NEW DELHI: Indira Gandhi's name has come to be so associated in the public mind with action and decisiveness that she is not given credit for her deep interest in ideas.

Yet what struck most people who met and moved with her were her breadth of vision and depth of knowledge, which, in the words of Dr Manmohan Singh, surpassed those of most political leaders of the 20th century. "She thought big and she thought far. Her concerns were of course Indian, but her perspective was invariably global."

As a tribute to her, the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust has been organizing every alternate year an Indira Gandhi Conference, which brings together outstanding scholars, statesmen and scientists from various countries - the kind of group she would have loved to meet to discuss some of the major challenges of our day.

The themes of some of these conferences bring out the flavour of the discussions - "The Making of an Earth Citizen," "Post-Colonial World: Interdependence and Identities" and "Architecture of an Inclusive Society."

The proceedings of each conference have been brought out in book form and the Indira Gandhi Conferences have come to be regarded as a source of ideas by policy-makers in various countries.

The Ninth Indira Gandhi Conference took place in Delhi over the weekend. For a change, it confined its attention to our own country and the theme was "India: The Next Decade." The first session was devoted to the challenges and prospects for our democracy.

Taking stock of the achievements as well as our "democratic deficit," it sought to answer questions like: What reforms are needed in the institutional architecture of representative democracy to ensure that political interests would be subjected to public rules?

The second session was devoted to the economy and how to ensure growth and check inequalities between states, social classes and urban and rural areas. It went in detail into the problems of globalisation, competitiveness and environmental costs, and also into what was needed to convert our economy into a knowledge economy.

The third session was appropriately devoted to "Changing Values," particularly the impact on youthful minds of technology on the one hand and of growing religious orthodoxy and sectarianism on the other: what needs to be done to ensure the flow of ideas, to foster and enlarge the domain of cultural pluralism and to stimulate innovation.

I wasn't able to sit through the conference the way I had audited the earlier eight conferences. But I had a chance to study some of the excellent background papers that had been prepared by the more conscientious participants.

I found two of them particularly brilliant and stimulating, Aspects of Democratic Accountability in India, by Prof. Pratap Bhanu Mehta of the Centre for Policy Research and Indian Democracy: An Audit, by Prof. Yogendra Yadav of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

I have to resist the temptation of quoting at length from Prof. Mehta's paper, for he has cautioned that it is only a draft and not for quotation. The argument he develops is that over the last 50 years, India has been able to sustain a lively, stable, multicultural and functioning democracy with regular elections, a free press, independent judiciary and a vibrant civil society; yet the institutions of ensuring democratic accountability have performed imperfectly. The judiciary, burdened with arrears, has under performed in spite of its activism in some fields like the environment and social justice.

Our parliamentary democracy is robust and contentious but elections are at best a blunt instrument. The real choice of voters is circumscribed by the games that party manipulators play in the formation of coalitions and the making and unmaking of governments.

The time spent by Parliament in debating the performance of the executive has been going down steadily. The entire party system has become ethnicized. Another interesting point discussed by Prof. Mehta is whether the panchayat institutions promote or inhibit greater accountability.

Prof. Yogendra Yadav in his historical overview of the functioning of democracy in independent India argues that at independence our elite invited the ordinary citizens to join them in playing the game called democracy and also held out the hope that this would remove poverty and shake off the old social and cultural burdens.

The invitees had accepted the opportunity with gusto. While the economic condition or caste divisions had not changed greatly, India had demonstrated that it was possible for a poor, unequal post-colonial society to emerge as a functioning democracy.

One reason why India had been able to sustain democracy while other nations had not been able to do so, was that India had had a wider catchment area for the recruitment of the political class than any other society.

The number of elected political representatives at one or the other level from the national to the village level was almost three million. If we made allowance for the fierce competitiveness that elections evoke in India, it means that anywhere between 10 to 20 million people are bitten by the democratic bug, in turn ensuring that the system will endure.

If India has kept at bay even the remote possibility of a military take-over and has been able to defend its borders in Nagaland, Manipur, Kashmir etc., the reason is that the democratic system nurtures the arts of accommodation.

There are conspicuous shortcomings. Women are still to be empowered. There is a near collapse of democratic procedures within political parties and manipulators and fixers have taken over.

Yet so many groups that had virtually no chance earlier of coming into power have been able to do so that the electoral system, for all its defects, is perceived as something of a social leveller.

It came as a surprise to me that in nearly 50 closely typed and tightly argued pages, there was no mention of Mahatma Gandhi. Perhaps political scientists leave such things to historians or mere journalists.

Prof. Yadav's reference to the elite inviting the people at large to taste the democratic menu might apply to the makers of our Constitution. But well before the adoption of the Constitution, there had been a tradition of mass action and mass democratic politics under Gandhi.

He could not be labelled as elite and he helped people to recognise the source of their power within themselves. If India has been able to nurture democracy despite the prevalence of poverty and social inequality, the reason is that India had Gandhi while other colonies did not.

As for gender equality, I am all for more women sitting in our legislatures and panchayats. But I doubt the validity of the argument that that would make these institutions more democratic. There is nothing to show that women are necessarily more democratic and less driven by dogma than men.-By arrangement with Asian Age/New Delhi.

(The writer was adviser to prime ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi).