Democracy is a form of government, not a guarantee of social stability, public virtue, or lack of terrorists.
It is not a value judgment on any of those issues. In many cases, an enlightened monarchy could be seen as preferable in terms of social stability, public virtue, and preventing unrest and terrorism. The only problem being, of course, that of succession of power–there is no guarantee that an enlightened monarch will be succeeded by an equally enlightened monarch.
Your post demonstrates a very typical problem - that of equating something that tends towards the good (for example, democracy) with actually achieving the good.
India is a democracy because, by and large, it has elections, and those elections provide legitimacy to its rulers - that is, are not simply a sham. That does not mean India lacks problems with nepotism, cronyism, corruption, bribery, extremism, etc. etc.
It does mean that India has a form of government unlike any seen in the ME, Israel and Turkey aside (and of course those two are hardly immune from hosts of their own problems). Perhaps Iraq and Egypt will develop democracies, but it is too early to be certain.
So? At various times the Ottoman Empire covered all or most of we now call “the middle east”, so it covered a great deal of Arabic and non-Arabic territory. Had it not eagerly destroyed itself, and sided with the eventual loser in WWI, some latter-day version of it might still exist and might have resisted European colonialism.
Actually, reading about the OE suggests it wasn’t a bad empire, as empires go. It seemed open to technologies like the railroad and telegraph, and had it evolved into a constitutional monarchy, it might well have lasted as long as the British Empire, sliding into eventual decline and peaceful release of far-flung territories.
Malthus has ably explained what’s wrong with your criticism. Just to add a few comments on the specific problems you mentioned:
“Caste society”: Class stratification based on social and ethnic groupings is by no means limited to India. Replace “caste discrimination” with “race discrimination”, and you’ve got a phenomenon that afflicts plenty of Western democracies.
“Corruption”: As noted, the presence or absence of corruption doesn’t determine what a country’s political framework is. There are democracies with little corruption and democracies with lots of corruption, and other governmental systems (such as monarchies) that also vary in their corruption levels from country to country.
Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index rates India’s political “cleanness” at 3.1, which is actually higher than some other democracies, including Mexico and Argentina, both at 3.0, Ecuador at 2.7, and Ukraine at 2.3. It’s meaningless to argue that a country with a democratic form of government somehow doesn’t count as a democracy politically just because it has more than a certain arbitrarily specified level of corruption.
And where would you draw the line for the cut-off level of corruption even if you did try to make that argument? Democracies in the same or lower category of political “cleanness” level compared to India include not only the ones mentioned above but also Italy (3.9), Greece (3.4), Romania (3.6), Russia (2.4), Armenia (2.6) and the Philippines (2.6), and several others. Are you going to disqualify all those countries from being considered democracies too?
“Religion as key in winning elections”: You have GOT to be kidding. Do you seriously mean to say that you can’t think of any other examples of established democracies where religion is crucially important in winning elections? :dubious:
I’m not sure if Russia is or isn’t a democracy, but if newcomer had said “Russia as an example of democracy? You are making a laugh, aren’t you?” that would have not been hardly as eyebrow-raising as the similar statement about India was.
You miss the point entirely. Why is there some need to see humanism and rationalism directed at it from the outside? That didn’t happen in The West during the Enlightenment.
What we saw last year during The Arab Spring was the seed of a promise to embrace those values, but only the seed. Whether it will germinate and flower into democratic institutions with a civil society allowing freedom for the people is yet to be seen. Too often we’ve seen democratic movements hijacked by religious fanatics who crush the ideas of democracy, humanism and rationalism under the yolk of Medieval Theocracy.
It’s up to the people themselves, not some outside agent.
As pointed out above and to the point of the thread, India is an example of democracy in the sense that if all the Islamic world comes to meet its standard, we should be overjoyed and call it success for democracy.
That was my thought as well. India ain’t perfect, but would you rather live there or in Iran or Saudi Arabia? And, oddly enough, India is the 2nd or 3rd largest Muslim country in the world, surpassed only by Indonesia and, depending on who does the measuring, Pakistan.
Also, how did you come up with a claim that democracy is “tendency for good” (forgetting for a moment that it’s a convenient cop out for “achieving good” ?
I fail to see how US democracy attacking and destroying Iraq is a “tendency for good”, or installing shah in Iran, or keeping that monster-zombie of a country called Saudi Arabia alive, or supporting Israel in their subjugation and land-stealing of Palestinians?
It appears that your definition of “good” is somewhat subjective and selective; in fact, quite inhumane and irrational.
They’re not going there to “live”, they’re going there to make money and then go home. They’re guest workers who are going to leave after a certain amount of time.
Saudi Arabia has laws to ensure they don’t, with extremely rare exceptions, become citizens and that any children they have there aren’t Saudi citizens either.
On another note, they’re also treated like complete crap.
First of all they’re migrants, not immigrants. But the questions was about you. Where would you rather live, as a citizen? Especially if you are a woman.
Actually, I think you could make a reasonable argument that women have it better off in most of the Islamic world.
I don’t know if it’s still true, but as late as 1995 India had the dubious distinction of being the only country in the world where women had a lower life expectancy than men and it’s one of the only countries in the world(maybe the only one other than the PRC) where men outnumber women.
I’m not talking about “most of the Islamic world”. I’m talking about Saudi Arabia.
Life expectancy is not a particularly good measure of quality of life, and India has changed enormously since 1995. Saudi Arabia is still stuck in the 14th century, in a lot of respects.
Well seeing as I am Pakistani, India is out, unless its at the head of an occupying army.
On a more serious note, Saudi Arabia in a heart beat. Someone with my education level could get a very good job there (and I have in fact been offered, which I turned down). Not the case in India.
Well, I guess if it doesn’t bother you to immigrate to a country with little personal freedom, and which grossly oppresses it’s female population, then you have fewer moral qualms than many of us.
You couldn’t pay me enough to be become a Saudi subject. I pity any daughters you would have in your newly adopted country.
But no one credible claims that all the Islamic world is democratic. Claiming that Russia is democratic is worthy of dismissal of that statement. Claiming that nearly all of the Islamic countries are democratic is worthy of dismissal of that person’s sanity.
There seems to be some ambiguity on what conditions or qualities we’re intending to specify when we say that a country is a “democracy”.
The previous posts by Malthus and by me used “democracy” in a more limited technical sense to mean “having a form of government whose laws specify that governance is exercised by popular vote, either directly or by popularly elected representatives”.
If you want to use “democracy” instead as a relative term depending on conditions like how much of the adult population is permitted to vote, how transparent and honest the popular elections are, and so forth, then you need to define a quantitative measure of democracy, such as the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index. Where a country ranks according to the Democracy Index is not going to correlate perfectly with whether or not their system of governance is officially classified as a “democracy”.
The Democracy Index lists most of the world’s most developed nations in their highest index category, even the ones that are constitutional monarchies (and hence not “democracies” in the technical sense of recognizing no official sovereign except the people as a whole).
In the DI’s ranking of most of the nations of the world from most democratic to least democratic, India falls in the second index category at #39, slightly behind Israel at #36 and Slovakia at #38, but well ahead of Poland at #45, Hungary at #49, Ukraine at #79 (third index category), and Russia at #117 (lowest index category).