Whenever Pakistan lapses into its moments of martial law and repression, as happened with General Pervez Musharraf’s emergency last week, a smug, superior look appears on the face of India. Whether it’s Indian politicians, businessmen, hacks or housewives, you hear self-congratulatory talk of our democracy and their hopelessness. Poor things, we say disdainfully, they really have not managed very well, have they? How sad for them that they made the mistake of abandoning India to create the violent little country that Pakistan has become. Some of this is true, but we need to hold the gloating and take a hard look at our democracy and see it for what it really is.

At about the time that General Musharraf was conducting his puzzling coup against himself, I happened to be on a flight from Mumbai to Delhi with a politician seated beside me. Typically, he was the last man to board and had a flunkey with him who carried his bag while Netaji talked endlessly on an expensive cellphone. When his conversation continued after the doors were closed and the plane began to taxi I, a nervous flier at the best of times, asked him to stop and reminded him that it interfered with the aircraft’s communications system. He ignored me so I tapped him on the shoulder and told him firmly that he must turn his phone off now. This annoyed him because, like most other Indian politicians, he seemed accustomed to rules not applying to him.

This gentleman was a perfect caricature of an Indian politician. He wore khadi but on his wrist was a platinum and diamond Patek Phillipe watch and on his feet expensive Italian loafers. Public service in India is such a profitable enterprise today that criminals abandon careers in crime for politics and billionaires abandon their businesses for a seat in Parliament. A clever politician can make more in a single term in the Lok Sabha than most Indian businessmen make in a lifetime. The result is that the worst Indians go into politics and once they get a toehold, they make sure that their constituency becomes something they pass on to their family. Hereditary democracy was once the leitmotif of the Congress party but today it is hard to find a major politician who has not brought a son, daughter, wife or mistress into what only the deluded still call public life.

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