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The reality is that India is fundamentally broken, in thrall to a legitimate but dysfunctional democracy that serves the interests of the agricultural peasant class, lower and backward castes, tribal people and resentful minorities over the middle and upper classes, who are a small minority.
I don’t believe truly universal suffrage is viable in a country where almost 50% of the population still work in agriculture. Until 1900 fewer than 20% of the total American population voted in presidential elections, in part because even many who could vote didn’t. In India it’s around 45-50% iirc, similar to Western countries. (Around 650-700 million votes cast in the last election).
The problem with India is that emigration acts as a pressure valve on the domestic middle and upper classes. They leave instead of overthrowing the system. To save India, they must overthrow democracy, re-assert the whip hand over the peasants, abolish the perverse system of reservation, abolish price floors in agriculture, consolidate small holding farms (brutalizing any peasant farmer resistance, which they have caved to every time so far) and embark on the kind of infrastructure development projects China did two generations ago.
But that seems like a lot of work when you can just go to America and be a doctor or engineer and have a nice comfortable life. India is probably the biggest example of the failure of democracy in human history.
Well just due to population size India is the largest example of lots of things.
Argentina is possibly a more cartoonish example of democracy failing. Maybe south africa too.
Argentina had as many problems as a dictatorship, I think the cause is the urban-rural setup, the first period of deglobalization after 1914, the constitutional structure in terms of regional/state authority and some cultural issues, plus some other things.
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South Africa worked quite well as democracy prior to 1994
The democratic victory of the national party in South Africa after the depression arguably led inexorably to its state failure decades later.
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Even under apartheid, SA was not a particularly well run state, with significant corruption issues and lack of full control over large portions of its territory.
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