by Amartya Sen
A third way in which government policy was counter-productive was its role in the redistribution of food within Bengal. The government bought food at high prices from rural Bengal to run a selective rationing system at controlled prices, specifically for the resident popu-
* These issues are discussed in my Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), Chapter 6.
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t h e p r a c t i c e o f d e m o c r a c y lation of Calcutta. This was a part of the war effort intended to lessen urban discontent. The most serious consequence of this policy was that the rural population, with their low and stationary income, faced rapidly exploding food prices: the strong outward movement of food from rural Bengal because of the war-fed boom was powerfully reinforced by the government policy of buying dear from rural areas (at ‘whatever price’) and selling it cheap in Calcutta for a selected population. None of these issues came into parliamentary discussion in any substantive way during the period of news and editorial blackout.
The Bengali newspapers in Calcutta protested as loudly as government censorship permitted – it could not be very loud, allegedly, for reasons of the war and ‘fighting morale’. Certainly there was little echo of these native criticisms in London. Responsible public discussion on what to do began in the circles that mattered, in London, only in October 1943, after Ian Stephens, the courageous editor of The Statesman of Calcutta (then British owned), decided to break ranks by departing from the voluntary policy of ‘silence’ and publishing graphic accounts and stinging editorials on 14 and 16 October.* The rebuke to the Secretary of State for India, quoted earlier, was from the second of those two editorials. This was immediately followed by a stir in the governing circles in British India and it also led to serious parliamentary discussions in Westminster in London. This, in turn, quickly resulted in the beginning – at long last – of public relief arrangements in Bengal in November (there had been only private charity earlier on). The famine ended in December, partly because of a new crop, but also, very significantly, because of the relief that was finally available.
However, by this time the famine had already killed hundreds of thousands of people.
* Ian Stephens’s dilemma on the subject, and his ultimate decision to give priority to his role as a journalist, is beautifully discussed in his book Monsoon Morning (London: Ernest Benn, 1966). When, later on, I came to know him in the 1970s, it became clear to me very soon how strongly the memory of that difficult decision lived on in his mind. He was, however, rightly proud of the fact that, through his editorial policy, he had saved the lives of a great many people and had managed to stem the tide of the
‘death roll’.
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It was mentioned in the last chapter that no major famine has ever occurred in a functioning democracy with regular elections, opposition parties, basic freedom of speech and a relatively free media (even when the country is very poor and in a seriously adverse food situation). This understanding has now become fairly widely accepted, even though there was much scepticism about the thesis initially.*
This is a simple but rather important illustration of the most elementary aspect of the protective power of political liberty. Though Indian democracy has many imperfections, nevertheless the political incentives generated by it have been adequate to eliminate major famines right from the time of independence. The last substantial famine in India – the Bengal famine – occurred only four years before the Empire ended. The prevalence of famines, which had been a persistent feature of the long history of the British Indian Empire, ended abruptly with the establishment of a democracy after independence.
Despite China’s greater success than India’s in many economic fields, China – unlike independent India – did have a huge famine, indeed the largest famine in recorded history, in 1958–61, with a mortality count estimated at close to 30 million. Though the famine raged for three years, the government was not pressed to change its disastrous policies: there was, in China, no parliament open for critical dissent, no opposition party and no free press. The history of famines has, in fact, had a peculiarly close connection with authoritarian rules, for example with colonialism (as in British India or Ireland), one-party states (as in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, or in China or Cambodia later on), and military dictatorships (as in Ethiopia or Somalia). The contemporary famine situation in North Korea is a continuing example.2
* After my initial presentation of this thesis in ‘How Is India Doing?’ New York Review of Books, 29 (1982), and ‘Development: Which Way Now?’ Economic Journal, 93
(1983), there was a good deal of reprimand from a number of critics (including food experts), and there were strongly worded altercations both in the New York Review of Books and in the Economic and Political Weekly, following my articles.
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t h e p r a c t i c e o f d e m o c r a c y The direct penalties of a famine are borne only by the suffering public and not by the ruling government. The rulers never starve.
However, when a government is accountable to the public, and when there is free news-reporting and uncensored public criticism, then the government too has an excellent incentive to do its best to eradicate famines.*
Aside from this immediate connection with the political incentive to prevent famines that is embedded in government by discussion, there are two other specific issues here which may be worth noting.
First, the proportion of the population affected, or even threatened, by a famine tends to be very small – typically much less than 10 per cent (often much less than that) and hardly ever more than that ratio.
