The first point to note in assessing Indian democracy is that democracy cannot be evaluated in primarily instrumental terms.

Political freedom and civil rights have importance of about Indus valley. Their value to the society does not have to be indirectly established in terms of their contribution to economic growth or other such economic or social achievements. Politically unfreeze citizens are deficient in freedom even if they happen to enjoy a high level of income, or a favorable standard of living in other respects. Insofar as democracy is its own reward, it would be a mistake to treat Indian democracy as a failure on the simple ground that it has not helped generates a high rate of economic growth. In fact, it can be argued, on the contrary, that the real problem is not that India has too much democracy, but that, in some significant ways, it has too little of it. The complaint here relates to cases of violation of civil rights and of individual liberties, frequently on the grounds of combating terrorism, or preventing separatist extremism, or other such law and order issues. There is, I believe, real ground for concern here (as the Indian Human Rights Commission has also pointed out). I do not, however, pursue this issue further in this essay. How can one assess the impact of Indian democracy on economic and social matters? That complex exercise requires, among other things, that we place Indias experience in a comparative perspective, including taking note of what has been happening in other countries. The difficulties of this exercise include the problem of deciding which countries to compare Indian History with. When comparative statements are made that try to show the failure of Indian democracy, it is typically assumed that had India not been a democracy, it would have had experiences rather similar to South Korea, Singapore, or China, rather than other nondemocratic countries such as North Korea, Afghanistan, or Sudan. The proximate comparison of India with a not always democratic country must be with Pakistan, and somehow that does not tend to be the focus of the rosy portrayals of the nondemocratic alternative that India has missed. The casual empiricism of highly limited comparisons tends itself to be a problem in examining the critique under discussion. However, a number of extensive inter country comparisons have, in fact, been recently made by Robert Barro and others. Little evidence has been found in these comparative assessments to indicate that authoritarian governance and the suppression of political and civil rights are really beneficial in encouraging economic development, or even in advancing just economic growth. As far as the latter is concerned, despite the frequently made casual generalizations about the negative impact of democracy on economic growth, the actual directional linkages are quite unclear and seem to depend on many other circumstances. While some statistical investigations note a weakly negative connection with democracy, others find a strongly positive one. On balance, the hypothesis that there is no relation between democracy and economic growth seems hard to reject. Since political freedom and democratic rights have importance of their own, the case for them remains unaffected. No less important is the fact that the policies and circumstances that led to the economic success of Asian economies to the east of India are by now reasonably well

understood. A sequence of empirical studies has identified a general list of helpful policies, with much internal diversity, which includes openness to competition, the use ofinternational markets, a high level of literacy and school education, successful land reforms, easier availability of credit (including microcredit), good public health care, and appropriate incentives for investment, exporting, and industrialization. At the level of these constructive strategies, there is absolutely nothing to indicate that any of these policies is inconsistent with greater democracy and actually have to be sustained by the elements of authoritarianism that happened to be present in South Korea or Singapore or China.Economic growth is extremely important in removing poverty, but it is helped by a friendly economic climate rather than by a fierce political regime.