We may go around saying that the politicians are the pits, that lawyers go on too long and contribute much to the law’s delays, that sometimes even judges miss the wood for the trees: but all this, we can loudly proclaim, in a liberal, although slightly anarchic, democracy.

To support the theme, Junta versus Janata, and to emphasise the ‘Janata’, let me recall two incidents, each of them accurate.

One: When after imposing an Emergency in June 1975, Mrs Gandhi called for elections in January 1977 and lost, most people were concerned: would she call in the army? To her credit she did not. Would she respect the mandate of the people? Despite the advice of some lawyer-politicians, she did! I recall with pride Prime Minister James Callaghan’s tribute to this event in our political history. He said that the ultimate mark of a true democracy is the willingness of a government defeated at the ballot box to surrender power peacefully to its opponents. That is what happened when Mrs Gandhi was defeated at the polls in March 1977, and that is what happened again when her opponents (the Janata Party) were in turn defeated at the elections of 1980, and Mrs Gandhi came back to power.

Despite the blemishes of the Emergency, she was in many ways a different woman.

Two: Winston Churchill used to call democracy “the worst system of government in the world” — always adding the rider “except all those other systems”! But Zulfikar Bhutto (Benazir’s father) always used to say, it was the worst of all systems, without Churchill’s rider. Piloo Mody had gone to visit Bhutto (who was his friend) when he was in prison in Pakistan awaiting a sentence of death for murder, a murder of which it was widely believed he was innocent. He told me on his return that Bhutto nostalgically recalled “the noise and chaos of Indian democracy”, regretting that he had made fun of it in the hey-day of his political power. The noise and chaos of Parliamentary democracy, he told Piloo, had a certain vitality; it had the strength and safety of numbers. No citizen’s fate depended on the whims or dispensation of one man or woman — Bhutto was right.

This is why I agree that a modern nation does need democracy and also needs its politicians, “however clumsy, corrupt, effete and power-crazed” they may be!