educated, in the villages than in the cities. Since the elections five years ago, women vote (slightly) more than men.
The success of democracy in India has belied the pessimistic omens after independence and the first elections in 1952, when it was a very poor and illiterate country. But India is not an isolated case. Let’s see the numbers. A little more than half of the world’s population lives in a democracy. We consider “rich” countries to be those with an income per person above the world average (in terms of purchasing power, around 18,000 dollars a year) and “poor” to be those below this threshold. About half of the world’s population living in democracies live in relatively poor countries (including India, but also Indonesia, South Africa and others), while about half of the population living in dictatorships live in relatively rich countries (including China, but also Saudi Arabia, Russia and others).
Some mainstream sociologists were puzzled by India’s case because it does not conform to the classical doctrine that economic development must precede democracy: from Seymour Lipset to Adam Przeworski, who has repeatedly predicted that “India will a dictatorship before 2030″. However, it is not an exception or an anomaly. Early modern democracies, such as Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom or the United States, also established broad male suffrage for competitive elections in the 19th century when they were quite poor, as poor as India was in the mid-20th century or as it is now.
For about forty years after independence, when the government was dominated by the National Congress party, initially led by Jawaharlal Nehru, the centralized and closed economy grew at an annual rate of 1%, which was often subject to tease But since the early 1990s, when India liberalized and opened up to new technologies and globalization, it has enjoyed significant benefits from open trade and capital inflows. Against all expectations, income per person in purchasing power has multiplied by five in thirty years.
Precisely because the country took time to adopt more sophisticated institutions and policies, it has been able to adapt more easily to the world economy. Unlike developed countries with old technologies and onerous pre-existing social arrangements, India has not had to dismantle old industrial and bureaucratic structures that could have obstructed innovation.
As a result, Indian citizens say they prefer democracy to an authoritarian regime by a ratio of four to one. In the most recent international survey by the Pew Research Center, 72% of citizens say they are satisfied with how democracy works in their country, second only to Sweden, and in contrast, for example, to 33% in the United States and 29% in Spain.
The Congress Party, always led by the Gandhi family descended from Nehru, and the People’s Party (BJP), led by the current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, have alternated in government seven times. The electoral system is a copy of the British tradition of single-seat districts by the relative majority rule, which allows a party with less than 40% of the vote to obtain an absolute majority of seats in the Lower House of Parliament.
However, while numerous smaller parties are running independently, the two largest parties form very broad electoral coalitions: in the current election, the BJP has formed a National Democratic Alliance with 12 parties, mostly regional or ethnic, while the opposition Congress is represented in an Alliance for the Inclusive National Development of India (to fit the acronym India) with 23 parties, including several from the extreme left. The participation of all these parties in federal politics works as a factor of national unity.
After the Cold War, India’s old foreign policy of “non-alignment” was replaced by “strategic autonomy”. India remains outside the United Nations Security Council, despite having become a nuclear power, and outside the G-7 despite being the fourth largest democratic economy. However, it has been very dynamic in supporting the democratization of its neighboring countries in South Asia, which is still a poorly integrated region. It is also the oldest and most stable democracy in the so-called Brics group, now expanded to nine members, and has recently increased its relations and agreements with the United States and the European Union in a world of fluctuating international coalitions. From a global and historical perspective, democracy in India, although still open to future challenges, is already one of humanity’s greatest contemporary achievements.
