While I was dining with a group of Indians the other weekend, one of the guests, a banking official in Hong Kong, praised the recent elections in India. A country with a population of more than one billion had proved its commitment to democracy by throwing out the BJP and installing a new government, he declared.

When I asked him if he felt his country would get any better as a result of the election changes, I did not get much of a reply.

What has happened since the new government took over at the end of May? Here's one thing: a total of 126 farmers in the drought-hit Indian state of Andhra Pradesh have committed suicide, according to a June 30 report in "The Financial Times". This is nothing new. In the mid-1980s farmers from this southern state were killing themselves because pests had destroyed their crops.

Life can be tough too for the impoverished in China - but mass suicides of farmers?

Which leads on to an important question: does the democracy of India provide the best government for handling situations of extreme adversity - especially when decisions involve the lives of large numbers of people?

Let's not doubt how desperate the state of affairs can become in any country where tens of millions of farmers' lives hinge on the vagaries of Nature. No rain can mean a famine. A plague of locusts can bring a similar disaster.

During the Yangtze River floods in 1998, the death toll was high, millions of acres of cropland were destroyed and huge numbers of farmers were left homeless. But the military-style campaign launched by the Chinese Government to help the victims was admirable. So too was the tough action taken by China during the SARS epidemic. Contrast that with the mass panic and chaos during the pneumonic plague outbreak in west India in 1994.

What advantages has India gained from democracy? When the country broke free of undemocratic colonialism, it inherited the British police and judicial systems. The British had established fairly rigorous records of criminal cases following reforms of the Indian judicial system introduced by Lord Cornwallis in 1786, with a civil court under a European judge set up in every district.

So what has happened in the last fifty years? India's newspapers are filled with stories of unfortunates who have been detained in cells for years awaiting trial - sometimes on minor charges. Paying a bribe to the right official is often the only remedy. If you don't have the money, your legal case can end up buried under mounds of forgotten paperwork.

Various articles/books published in the West ascribe abuses of the legal system in China - where detentions without trials have been reported - to lack of Western-style democracy. How, then, do the critics account for the judicial/police abuses in democratic India?

I once conducted a written survey of leading members of the community in India. Many cited corruption in the police force and distrust of its officers as the worst features of their country.

While I was browsing for old books in Chandni Chowk near the Red Fort in Delhi, a thief grabbed my wallet and made off down a side alley. I hurried to the nearest police station, reporting the crime to a senior duty officer. Declining to file a report, he refused pointblank to do anything. By contrast, when an American colleague had her bag snatched in Qingdao, she told the police and they drove her around the town in a hunt for the culprit.

I once interviewed a senior police chief in India's financial capital (now known as Mumbai). He gave me a sheet of statistics that implied the city had one of the world's lowest crime rates. When I returned to New York, a sceptical Indian journalist in my office said: "Nobody in India believes police statistics. Don't forget that Bombay is gangster land."

Judicial transparency is in China's interest too. Criminologists, when comparing Asia with the West, turn to Singapore, Hong Kong and their pet favourite - Japan. Social scientists rarely cite figures from China because they are unsure about the reliability of police data. China Daily has several times in the past quoted senior officials who said that not all the statistics are reliable. It has reported too on inadequacies in the justice system and attempts to purge corruption and upgrade the professionalism of legal staff.

Achieving first-rate standards does not mean China's legal system need run on Western liberal lines. Singapore has a severe but transparent legal system with first-rate lawyers.

Hong Kong too can take pride in the openness of its legal system - but equally in the "iron fist" across-the-border support of police officers and courts that have played a key role in scotching mobster violence in Hong Kong and Macao since the late 1990s.

(HK Edition 07/05/2004 page6)