I'd like to think that aspiring higher than that is neither western nor non-western.
Democracy, with rights, has prospered and been embraced across cultures and around the world, on every continent. Before Modi, it was embraced in India.
What does “democracy, with rights” even mean? Who decides what the “rights” are? In Asia, “democracy, with rights” exists primarily in Japan and South Korea, where it was imposed by the United States. Previously, it existed in Hong Kong, which was a British colony. Singapore also has “democracy, with rights” but again as a result of British colonization. And post-colonization, the “with rights” part is pretty circumscribed.
“Democracy, with rights” was a foreign import to India (and Bangladesh), imposed by an Oxbridge-educated Indian elite. Nehru didn’t get secularism and social democracy from India, he got them to England while he was studying at Cambridge.[1] What you’re seeing in India now is the result of India becoming more democratic as British colonial influence fades: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial...
[1] The last Congress prime minister has degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge. While the current leader of Congress is half Italian and went to college near Orlando, then got his masters at Cambridge.
People in India learned about computers from the West, but that doesn't make them somehow wrong for India. People in the UK didn't know about democracy at some point in history; does that make it wrong? Can there be no growth or innovation - an extreme conservative argument, but used to meaninglessly oppose anything they don't like.
Rights are also a moral issue. There are people being harmed, who at the same time deserve to be free and live fulfilling, safe lives of their own choosing - not of your choosing (or mine).
Democracy is consistent with "growth [and] innovation." If the Indian electorate finds certain western ideas to be positive innovations, it can adopt them democratically. Like computers--Indians adopted computers because they found computers to be a western advancement worth adopting. But voting is how you decide what's "innovation" versus what's "regression." How else would you possibly decide that?
> Rights are also a moral issue. There are people being harmed, who at the same time deserve to be free and live fulfilling, safe lives of their own choosing - not of your choosing (or mine).
You're articulating western morality that isn't widely accepted in Asia. "Choice" is a western fixation. Asians know that most individuals need society to help them make good choices. Western parents tell their kids to "follow their dreams." Asian parents tell their kids to "follow the proven track." Likewise, fixating on "harm" to the individual rather than harm to society as a whole is a western fixation. For example, westerners perceive Singapore's practice of caning those that cause public disorder as violating "human rights." But Singaporeans view it as an appropriate trade-off that protects the public's right to live in a clean, orderly, and safe environment.
"Democracy" is good, and widely supported in places like India, Bangladesh, etc. But it's antithetical to the concept of democracy to use it as a backdoor to smuggle in unrelated western moral philosophy.
If a majority vote to exclude a minority from owning businesses (then property, then anything), it isn't a liberal democracy.