Challenge for Democratic India

The eyes of the world are fixed on India. Parliamentary elections are now underway in what is expected to be the largest and most daunting democratic exercise in the history of civilization. More than 714 million citizens are eligible to cast a ballot on over 1.4 million electronic voting machines scattered across 830,000 polling stations. That is democracy on a titanic scale.

India and its people should be proud of their extraordinary progress since declaring independence in 1947. Out of the ashes of the British occupation, India has emerged as a model for countries aspiring to join the community of democratic states – and rightfully so, because India’s democratic institutions are among the very best across the globe.

India’s commitment to free and impartial elections has received well-deserved praise. For example, the Economist gave India the second-highest score for the fairness, transparency and openness of its electoral process in its 2008 Democracy Index, an annual ranking of the state of democracy in the world.

But democracy means more than just elections. Democracy entails an equally strong commitment to values and principles – like equality, justice and opportunity – without which democracy would be divested of its core meaning. After all, what does the right to vote mean if citizens cannot read, have no food to eat or home to call their own, can expect to die young and are denied basic human rights?

That is the plight of India today. According to the United Nations, which ranks India 128th out of 177 countries on its annual Human Development Index, gender inequality endures, the gap between the richest and poorest continues to widen, nearly half the population must make do without electricity, 40 percent of Indians cannot read, 30 percent live below the poverty line, 50 percent of children under age five are below normal weight, over 40 percent of one-year-olds are not fully immunized against measles, and life expectancy is barely 60 years.

These staggering statistics are difficult to comprehend, especially for a country whose economic growth over the past 20 years has surpassed each of the G8 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

But part of the answer to this riddle comes into sharp focus when we consider India’s economic priorities: military expenditures were more than three times greater than healthcare spending. In contrast, the opposite is true of all G8 countries, which invested an average of just under four times more in healthcare than in defense. Even the United States, the world’s military hyperpower, spent nearly twice as much on healthcare as it did on the military.

The poor quality of life in India raises a dispiriting contrast with the rich quality of its electoral process. But India is not doomed to this tragic state of affairs. Quite the contrary, the future of India is not yet written. Indians still have time to redress the imbalance between the nuts and bolts of electoral democracy and the substantive values of liberal democracy.

Time is running short, though, because the longer India waits to attack these disparities, the more likely the possibility that they will harden from a mere trend into a permanent condition. There is no better time than now, as candidates present their visions for the future of India, for Indian citizens to send a message with their votes that elections alone do not satisfy the promise of democracy.