With Iraq back on the chess-board of international diplomacy, there is Once again the talk of democratizing individual West Asian nations, if not West Asia as a region. Going by the neighbourhood experience in recent times, it has also raised the question if West Asia is ready to be democratized, if it is not through the barrel of the American gun.
There is no doubt democracy, despite all its follies and failings, is the best form of government. As the very definition goes, it is the "Government of the people, by the people and for the people." For a democracy to be functional, and not just surviving on external interference and interpretation, it has to involve the people at all levels and all stages. What we would have otherwise is a "guided democracy" at best, and it could be worse than a dictatorship. There would be a mis-match between the interests of the rulers and the ruled on the one hand, and between the two of them and the "external guide" on the other. It would end up as a triangular warfare, and not as "triangular ties", as events in
Afghanistan and Iraq have shown.
International discourses on imposing "western democracy" often refer to the "Indian example". The "Indian example" was not exactly unique at inception, and was attempted by the British in other parts of the world that they had occupied. What has made it unique has been the post-Independence experience, when over the past five decades and more, India has successfully adapted democracy to local conditions as they exist now without reverting to a distant past, when it was dictatorship, of the royalty or otherwise. In a way, it can be said, "western democracy" has adapted to Indian conditions of socio-economic realities and caste inequities.
The success of the Indian system owes exclusively to the local people, and this is the point that needs to be borne in mind while the experiment is sought to be replicated elsewhere. They were willing to learn, adopt and adapt. They were both equipped and willing to amend and adjust existing systems to suit the local conditions, they having studied and accepted both as they stood, but needed to be dovetailed. It is this inherent acceptance of the evolutionary process that has helped India bounce back as a full-bloom democracy despite the passing cloud of emergency era.
For all the local contributions to making "western democracy" a success in India, the role evolutionary process cannot be ignored either. The British rulers did not try pushing democracy down the Indian throat through the barrel of their guns, beyond a point. Given their long-term trade interests, requiring peace and tranquility at all times, they had the need and patience to "educate" the Indians from the scratch. They did not start with imposing democracy from the top, but instead began with schools and colleges, revenue administration and municipal corporations, judiciary and the Press.
Maybe, they were also befooled by the self-belief that the "sun would never set over the British empire", and hence gave themselves the luxury of time unavailable to other nations occupying territory elsewhere and at present. Having lived in and off the oceans, where all things other than the occasional storm moved slowly, the Britons possibly were tuned to the slow pace that was required to educate a new nation into their ways of living and thinking. In the end, they had spent over 300 years between setting foot on India and returning home after "handing over" a free nation to a free people. So complete was the process that India had no problem when the rulers left, and no problem with them, either. So much so, free India not only joined the British Commonwealth without any rancour of ill-will, but also chose to have a Briton in Lord Louis Mountbatten as its first Governor-General. Whatever needed to be honed and tuned, to suit the Indian conditions even more, free India has been doing them inch by inch, year by every passing year.
There is a lesson in the "Indian experience" as compared to even that of Pakistan, which had formed a part of the same nation before Independence and Partition. Education of the kind required to accept democracy was lacking, if not entirely absent in areas that now form Pakistan even at the time. While the Indian Princes in the heartland were under pressure from the population tuned to the events in the neighbourhood of "British India" reform the education, administrative and judicial systems, even if slowly, that kind of compulsion was not there for whoever ruled the fringes of the borderland now forming a part of Pakistan. The results are there for everyone to see, clearly hinting at the course that needs to be adopted if democracy has to sprout, grow and spread elsewhere, too. Time in that case would not be running out, as presumed, but will have to be at a premium, if anything meaningful has to be achieved that is, if you are not looking around for one more Pakistan, or one more Afghanistan.
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