So if it were true that only disaffected famine victims vote against a ruling government when a famine rages or threatens, then the government could still be quite secure. What makes a famine such a political disaster for a ruling government is the reach of public reasoning, which moves and energizes a very large proportion of the general public to protest and shout about the ‘uncaring’ government and to try to bring it down. Public discussion of the nature of the calamity can make the fate of the victims a powerful political issue with far-reaching effects on the climate of media coverage and public discussion, and
* It is worth mentioning here that doubts about the reach of this proposition have sometimes been raised by referring to the fact that there have been famines, or at least conditions approximating a famine, in a few countries that have started having some kind of democratic elections, without the other features that make a democracy accountable. Niger, which had both elections and famines, was given as an alleged counter-example in 2005 by a number of observers. The point to recognize here is, as the New York Times noted in an editorial, that the incentive-based connection with famine prevention applies specifically to a functioning democracy. Niger did not qualify, since democracy functions not only with the help of elections (which Niger had recently instituted), but also on the basis of other democratic institutions that produce accountability. The Times put the basic issue with much clarity: ‘Amartya Sen has taught, rightly, that ‘‘no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy’’. Functioning is the key word; leaders who are truly accountable to their people have strong incentives to take timely preventative action. Mr Tandeja [the head of the Nigerian government], whom President Bush hailed at the White House this June as an exemplary democrat, clearly needs a refresher course in humane economics and accountable democracy’ (‘Meanwhile, People Starve’, New York Times, 14 August 2005).
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e ultimately on the voting of others – a potential majority.* Not least of the achievements of democracy is its ability to make people take an interest, through public discussion, in each other’s predicaments, and to have a better understanding of the lives of others.
The second point concerns t
he informational role of democracy which goes beyond its incentive function; for example, in the Chinese famine of 1958–61, the failure of the so-called ‘Great Leap Forward’, involving a drastic expansion of collectivization, was kept a closely guarded secret. There was little public knowledge of the nature, size and reach of the famine within China, or outside it.
Indeed, the lack of a free system of news distribution ultimately misled the government itself, fed by its own propaganda and by rosy reports of local party officials competing for credit in Beijing. The vast number of communes or cooperatives who had failed to produce enough grain were, of course, aware of their own problem. But thanks to the news black-out they did not know anything much about the widespread failure across rural China. No collective farm wanted to acknowledge that it alone had failed, and the government in Beijing was fed rosy reports of great success even from the badly failing collectives. By adding up these numbers, the Chinese authorities mistakenly believed that they had 100 million more metric tons of grain than they actually did, just when the famine was moving towards its peak.3
Despite the fact that the Chinese government was quite committed to eliminating hunger in the country, it did not substantially revise its disastrous policies (associated with the ill-advised ‘Great Leap Forward’) during the three famine years. The non-revision was possible not only because of the lack of a political opposition and the absence of an independent media, but also because the Chinese
* All this has obvious connection with the arguments presented in earlier chapters, in particular in Chapters 8, ‘Rationality and Other People’, and 15, ‘Democracy as Public Reason’. The different types of impartial reasons discussed in Chapter 9, ‘Plurality of Impartial Reasons’, also have relevance to the political engagement that the predicament of famine victims may arouse, involving not only reflections on cooperation and mutual benefit, but also the responsibility of ‘effective power’ that the clearly fortunate in a famine-threatened country may specifically acknowledge towards the more vulnerable, thanks to public reasoning.
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t h e p r a c t i c e o f d e m o c r a c y government itself did not see the need to change its policies, partly because it did not have enough information on the extent to which the ‘Great Leap Forward’ had failed.
It is interesting to note that even Chairman Mao himself, whose radical beliefs had much to do with the initiation of, and unrelenting persistence with, the ‘Great Leap Forward’, identified one particular role of democracy, once the failure had been belatedly acknowledged.
In 1962, just after the famine had killed tens of millions, Mao made the following observation to a gathering of 7,000 cadres of the Communist Party:
Without democracy, you have no understanding of what is happening down below; the general situation will be unclear; you will be unable to collect sufficient opinions from all sides; there can be no communication between top and bottom; top-level organs of leadership will depend on one-sided and incorrect material to decide issues, thus you will find it difficult to avoid being subjectivist; it will be impossible to achieve unity of understanding and unity of action, and impossible to achieve true centralism.4
Mao’s defence of democracy here is, of course, quite limited. The focus is exclusively on the informational side, ignoring its incentive role as well as the intrinsic and constitutive importance of political freedom.* But nevertheless it is extremely interesting that Mao himself acknowledged the extent to which disastrous official policies were caused by the lack of the informational links that more active public reasoning could have provided in averting disasters of the kind that China experienced.
d e m o c r a c y a n d d e v e l o p m e n t Most champions of democracy have been rather reticent in suggesting that democracy would itself promote development and enhancement of social welfare – they have tended to see them as good but distinctly
* On this, see also Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 149–50, who provides a remarkably illuminating analysis and assessment of this odd turn in Mao’s political thought.
