Opinion - Interviews

“Democracy is a vital disciplining instrument”

— Photo: Vipin Chandran

David M. Malone… “corruption isn’t confined to Canada or India; we find it everywhere.”

David M. Malone is a Canadian scholar, diplomat, author, and was, till recently, Canada’s High Commissioner in India. He has taken over as the president of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) after being the High Commissioner for two years. Before leaving India, he talked to Harish Khare.

Well, as a Canadian I would say, “absolutely not.” Because what kept corruption under control in Canada — we had a great deal of corruption in the late 19th Century when the country was being built — what kept the situation broadly under control was the discipline of elections and the knowledge by political parties that certain decencies could not be dispensed with. Now importantly corruption is a universal phenomenon. It isn’t confined to Canada or India; we find it everywhere. So corruption is a universal phenomenon and well, democracy is not the only cure; alert courts; a police system that has integrity; vibrant media, which India has — all of these things are required but democracy is very important to development with market orientation. In a system of total government control it may be that democracy can be dispensed with and very high rates of growth achieved. But in a system that is a centrally market oriented, democracy is a vital disciplining instrument.

Well, in Canada, first of all there is no tradition of coalition governments. When a government is in minority, as ours is currently, it needs to rely on support or at least abstentions by one or more of the opposition parties to get legislation through. Interestingly, some of the best periods of governance in Canada have been under minority governments. Because a government that is willing to display its strong leadership can dare the opposition to bring it down and can govern for a long time in that situation precisely by impressing the public with what it is doing and intimidating the opposition with what it is doing. So minority status need not be paralysing.

The Indian Constitution, which draws to some small extent on the Canadian Constitutional arrangements, as on many others, is a much more centralised, or centralising constitution than the Canadian one. The government in New Delhi has considerably greater powers, including emergency powers to suspend State governments.

That having been said, certain features of the division of powers in India and Canada are immediately recognisable — the role of the judiciary is very similar in the two countries and the other stake-holders and power-brokers in the political game are rather similar — very dynamic media in both countries, dynamic civil society and, of course, a politics that is driven by a number of constituencies within society which can include ethnic minorities.

In Canada, much more than in India, virtually everybody now comes from a minority of some sort, because a clear majority in Canada has largely disappeared since about 1960. Now coming to the question of minorities, India has been a multi-cultural multi-ethnic multi-religious country for much longer than Canada. For us Canadians it is important to remember how young we are and how young our experience is. We have been only truly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic since the 1960s, that’s when we started receiving large waves of immigrants, often refugees, from the developing world, creating a new face of Canada, which is really a mosaic today... So, in a sense, Canada has changed very quickly since about 1960. So far so good but Canadians shouldn’t be complacent. Inter-community relations can become tense in a hurry depending on the issue. Climate of accommodation — which is the overwhelming climate in Canada — can be threatened easily.

A great stabilising force in Canada, beyond governments of all parties that have sought to accommodate the minorities, has been our courts. Take the Sikh community in Canada. Several court rulings are very important on the right for the Sikhs — wearing turban with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the rights for the Sikhs to carry kirpans. These decisions came from courts and because they came from courts, they are universally respected.

Well, I think, in Canada it was really the political leadership that had decided on opening out the country to Canadians from all parts of the world. And those were decisions, taken across parties, basically in the late 50s when the Conservative party was in power and the 60s when most of the years the Liberals were in power. So these were very broad-based decisions that the era of the essentially White Canada, with aboriginal minorities, was over and that Canada needed to reflect the rest of the world. Of course we already had the Chinese communities, South Asian communities but they did not participate fully in all aspects of Canadian life including politics and in the public service. For example, we had very few public servants from ethnic-minorities. All of that changed on the basis of the decisions taken across by the political parties in the late 50s and early 60s. And neither Canada nor India has done particularly well in relation to what we call aboriginal people and India calls tribal people. And it is only recently in Canada we started to come to terms with the full extent of the injustices perpetuated against our aboriginal communities.

Well I think the interplay between courts and parliaments in Canada, between courts and other components of societies is complex as it is in India. In all countries there are some decisions politicians prefer the courts to take. Because these are the decisions that can cost votes and if the courts can do the right thing without losing any votes then often these decisions are tacitly accepted. But there is also wariness in Canada of excessive court activism and our courts are very sensitive to that.

As a student of different legal systems, I can only observe that every country finds its own balance. But in every constitutional system there has to be architecture of checks and balances — because abuse of power needs to be checked. In India happily the most important thing that has happened constitutionally, it seems to me, was the comprehensive failure of the Emergency. And today a second Emergency is inconceivable in India. So the constitutional system in India rather gently defeated the greatest threat to constitutional order in India.

Living in India you realise that the country has extraordinary resources, above all human capital. If I am optimistic about the future of India it is because of the quality of human capital which strives constantly for better lives for next generation and it is achieving them.

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