The failure of the Indian state to provide basic public services and implement job-creating infrastructure projects was a prominent theme in the nation’s general election this month.
In this regard, critics often compare India unfavorably to China’s seemingly purposeful and effective authoritarian government, despite the recent excesses of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in consolidating his personal power.
At a time when confidence in liberal democracy is weakening worldwide, this question has taken on global importance.
However, the standard contrast between Chinese authoritarian efficiency and Indian democratic dysfunction is too simplistic.
Authoritarianism is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for some of the special features of Chinese governance. Similarly, not all of the Indian state’s shortcomings are inherent in the nation’s democratic system. Failure to appreciate such nuances risks overlooking three especially important governance issues.
For starters, unlike in many other authoritarian nations, China’s bureaucracy has had a system of meritocratic recruitment and promotion at the local level since imperial times. Although the Indian state also recruits public officials on the basis of examinations, its system of promotion — which is largely based on seniority and loyalty to one’s political masters — is not intrinsic to democracy.
India’s bureaucrats are less politically insulated than their counterparts in the UK, Denmark and New Zealand, but much more so than officials in the US (even before US President Donald Trump’s rampant practice of firing by Twitter).
Yet in meritocratic China, plenty of evidence suggests that promotion at the provincial level and above is largely dependent on political loyalty to particular leaders. Furthermore, there is quantitative evidence of quid pro quo transactions in Chinese official promotions.
For example, a provincial party secretary’s chance of promotion to the upper echelons rises with the size of the discount offered when selling land to a firm connected to members of the Chinese leadership.
Although Xi’s anti-corruption campaigns have curbed some of these deals, the crackdown is often more vigorous when the officials involved are suspected of having links with the leadership’s rivals.
Second, the Chinese state is usually seen as having much greater organizational capacity than India’s, but here, too, the reality might be more nuanced.
The Indian state, despite all the stories about overbureaucratization, is surprisingly small in terms of the number of public employees per capita; for example, the number of employees in the tax administration per thousand members of the population is more than 260 times higher in the UK than in India, and five times higher in Turkey.
Moreover, the nation’s police, judiciary and bureaucracy have numerous unfilled vacancies. To a considerable extent, this is a consequence of India’s sizeable informal sector, with more than 80 percent of workers, which is unusually large for a major economy, and it limits the state’s ability to generate tax revenue to fund the government.
Moreover, the Indian state has an extraordinary ability to organize large, complex events, such as the world’s largest election, its second-largest census and some of the world’s biggest religious festivals.
Public officials also prepared the unique biometric identification of more than 1 billion citizens in a relatively short period.
However, India’s bureaucracy is less effective in carrying out routine essential activities such as cost and effective pricing and distribution of electricity. This is not because the state lacks capable people, but rather because local political sensitivities make it hard to recover the costs of supplying power.
The state’s political constraints thus limit its organizational effectiveness.
Besides, the police and bureaucracy are often deliberately incapacitated and made to serve leaders’ short-term political goals.
Finally, China’s governance is, and has historically been, surprisingly devolved for an authoritarian nation. Its system combines political centralization, through the Chinese Communist Party, with economic and administrative decentralization.
India’s system is arguably the opposite, combining political decentralization, reflected in strong regional power groupings, with a centralized economic system in which local governments depend heavily on transfers from the central government.
For example, sub-provincial levels of government tend to account for about 60 percent of total government budget spending in China, compared with less than 10 percent in India. This difference helps to explain the far worse performance of Indian local government in the provision of public services and facilities.
In addition, China’s regions compete more strongly with each other in business development and in experiments with new ventures than their Indian counterparts. This is mainly because Chinese local officials’ promotion is tied to performance, although the pace of regional experimentation has slowed under Xi, as loyalty-based promotion has increased.
Yet, although one must avoid oversimplification when comparing Chinese and Indian governance, democracy — or its absence — does still make a difference.
The lack of downward accountability and electoral sanctions in China allows the nation’s leaders to avoid the pandering to the short-term interests that characterize Indian politics, particularly at election time. This, in turn, makes it easier for Chinese leaders to take bold long-term decisions relatively quickly, and also somewhat independently of the corporate and financial interests that commonly wield influence in democratic systems.
On the other hand, high-level mistakes or outright abuses of power in China take longer to detect and correct in the absence of political opposition and media scrutiny.
Chinese leaders’ anxiety about losing control results in too much rigidity and lockstep conformity.
Ultimately, therefore, the Chinese system is more brittle: when faced with a crisis, the state tends to overreact, suppress information and behave heavy-handedly, thereby sometimes aggravating the crisis.
The Indian system of governance, for all its messiness, is more resilient. Yet this resilience has been severely strained under the regime of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has sought to polarize voters along religious and social lines, encourage a strong leader, and weaken democratic institutions and processes.
Let us hope that the BJP will now spend the political capital from its landslide victory on changing course, improving democratic governance and respecting the immense diversity of India’s population.
Pranab Bardhan is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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