Analysis | Battle for democracy: India, Hong Kong and Biden’s China bogeyman

India, democracy’s most important test case, has important lessons on how the ideal is wrecked from within

Democracy’s struggles are internal, not geopolitical. It needs to clean up its act, not pick fights with autocrats

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This Week in Asia’s cover design, by Huy Truong

Published: 10:00am, 7 Aug 2021Updated: 4:55pm, 13 Aug 2021

It’s hard to imagine today, but there was a time not so long ago in Hong Kong when the biggest political story in town was unsanctioned home improvement.

In early 2012, a bureaucrat who aspired to be the city’s chief executive was caught hiding a fancy basement under his swimming pool, complete with an entertainment suite, a jacuzzi and a wine cellar. A media frenzy erupted. Eagle-eyed reporters kept vigil outside his home, their cameras mounted on cranes watching his home 24/7, and political analysts wrote reams on how this “scandal” would impact the chief executive election.

To an outsider, the sanitised politics of this city those days could seem as unexciting as a bureaucrat’s basement. Especially, if he were a journalist from the world’s largest, and decidedly raucous, democracy, where the extent of commotion and corruption in politics dwarfed anything that Hong Kong could muster.

But even by India’s usual standards, politics back home was at the time plumbing new depths. Public discontent against the then ruling Congress party-led coalition government was building up. Allegations of serial scams in government projects were straining Indians’ already tenuous trust in the country’s political class. While Hong Kong’s news channels were relaying staid images of drawn curtains at a bureaucrat’s home, television cameras in India caught two ministers watching porn in the Assembly.

The good times of Hong Kong’s comparatively unstimulating politics weren’t destined to last. Not just uninterested residents but the whole world would soon have to sit up and take notice as the democracy movement gathered steam. The annual democracy marches, which mark the city’s return to Chinese sovereignty from British rule, had begun to get bigger every passing year. Pro-democracy politicians, groups, student leaders and intellectuals were making increasingly emphatic demands for universal suffrage.

Analysis | Battle for democracy: India, Hong Kong and Biden’s China bogeyman

India, democracy’s most important test case, has important lessons on how the ideal is wrecked from within Democracy’s struggles are internal, not geopolitical. It needs to clean up its act, not pick fights with autocrats

India, democracy’s most important test case, has important lessons on how the ideal is wrecked from within

Democracy’s struggles are internal, not geopolitical. It needs to clean up its act, not pick fights with autocrats