The institutional forms in which such a democracy expresses itself must be left to each Asian country to determine. In India the feeling in certain socialist and liberal circles that democracy is not working successfully as a political system has led to a retreat from the present Western parliamentary forms to a grassroots search for a true democratic base in the villages. Some such emotive force has moved politicians like the American-trained socialist Jayaprakash Narayan to ally himself with the Bhoodan movement which has its roots in rural India.
Gandhi had much the same idea of democracy, for in a talk with Louis Fischer some years ago he envisaged the pyramid of India's political structure as broad-based on her villages. Like Plato's city-state Gandhi's ideal was the Indian village state with each of India's seven hundred thousand villages "organised according to the will of its citizens, all of them voting".
"Then," he said to Fischer, "there would be seven hundred thousand votes and not four hundred million. Each village, in other words, would have one vote. The villages would elect their district administrations, and the district administrations would elect the provincial administrations, and these in turn would elect a president who would be the national chief executive".
"This is very much like the Soviet system," Fischer commented.
"I did not know that," said Gandhi. "But I don't mind."
He didn't mind because the spirit of democracy mattered much more to him than its institutional forms, and the institutional forms he conceived were those which he believed were best suited to India. There is a relish of irony and of poetic justice in the thought of Asia's using Soviet institutional forms for expressing and consolidating the democratic spirit.
