Democracy and poverty alleviation?
Photo: Quddus Alam / Driknews
Most dailies, on 18 October headlined on the front page the report which correlated democracy as the means to ease poverty. The other part was on curtailing and eliminating graft to contain poverty. However, this reader could not correlate the relationship between democracy and poverty alleviation! The correlation seemed to be theoretically weak, and rather elusive! Do democracies alleviate or for that matter contain poverty to any extent? There are hardly any examples in the world that we can show today. The US has come on hard times; extending and increasing the impact of poverty in society. All because of the free for all, unending greed for wealth of the financial tycoons; speculating on junk shares and property debentures! In contrast, the former USSR, China and Cuba, known as authoritative regimes, without any democracy have been real examples in alleviating mass poverty of their citizens! In these countries, poverty has been really contained and marginalized. This is no small achievement of these countries! One wonders, how democracy can be the "prime weapon" to rid our nation of poverty. Rather, fighting graft, particularly under the government's capital expenditure programme, which is sometimes illogical, can have a significant impact in helping to divert more funds, that can be used under welfare programmes that directly help to reduce poverty. Take the case of our capital investment in military hardware, particularly in procuring heavy arms, naval vessels and fighter aircraft. Do we really need the hardware for war, given our commitment to peace? One wonders! Mino Masani, the late Indian economist of the mid twentieth century, described India's poor people as "poverty in the land of plenty". That was true as India then a British colony had its national earnings siphoned off to the UK to finance their war in Europe, with nothing left to feed the hungry Indians! I believe that fighting graft and curtailing unwise state capital expenditure on war materials is the only logical way to contain poverty, irrespective of the type of government-- democratic, autocratic or otherwise! As a matter of record, democratic free capitalism based governments are most graft-prone, if we only look around the world today!
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