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e separate and largely independent goals. The detractors of democracy, on the other hand, seemed to have been quite willing to express their diagnosis of what they see as serious tensions between democracy and development. The theorists of the practical split – ‘Make up your mind: do you want democracy, or instead, do you want development?’
– often came, at least to start with, from East Asian countries, and their voice grew in influence as several of these countries were immensely successful – through the 1970s and 1980s and even later
– in promoting economic growth without pursuing democracy. The observation of a handful of such examples led rapidly to something of a general theory: democracies do quite badly in facilitating development, compared with what authoritarian regimes can achieve.
Didn’t South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong achieve astonishingly fast economic progress without fulfilling, at least in the early days, the basic requirements of democratic governance? And after the economic reforms in China in 1979, didn’t authoritarian China fare a lot better in terms of economic growth than democratic India?
To deal with these issues, we have to pay particular attention to both the content of what can be called development and to the interpretation of democracy (in particular to the respective roles of voting and of public reasoning). The assessment of development cannot be divorced from the lives that people can lead and the real freedom that they enjoy. Development can scarcely be seen merely in terms of enhancement of inanimate objects of convenience, such as a rise in the GNP (or in personal incomes), or industrialization – important as they may be as means to the real ends. Their value must depend on what they do to the lives and freedom of the people involved, which must be central to the idea of development.*
If development is understood in a broader way, with a focus on human lives, then it becomes immediately clear that the relation between development and democracy has to be seen partly in terms of their constitutive connection, rather than only through their external links. Even though the question has often been asked whether political freedom is ‘conducive to development’, we must not miss the crucial
* This issue received attention in Chapter 11, ‘Lives, Freedoms and Capabilities’.
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t h e p r a c t i c e o f d e m o c r a c y recognition that political liberties and democratic rights are among the ‘constituent components’ of development. Their relevance for development does not have to be established indirectly through their contribution to the growth of GNP.
However, after acknowledging this central connection, we also have to subject democracy to consequential analysis, since there are other kinds of freedoms as well (other than political liberties and civil rights), to which attention must be paid. We must be concerned, for example, with economic poverty. We do, therefore, have reason to be interested in economic growth, even in the rather limited terms of growth of GNP or GDP per head, since raising real income can clear the way to some really important achievements; for example, the general connection between economic growth and poverty removal is by now reasonably well established, supplemented by distributional concerns. Aside from generating income for many people, a process of economic growth also tends to expand the size of public revenue, which can be used for social purposes, such as schooling, medical services and healthcare, and other facilities that directly enhance the lives and capabilities of people. Indeed, sometimes the expansion of public revenue as a result of fast economic growth is much faster than the economic growth itself (for example, in recent years, as the Indian economy has grown at 7, 8 or 9 per cent per annum, the rate of increase of public revenue has been around 9, 10 or 11 per cent).
Public revenue creates an opportunity that the government can seize to make the process of economic expansion more equitably shared.
This is, of course, o
nly a potential condition, since the actual use of the expanding public revenue is another matter of great importance, but economic growth creates the condition when that choice is responsibly exercised by the government.*
The much-articulated scepticism about the compatibility of democracy and rapid economic growth was based on some selected cross-country comparisons, focusing particularly on the rapidly growing economies of East Asia, on one side, and India, on the other, with its
* On important contrasts between different types of uses – and waste – of resources generated by economic growth, see my joint book with Jean Drèze, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e long history of modest GNP growth of 3 per cent per annum.
However, fuller cross-country comparisons, for what they are worth (and they cannot be worth less than the prevailing practice of basing a big conclusion on a handful of selected inter-country contrasts), have not provided any empirical support for the belief that democracy is inimical to economic growth.5 And while India used to be cited as living proof that democratic countries are destined to grow much more slowly than authoritarian ones, now that the economic growth of India has accelerated remarkably (this began in the 1980s but was firmly consolidated through the economic reforms of the 1990s and has continued since then at a rapid rate), it becomes hard to use India as the quintessential example of the slowness of economic progress under democratic governance. And yet India is no less democratic today than it was in the 1960s or 1970s.* Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming that growth is helped by the supportiveness of a friendly economic climate rather than by the fierceness of a ruthless political system.†
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Furthermore, we have to go beyond economic growth to understand the fuller demands of development and of the pursuit of social welfare.