TWO days before his Indian counterpart was to face a vote of confidence brought about by his zeal to embrace a political-economic relationship with the United States regardless of an inevitable resistance this would trigger among ordinary Indians, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani was offloading his own woes on national TV. And the scenario didn’t look too different from the one prevailing in Delhi.

As food shortages and fuel prices continued to play havoc, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (like Mr Gilani on Saturday) pointed accusingly at hoarders and middlemen and, somewhat grudgingly, alsoblamed certain global factors for the situation. For energy, therefore, India had to embrace a strategic relationship with Washington, Mr Singh has pleaded. The civil nuclear deal with the United States would light up India’s villages, his party boss Sonia Gandhi adlibbed. Confident projections in full-page ads claimed the nuclear deal would usher in unprecedented prosperity, and by implication, there would be no more starvation deaths in the country.

Mr Singh’s interest in energy generation as a plank of his foreign policy, as much as it was an economic issue, is as old as 1992 when he backed the $2.5 billion the US firm Enron to set up a gas-fired power project in Dhabol in Maharashtra. That was to become the first largest foreign direct investment in India. The BJP, another party that has contributed generously to India’s embrace of the United States, provided a sovereign undertaking to the project. And the way it did that is a reflection of how governments without mandate have imposed incalculable economic burdens on their people. The BJP first came to power as a minority government in 1996 when it ruled for all of 13 days. But during that brief tenure, when it did not even have the legitimacy of the trust of the Lok Sabha, it decided to write a sovereign guarantee for Enron, the project that Mr Manmohan Singh had promoted.

The situation in Pakistan mirrored the gathering crisis in India. The fact that Mr Gilani has promised $14 billion for international power projects to battle severe energy shortages, amid advice for greater exploitation of the nation’s coalfields, might seem like a different route to the one taken by Mr Singh to produce life-saving energy. But, going by the summary of Mr Gilani’s address, and whatever could be gleaned from years of Mr Singh’s embrace of President George W. Bush, it is clear that both prescriptions were hammered out in Washington.

This is of a piece with what Mr Salman Shah, the economic adviser to the Shaukat Aziz government, effectively an adjunct of President Musharraf’s ongoing power play, had prescribed less than a year ago.

Any new government in Pakistan following fresh elections, he told me last year, must continue Gen Musharraf’s economic policies if the 7 per cent plus growth was to be maintained. I had foolishly asked him what if the free-market policies of the Musharraf-Aziz duo were overturned by the PPP, given its history of populism. Mr Shah’s warning was menacing. “Whoever comes into power would have to follow (our) policies...Any mismanagement of the economy will not be tolerated -- for the simple reason that the benchmarks that have been established in Pakistan in terms of fiscal management, in terms of monetary policy, in terms of exchange rate policies would brook no lowering of the bar.” Any mismanagement of the economy will not be tolerated by who, I forgot to ask.

When Mr Gilani complained that a vestige of the old dictatorship, a reference to President Musharraf’s continued presence as head of state, was hindering good governance he might have answered the question: Were the neo-con economic policies he inherited from Mr Salman Shah, a policy that had the full support of the Musharraf regime, a good or a bad legacy of the dictatorship he otherwise loathes. The fact is that, as far as developing countries are concerned, you cannot criticise a dictatorship and embrace its economic policy. For economic policies are so often the very soul of dictatorships.

That is why it seemed such a miracle that India was defying the cardinal rule. It had a functioning democracy and yet practised neo-con economic policies since 1991, the year Mr Singh assumed charge as finance minister. But all that may be changing. India may not need a dictatorship to pursue its economic agenda. That’s because it is doing pretty fine by making democracy just a bit irrelevant. Mr Singh is the author of this new reality that keeps the pretence of elections intact but crushes the mandate thus arrived at by a range of innovative techniques. The arrangement is insidious but no longer as subtle as it once looked. Indian bookies are busy not watching cricket scores, but the outcome of brisk horse-trading that is said to be under way to keep Mr Singh’s government from falling on Tuesday. We’ll come to it in a moment. But first look at the “approved” democracies in the region. Start with Afghanistan. The president there is also known as the mayor of Kabul who hardly ever steps out of the capital. And yet President Karzai is an elected leader. (What are approved democracies? We can answer that by looking at the disapproved democracies — for example, the Hamas in Occupied Palestine). In Pakistan the blood-drenched elections threw up a peculiar arrangement. It would have been unthinkable for a progressive prime minister to cohabit with some of the parties that Mr Gilani was forced to woo yet again in his weekend address. But there you are. It’s an assignment handed by his new found foreign cheerleaders. He has to swim, moreover, against the lashing currents with hands tied behind the back, so to speak, with one end of the rope tethered to the presidential chair, his bugbear.

The farce of the civilian government in Bangladesh is commonly not seen by its indulgent neighbours or by its ideological kin like India.

We are more than willing to ignore the bayonet that shores up the foreign-backed administration there. So what is there about neo-con economic policies that have struck such deep roots from Afghanistan to Bangladesh, via Pakistan and India? The first rule is that the governments in these countries must disabuse themselves of any notion of popular democracy or restructure the economic agenda. So how is India going about doing this?

There was an earlier aborted attempt to suspend democracy in India when Indira Gandhi imposed her emergency rule. But that episode has to be seen separately, more in the context of the Cold War than as fallout of a thoughtout policy. The pro-Soviet communists supported the emergency and everyone else, including China-loving communists and the pro-West parties, opposed it. Both the configurations and the context have changed. Mr Singh has displayed a single-minded resolve to win the nuclear deal, and the consequent trust vote, by hook or by crook. Such a course involves subverting the parliamentary spirit, or at the very least reducing the whole process to a farce. Getting convicted MPs out on bail in order to bail him out or changing the name of the Lucknow airport to win the support of a party, or offering plum posts to MPs whose vote can see the government through is not exactly the Indian democracy that Nehru or Gandhi had dreamt of.

Let me here change the flavour a little bit. It is not as though neo-con economics is bad for developing countries but otherwise works well in advanced countries with deeper democratic traditions. One story about the fuel crisis in the United States revealed a very normal “Third World-like” response from the ordinary people. Some US motorists sick of getting clobbered at the pump seemed willing to do just about anything for free fuel, from giving up the right to name their children to stealing from day-care centres to donating blood.

In Orlando, Florida, David Partin pledged to name his son after local radio hosts to win a $100 gas card as part of a contest. In Mesquite, Texas, thieves drained $100 worth of gasoline from buses used by the Higher Ground Church day-care centre and have hit four or five other church centre fleets in the area. The American Red Cross, meanwhile, is running a summer raffle where blood donors are eligible to win a year’s supply of fuel.

If this is not an outcome of our economic and political misjudgement than all we to do is to look at the way election results are manipulated in the United States. And elections are rigged not so much to exercise political control but to serve corporate interests more. It’s not so different, in the final analysis, from what goes on in our patch in the name of democracy.

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