I would rather live in a dictatorship with food to eat than in a country which starves its people. To be frank, I don't think India is a free country. It is a country where the haves control and oppress the have nots. Do you think a poor tribal from a village has the same freedom as an educated urban middle class ?
You would rather live in a 'dictatorship' with food to eat? Go through the list of dictatorships in history and you will see that very, very few had lots of 'food to eat' . I garner your idea about totalitarian systems is based upon China. But that idea is based upon China
now. Sixty years after it closed itself to the world, starved 90 million people to death and put them through strife and misery- unimaginable in the history of self-imposed human democides.
Do you think an urban worker in China in the 70's or 80's had the same freedoms as an Indian tribal? Tell me, do you think an urban worker in China
today has the same political freedoms as an Indian tribal? Do you think that the rural tribal under Pakisthan's military dictatorships were any better off than a rural tribal under Indian democracy at the same time? An Indian tribal has 'voice', and nothing has oppressed freedoms, nothing has oppressed industry, nothing has oppressed entrepreneurships and growth as much as the lack of it. A little agitation gives vitatlity to souls, but it is not so much peace, as freedom, that allows people to prosper. China's economic sector has modernized today simply because it has allowed that- freedom. But dictatorships, most always and everywhere, do not allow that. You seem to have a false synonymousness between dictatorships and freedom.
Authoritarian systems are better at economic modernization, you say? Says who? Do yourself a favour. And take a look at the evidence:
D. Rodrik, "Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion," Journal of Economic Literature 44:4, 2006, 973-87
That is
Statistical evidence of the myth, that democracies have never been able to provide for their citizens as well as authoritarian states or dictatorships...
Let me quote something to you, that speaks directly to this question of 'Losing Faith in Democracy':
"...The people make a mistake in its choice far less often than a prince, and a man of real worth among the king's ministers is almost as rare as a fool at the head of a republican government. So that it is, when by some lucky chance, one of these men who are born to govern takes control of public affairs in a monarchy that has almost been wrecked by this bunch of fine managers, people are all amazed at the resources he finds, and it is epoch-making for the whole country."
~ The Social Contract, Book III, Chapter 6.
The India you will see twenty years from now, when it will be at a par with China's length of economic modernization, will be very different from the India you see today. And it will have reached there without forcefully expropriating land everywhere, as China did in the early years of its modernization, without imposing Extra Budgetary Revenue, as China exacts from its rural peasants till today, and without engaging in mass democides of the scale, only totalitarian and authoritarian dictatorships have ever witnessed. Thence, again you will come full circle and say: truly, democracy was better than dictatorship.