Although the spectacular Beijing Olympics briefly reignited the democracy versus development debate, the issue, at least in India, has been irreversibly settled in favour of democracy. Any development in India has to be within the four corners of democracy, halted and slowed down even if it be.
 
To be sure, the terrific Chinese Olympics exposed India's own poor sporting performance, and its slow preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. But if the anxieties had been deep, they would have resolved a different but related issue, the Tata's Rs one lakh Uno car project, which is held up in Singur (West Bengal) because of violent protests against land acquisition for the project. Last week, Ratan Tata, the revered industrialist, threatened to take the project to another state if the protests didn't cease. More than half-a-dozen states promptly offered to host Uno's manufacture.
 
But Singur shows how multi-layered development versus democracy issues are in India, and indeed, the scope for debate is getting narrower and narrower. West Bengal is ruled by a Communist Party India - Marxist (CPI-M) led coalition government, and it employed Chinese strong-arm tactics to acquire land for the Tata project, hoping it would kick-start industrialisation in a backward state. In Nandigram, the same tactic was used to create a large Special Economic Zone (SEZ), and when local tillers objected, CPI-M cadres unleashed a wave of violence, backed by police inaction, again typically reminiscent of Chinese methods.
 
Following a countrywide uproar, in which the national SEZ policy also came in for attack and re-examination, because rich agricultural lands were being sought to be turned into real estate under the guise of industrialisation, the Nandigram project was abandoned. In Singur, the issues are not very different, although the Tata's historic contribution to the country's industrialisation brings them sympathy and goodwill. If the small-car and other SEZ projects had been located in the country's backward areas (Singur is fertile land), a reasonably successful policy of the Seventies, these unrests would have been avoided, food security would have been preserved (in these times of food inflation), since rich agricultural land would have remained under cultivation, and the democracy versus development debate would not have gained the artificial but short life it seems to have.
 
In its own small way, the Indian establishment has limited "exuberant democracy" (Lee Kuan Yew's phrase) to pursue development, and this is evident in the national capital, Delhi. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation has legal immunity to create a vast network ready for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. And for that event, airports, road networks, hotel rooms and other infrastructure are being rapidly expanded. The result may not be Beijing Olympics II, but it will be a uniquely Indian amalgam of democracy and development.

The point, as often made by Michael Mandelbaum and others in the democracy/ development debate, is that India won't collapse despite being turmoiled on the surface, and Indians may be malnourished but won't die of famine, as Amartya Sen is wont to say, as thirty million Chinese perished between 1958-61 after the so-called Great Leap Forward.
 
The absence of a compelling vision, as Deng's in 1978, or Nehru's post-Independence, does rankle, but not for long. Nehru's political-economic vision lead to stagnancy, but Indian democracy could season a reforms' consensus for growth (It is another matter that foreign-policy consensus has broken over the Indo-US nuclear deal).

China, on the other hand, is still locked in the Dengist growth model whose outstanding success has now become its bane. Vast urban-rural/ regional disparities and separatist tendencies are being suppressed by brute force leading to a pressure cooker situation in the absence of democratic institutions to peacefully manage unrest.
 
India has its shameful disparities, but their vigorous exposure does lead to debate, policy intervention and corrections, although the process is slow. The fact that the poor and disempowered vote in larger proportion to their population than comparatively the middle class, or the rich, reveals who the real stakeholders of Indian democracy are, and why the fashionable apostasy to development sans democracy will never run the course.
 
So, in the great mela of Indian democracy, the small rancour against China's brilliant Olympics will eventually cool, the Tata small-car project will sort out with or without Singur, Commonwealth Games 2010 will be a reasonable affair, and all the while, India will keep an elephant's pace on development. In the true spirit of democracy, there will be fiery proponents of the Chinese development model, and there will be stout democracy defenders, but India will go on as ever.