India got its democracy from the United Kingdom and the Congress Party. The British built and operated most of the crucial institutions of liberal democracy in India: courts, legislatures, administrative rules and a (quasi-) free press. It just didn't allow Indians to exercise much power within them. Once independent, in 1947, Indians inherited these institutions and traditions and built their democracy on them, led by the Indian National Congress, which had dominated the struggle for independence.
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Nehru's India - he was prime minister from 1947 to 1964 - can best be described as a one-party democracy. Elections were free and fair, but as the party that liberated India and the only truly national party, the Congress Party dominated at every level, often winning two-thirds majorities in parliament and state legistlatures.
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India was a democracy, but one in which one political party was more equal than others. It was also, however, quite liberal. The Congress Party was committed to building genuine traditions of constitutional governance. Nehru in particular was deeply respectful of liberal institutions and traditions, such as the prerogatives of parliament and the press. He supported an independent judiciary, even when this meant accepting political defeats in courts. He was obssessive about secularism and religious tolerance.
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When I was growing up in India in the late 1960's and 1970s, this tradition was still strong but fraying. The Congress Party had morphed from a vibrant grass roots organization into a fawning, imperial court, appointed by and adoring of its popular leader, Indira Gandhi. Mrs. Gahndi pursued populist policies that were often unconstitutional and certainly illiberal, such as nationalizing banks and abolishing the rights of India's princes. Still, the courts were largely independent, the press free, and religious tolerance sacred. But over time, the Congress Party's committment to these institutions and values weakened. More importantly, the party declined as the dominant national institution. New challengers rose to fill the space, the most prominent being the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP, however, is only one among a host of energetic new parties that draw their appeal from regional, religious or caste differences. As a result, new voters - almost all from poor, rural, and lower-caste backgrounds - have entered the political system. In the 1950's about 45 percent of the population voted; today that number is over 60 percent. Yogendra Yadav, an Indian political scientist studying this trend, argues that India is going through a "fundamental though quiet transformation" that is opening up politics to a much broader group of people who were previously marginalized. these parties have made India more democratic, but they have also made it less liberal.

The BJP came to power by denouncing Nehruvian secularism, advocating a quasi-militant Hindu nationalism, and encouraging anti-Muslim and anti-Christian rhetoric and action. It organized a massive national campaign to destroy a mosque in northern India (in the city of Ayodhya) that had been built, some Hindus believed, on the site of the birthplace of Rama. That Rama is a mythological figure, that Hinduism advocates non-violence and tolerance, and that india has had terrible experiences with religious violence (and did in the wake of the Ayodhya affair) mattered little to the BJP. The rhetoric of hatred appealed to its core voters. Recently the BJP formed a governing coalition, and inevitably had to tone down its anti-Muslim, anti-Christian, and anti-lower caste rhetoric, lest it alienate the other members of its coalition. But it has still pursued a policy of "Hinduizing" India, which has meant rewriting history texts to downplay or remove refernences to Muslims and other minorities, establishing departments of astrology at major universities, and encouraging the use of Hindu religious symbols in public settings. And whenever it found itself in political trouble, it has stoked the fires of religious conflict, as it did in Gujarat in 2002. In Gujarat the local BJP government - in an unprecedented manner - allowed and even assisted in the massacre of thousands of innocent Muslim men, women and children and the ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands from their neighborhoods and towns. It was in some ways India's first state-assisted pogrom. Most troubling, all evidence suggests that it has helped the BJP with its Hindu base. In fact the leader of the BJP in Gujarat hoped to cash in on the violence and scheduled elections a few months afterward. But the non-partisan administrative body that runs elections in India - the election commission courageously concluded that elections could not be held in such circumstances.

Zakaria goes on to document India's increasing political corruption and loss of an independent judiciary, arguing that greater democratization and diminishing emphasis on secularism and the intermediary, elite institutions that serve the public interest while resisting short-sighted populist whim have given rise to many of these negative changes.

This is the reality of democracy in India. And yet no one in the West wishes to look at it too closely. We prefer to speak romantically about the beauty of Indians voting and the joys of the world's largest democracy. Thoughtful Indians do not quite see it this way.

Conventional wisdom assumes that more Democracy is always better, that greater participation by a greater portion of a population represents a more perfect egalitarian ideal. This sentiment, evident in motor-voter drives to public service announcements to MTV's Rock the Vote, is true to an historically powerful extent; but when less-educated, short-term populist ideals come to dominate relatively complex issues and political processes, exemplified by the outsized influence of narrow and more extreme interest groups, negative consequences can and do ensue. As Jonah Goldberg has noted in several columns, mature democracy doesn't thrive on "Beavis and Butt-head Voters." A value placed on moderate elitism - a trust in culture, education and institutional intermediaries - is a cornerstone of Zakaria's argument, with the problems of Indian democracy serving as a good external example of liberal decline in the face of purely democratic ascendance.

