Amit Varma points to a great article by Shekhar Gupta

In the article his guide and driver in Prague tells him “You Indians are very fortunate you always had democracy, even when you had socialism.”

How fortunate were we? Yes, it is true that except for the 2 years of emergency, we have never been under a dictatorship, let alone one of the totalitarian sort that the westerners are in so much horror of. Our misfortune has always come from the petty tyranny of the low level bureaucrat and the corrupt politician. Out bad rulers have been out to make money for themselves. The Germans and the Russians, on the other hand, have sufferred from the tyrannies administered by efficient and disciplined organizations. I think that this difference in experience explains some of the differences in attitude.

Indians see the awful mess their government is in, hope for a more efficient government. Westerners, with their fear of tyrannical governments, try to put in as many checks and balances as possible. Indians think that a more efficient government will be less corrupt. Quite true. But an efficient government that has too much power is more likely to become an efficient despotism. We don’t see this because it is our blind spot. On the other hand, the more checks and balances you put in, the more your governance will get bogged down in red tape. When your government is a small one, the red tape it is tied up in is a small price you pay too keep it from oppressing you. When you give it too many powers and tie it up in red tape, you get a government like the Indian one. But the Americans and especially the Europeans don’t realise that and that is their blind spot. As they have become more comfortable with their government, they’ve been giving it more and more powers and they are hoping that the checks and balances they put in will prevent it from sliding into a centralised tyranny which they fear, without realising that they are in fact sliding into bureaucratic tyranny, which they don’t see.

Here is a quick example which will explain my point better than the previous paragraph – National ID cards. The typical American will hate the idea. The hatred will puzzle the typical Indian, till he realises that for the American, an identity card is a symbol of something that he loathes. I mean, think rationally. How much damage will a national id card do if your other civil liberties are in place? And if they are withdrawn, how much protection will the lack of an ID afford you? The hatred is disproportionate to the actual damage that an ID card will do. It is what it stands for that is loathed.

The Indian will love the idea of a National ID. We will think that a single card (“increase in efficiency”) will deliver us from the harrassment that we suffer from having to prove your identity through a set of multiple documents like the ration card, passport, driver’s license, etc.

Another of our attitudinal quirks is that we think that the solution to petty tyranny is to complain to a higher authority. At the time of independence, we used to think that politicians would solve our problems. Then our faith shifted to bureacrats, then to the courts. It is surely a sign of desperation that lately our touching faith has shifted to the utterly powerless president and the almost equally powerless prime minister. The faith that someone from the top will clean up for us, the willingness to hand over power to them and the notion that if we don’t get the right people, we have to keep trying till we get them – all of them are made possible because we don’t know what tyranny really is.