The Predator Democracies of South Asia

S. J. Masty:

If you apply game theory, and assume that the purpose of governance is the most efficient allocation of loot, then the South Asian model of a Predator Democracy is the most efficient. It uses the smallest and shortest-lived majority to capture and allocate the greatest quantity of spoils. It cannibalizes nations, but it is devastatingly efficient. And, looking at the political spoils systems advanced under Clinton, Bush and Blair, is anyone really certain that our political future doesn't resemble Bangladesh?

My South Asian friends have thousands of years of tradition behind them when most of them assume, with neither shame nor doubt, that it is the right of any maharajah, born or elected, to reward his supporters from the public purse. Conversely there is close to one thousand years of Anglo-Saxon traditions, reflected in common law and statute, attempting to keep governance free from favouritism.

These two very different roots grow much deeper than any form of government, and they are nourished by two very different cultural concepts of fairness, neither of which can be changed easily or swiftly. But that won't stop the West's shallow, undereducated ideologues, the punch-drunk Whigs and self-satisfied Wilsonians insisting that tyranny can be eradicated and that democracy and its prerequisite values can be installed with the ease and speed of a plug-and-play computer programme off a CD-ROM. Or at gun-point.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration is really good at coming up with bad ideas such as invading other countries to bring "democracy" and allowing illegal immigrants to flood into the United States.