'56 p.c. Indians favour apartheid'

By M.S. Prabhakara

PRETORIA, OCT. 25. South Africans of Indian origin come at the very bottom in respect of their commitment to democracy and their future in a democratically-transformed South Africa.

This is among the findings that emerges in a survey, `Views of Democracy in South Africa and the Region', conducted by the Southern African Democracy Barometer, described as `a regional component of the continent-wide Afrobarometer'.

The survey was carried out in association with the Public Opinion Service of Idasa, a Cape Town-based NGO which traces its origin and its acronymic name to the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa, founded in 1986. The findings were released last week.

The survey is informed by a belief and an ideology according to which there is a `growing international consensus since 1989' on what constitutes `democracy'; and the 'structured questionnaire' on which the survey is based is constructed on the premise that there are two kinds of this `democracy' - the `classic liberal democracy' whose most important components are `majority rule, regular elections, multi-party competition and freedom of speech and dissent', and `social democracy' where the emphasis is on `universal access to basic necessities, full employment, universal access to education and income equality'.

There is little doubt where the Democracy Barometer's predilections lie. The year 1989 is a dead give-away. The responses were canvassed from `a random, disproportionate, stratified-nationally representative sample of 2,200 South Africans... from 550 randomly-selected sites around the country'. The various indicators about which opinions were canvassed, and categorised in terms responses from six other countries in the region (Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe) and of the four major `group identities' in South Africa (Black, White, Coloured and Indian) are: support for and commitment to democracy; conceptions about what constitutes democracy and its components; non-democratic alternatives to the present system, including views on a (hopefully notional) return to apartheid; elections and governance, political freedoms and related issues. In respect of each of these, the response from the `Indian' respondents has been uniformly negative.

Thus, only about 35 per cent of the South African Indians supported and showed a commitment to democracy in 2000, a sharp decline from the 54 per cent who showed a similar commitment five years ago. As much as 28 per cent of Indian respondents were willing to live under an `effective authoritarian regime' compared to the 19 per cent that showed such willingness five years ago. As much as 20 per cent of the Indian respondents, only marginally lower than the 24 per cent of Whites, considered that the last elections were not free or fair, compared to only three per cent of Blacks and two per cent of Coloureds who held such views. While Black South Africans have consistently exhibited the greatest levels of satisfaction with the operation of democracy in the country, Whites and Indians have showed the least satisfaction. Indeed, the survey categorically notes that ``no Indian respondents interviewed felt that South Africa is governed in a wholly-democratic fashion''.

Perhaps the most startling of the findings is that there is a dramatic increase in `apartheid nostalgia' among all South Africans, and not merely Whites, between 1995 and 2000. Compared to 13 per cent of South African Indians who shared this `apartheid nostalgia' in 1995, five years later 56 per cent of South African Indians responded positively about the apartheid regime.

The corresponding percentages in respect of the other `groups' was: Blacks from 8 per cent to 17 per cent; Coloureds from 11 per cent to 41 per cent; and Whites from 39 per cent to 59 per cent.

This relative lack of commitment on the part of the Indians and to a lesser extent of the Coloureds to the democratic transformation, and apprehensions about the future and all that is implied by majority rule, can be traced to the deep entrenchment of the apartheid mindset across the racial spectrum, and the success of the apartheid regime in co-opting sections of the Indians and Coloureds in the so-called power sharing arrangements. The findings are undoubtedly a wake-up call for all those genuinely committed to democracy in South Africa.

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