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ShareThe Olympic torch became a torture as it crawled its way through London, Paris and San Francisco.
What Chinese leadership thought would be a celebration of China's arrival on the global scene as a respected and legitimate world power has turned into a PR nightmare.
Countries hosting the torch are embarrassed and fearful of any injury, or, even worse, death of one of the demonstrators or runners, and have decided that they will shun any dramatics.
London was able to combine protests which remained peaceful except for one or two lunges at the torch across all 31 miles of its route. Paris just put it on a bus for part of the time and bundled it away with the Hotel de Ville declaring its loud support for human rights everywhere in a large banner.
San Francisco is the home of every kind of dissident movement. So the mayor took no chances. The American Chinese who wanted to celebrate were ignored as much as the Tibet protesters. We shall see how the torch does in the rest of its journey. One of these days I fear someone is going to die for the sake of the vanity of China's leadership.
Communist regimes have a special blindness about dissent and diversity. In democracies, one can protest loudly sometimes even violently.
The government, because it is elected, feels morally and legally entitled to take measures which force compliance with the law. In extreme cases like the Khalistan movement, the military is deployed even in the holiest of shrines. Though Indira Gandhi paid a price for it, Indian democracy survived.
Whatever the injustices of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi, there was then a Sikh president and now there is a Sikh prime minister.
The Chinese argue that Tibet is a part of China. Let us for the moment concede the claim. This does not however justify a heavy-handed repression of Tibetan religion and culture. Communists hate religion.
They believe modernisation will eliminate such backward superstition. So the railway line to Lhasa and resettlement of Han Chinese in Tibet are supposed to be the progressive rule Tibetans should be grateful for.
As it happens, Tibetans want to hang on to their religion and enjoy railway travel. If China were not a Communist dictatorship with its peculiar boneheaded inability to understand human behaviour, this could be easily accommodated. If Tibetans had a vote in a freely elected parliamentary election, there would be pro-religion party and a secular modernising party competing for votes and the Beijing leadership would not need hundreds of soldiers to shoot the monks down.
You often hear in India the argument that if only India was like China growth would be faster. Look at China, the Left says, it has no poverty unlike India. But then Indian growth rate has gone up from around 3.5 per cent to 8.5 per cent over the last 30 years while India has become, if anything, an even more chaotic democracy.
Poverty is coming down rapidly since India abandoned the favourite policies of the Left which perpetuated poverty and adopted liberal market reform. There are troubles all the time in India -- in Kashmir, Nagaland, Assam and even in Mumbai between Marathi-speaking and North Indians when Raj Thackeray takes into his head to become popular. Again and again democracy has been the solvent and army strong-arm tactics have led to deaths and human rights violations.
Indian leadership does not have to bring out tanks at the slightest trouble as China did in Tiananmen Square when unarmed students frightened a mighty dictatorship. If a regime is that fearful of its citizens, then it needs to ask what is wrong with it. Winning the Olympics is going to shock China as nothing else has done.
This is because as a dictatorship, China has escaped scrutiny by the world and has kept its own citizens under control even in matters like the internet.
All this is about to change. Day after day the world has witnessed the farce of the torch. People who never cared about politics are asking why there is all this heavy security presence on their streets.
Sebastian Coe who is in charge of the London Olympics of 2012 described the Chinese security guards as 'thugs'. The mayor of San Francisco has been humiliated. All because China wants to pretend that people should not notice what a horrible regime it has built up in matters of human rights despite much success in material prosperity.
When in August the games start there will be thousands of media people in Beijing filming and recording every thing on the field and outside. It will be broadcast around the world.
How China reacts to this challenge will test the quality of its leadership. Treatment of minorities, of dissidents, of religious fanatics such as Falun Gong will be in the spotlight. If they are to be killed in broad daylight, then people around the world will see that China had no moral right to hold the games.
Eventually it is better to have the muddle and the mess of a democracy than to have to have your Olympic torch crawl through country after country under siege. China may yet continue to be a one-party nation and have double or treble the GDP of India's, but more will live to shout and march and dispute in India then will ever do in China while communism lasts.
The writer is an economist