And to some degree, these lessons apply to the health of any democracy, including the United States. While many of us are sick of hyperbolic leftists (and Andrew Sullivan) raging about an ostensible "American theocracy" with similarities to "the Taliban," some of the political benefits of secularism and resistance to populist causes apply to our society as well. Continuing the specific example, individuals feel very strongly about religion, and the state's potential endorsement of one (or several) belief structures over any others necessarily creates tensions as others gain prominence, despite traditional impulses to honor a specific heritage or reinforce society's cohesion through dominant religions. And philosophically dependent on a state that remains neutral in matters of faith are the benefits of a state that assertively protects the rights of private citizens to exercise and express individual religious beliefs. Does my mention of a muted domestic parallel mean that I fear a display of the Ten Commandments in a courthouse will lead to a violent, state-assisted pogrom against unbelievers in Alabama? Of course not.

But to a lesser degree, I think that many earnest right-wing voices underplay the net of having a government seen as a neutral protector of faith, rather than an entity that plays favorites based on cultural tradition or a perceived historical ideal. This opinion doesn't spring from an insidious desire for some hyperrationalist ideal to defeat Judeo-Christian spirituality in a culture war, and I recognize the contribution of these religious influences in the grand formation of a pluralistic West; it's merely a belief that our government will adapt and thrive if it plays the part of a steady, neutral arbitor in the face of demographic changes, and that religion flourishes apart from the state, rather than from within it. That said, I actually regard the current debate over the boundaries between church and state as a relatively healthy reflection of our Democracy, especially because our judicial institutions maintain overall power and legitimacy, despite rendering opinions necessarily unpopular with one side or the other.

And to an extent, the Indian example of populist intolerance also applies to the recent domestic backlash against Islam. As I've written about over and over and over again, annoyingly and at length, I do not think that looking for a simple scriptural cause to the threat posed by Islamists is the right path to defining and tackling the threat from Islamofascism. After reading Zakaria's book (with its example divisive popular political movements based on a bizarrely violent interpretation of Hinduism) and umpteen pieces by Bernard Lewis, I believe now more than ever that my initial judgment is correct:

there is a continuum on which ideology - in this case, religious ideology - is scored in its power to influence systemically bad or good behavior among humans. The weighted score for this factor is one among several factors that determine a specific culture's character and behavior. We'll label it "cultural modeling." Of course the influence of a religion like Islam is not immaterial, and certain ideologies may be statistically more prone to abusive reading by extremists, for example, but it's also far, far from deterministic. And a religion's ostensibly fundamental definitions can adapt character and quickly reorder internal priorities in the face of a whole host of other, more powerful factors, succumbing to things like the consistently growing authority of humanistic impulses and man's chosen interpretation in open societies.
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while I consider Robert Spencer's treatises on Islam far more coherent and rational than any of the mad rantings scrawled in mud daub and poo on the rusted tin walls of LeGrand's backwoods hate shack, I also believe that he falls into a similar trap: assigning outsized, deterministic weight to the value of a Christian theologian's reading of "Islam," when attempting to define the roots of the Muslim world's recognized problem with violence and terrorism. As a specific example, the unerring tendency to cite elements of Koranic text as immutable proof of the religion's malicious character becomes tiresome, when most religious texts are remarkable studies in contradiction, contain some fairly nasty elements and have been situationally interpreted to dramatically different effect within the twin filters of culture and era.

But while that determination has been reinforced, Zakaria's case calls into question other assumptions in my same piece (note bolded text):

And while an individual like Spencer might make an analogous argument about folks like Dean, dorkafork, Flea and I - that we simplistically place undue weight on the value of political freedom to moderate the problems within the Muslim world, to the detriment of recognizing a fundamentally negative character of Islam - I'd strongly disagree. Because I believe that the historical record ably demonstrates that universal humanistic trends in open societies have been far more consistent in effect than subjective interpretations of religious doctrines. I'm not by any means devaluing all of his arguments - I just think that he's exagerrating the weights that he applies to them, a prisoner of the self-reinforcing frame of reference established and exemplified by the name of his site. ["Jihad Watch"]

While the overall democratic trend of the 20th Century has been very positive in terms of a decrease in initiated warfare and an increase in religious and ethnic tolerance, at least part of my sweeping assertion was incorrect, or at least dismissive of a significant alternate reality: open, democratic societies with a poorly educated, bloody-minded populace intent on asserting religion, regional dominance or other populist ends can indeed produce fairly negative results. Missing in those broken democratic equations are additional key components that underlie the liberal democracy that we all cherish so much: institutions insulated from the short-term interest of the democratic process, a strong business class that asserts interests conducive to accountable government and peace, economic opportunity that serves as a sponge for ideological energies, strong education and an aggressively maintained civic virtue that prioritizes pluralism and the rule of law. This special mix of institutions and virtues - what Zakaria labels the "mystical clockwork of Democracy" - is much trickier to implement in societies alien to the tradition than the simplicity of basic democracy (voting). But as varying examples of sustainable democracies from Asia to Europe to South America demonstrate, the task is not impossible.

And it must be undertaken, with vigor.

More on the "How" and "How to Maintain" later.

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