Fresh from their nastiest election in years, some Indians are openly questioning the merits of democracy - and concluding that there are more pressing issues in South Asia than whether or not people have the right to vote. PNS correspondent Andrew Robinson speaks several Indian languages and has been writing about South Asian affairs for over a decade.

HYDERABAD -- As Indians watched their new government being sworn in on television they could also follow, on another channel, the progress of the military coup across the border in Pakistan. Many viewers were no doubt quite envious.

"We should also have a coup," says Amulya Krishnan, my neighbor in this South Indian city and a housewife. "Get rid of all the politicians. Maybe then we'll see some progress."

Her sentiment is not uncommon. Another neighbor, a man in his sixties, has -- according to his wife -- been saying the same thing ever since India became a nation, literally shouting at the television set, "Useless buggers! They should all be shot dead!" whenever politicians appeared.

"Do we really need a government?" asks India's Outlook magazine. "Hundreds of thousands of Indians are today making their own arrangements for water and electricity, transport and security, heath care and education. So why do we need a government?"

It has been a long and tedious process in India -- with three elections in as many years, and this clearly one of the dirtiest. The politicians promised everything from free electricity and gas to more water and better weather. And yet everyone knows that in the end money will rule the day -- much of it hidden away in the homes of their elected officials.

The elections were determined by "bullets and fraud," writes Kumar Badal, of Outlook. "Voters were banished from booths, political murders became routine, fake ballot papers in fake boxes were imported and the state machinery was unabashedly exploited. There was a dash of novelty too: Polling officials [in Bihar] were injected with sedatives to prevent honest intervention."

Ask just about anyone in India what they consider the biggest problem facing India today and overpopulation will almost invariably top their list. But during this election, the word was practically taboo. Neither the Congress(I) nor the BJP raised the issue of family planning -- not to mention unemployment, inflation, crime, AIDS, water shortages and a host of other issues plaguing the nation.

Yet Western countries continue to be enamored of elections -- sometimes, as may have happened in East Timor, at the peril of the voters themselves. The pressure on countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh, who rely heavily on western aid, to conduct their affairs according to rules of democracy (free press, et al.) can make it extremely difficult for these countries to progress.

When the West condemns a military coup in Pakistan, as it did today, this only make matters worse. Canada has announced it is suspending official visits to Pakistan, while US State Department spokesman James Rubin says, "We would obviously seek the earliest possible restoration of democracy in Pakistan."

But what if democracy isn't working?

"Democracy? It's a demockery here," opines Ramesh Kasturi, a former zone manager for India's Life Insurance corporation, as he watches the Indian swearing ceremony. "The last time I voted, I went to cast my vote and someone had already cast it for me. So how does it matter? Democracy or a dictatorship? As long as the country is governed?"

Despite its democratic system, "what has happened with respect to social inequality and backwardness is very nearly a disaster," wrote the Nobel Prize winning economist, Amartya Sen, on the occasion of India's 50th birthday two years ago. "Not in the sense of something going suddenly very bad but something remaining extremely bad without there being any change in it."

In this upper class neighborhood, as if to confirm Sen's point, one encounters mansions built like fortresses -- and then, rising out of a filthy swamp, a slum of about fifty shacks, cooking fires burning, women returning with stacks of collected wood on their heads.

That is how things develop in India -- 50 years without a change to it.

And now, as two neighboring countries welcome their new regimes to power -- one a dictatorship, the other a democracy -- it's impossible to say which one will benefit its citizens more. But most people here will tell you that there are far more important issues in South Asia than whether or not the people have a right to vote.