Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (10 page)

At the risk of oversimplification, think of the following as the three major transformations currently in progress in India: (1) from grievance to aspiration, (2) from rebels to stakeholders, and (3) from preoccupation with domestic strength and political stability to ambition for “big-power” status.

The first transformation is evident in our election results in the past fifteen years. We could, in fact, describe the journey of the Indian voter as gratitude to grievance to aspiration. Gratitude, because for almost four decades after independence, the typical Indian voter supported the Congress and the Nehru-Gandhi family to thank them for winning our
freedom, founding this liberal republic, and then holding it together—albeit often with brute force. As we Indians felt more secure, we became more questioning, and angry. This is when grievance overwhelmed us and we started to defeat incumbent rulers, challenging the one-party, one-family domination of four decades. Between 1989 and 1998, the voters tossed out more than 70 percent of all incumbent candidates. And then sentiment reversed again. Some leaders, even some we would have dismissed as casteist or sectarian in the past, started winning reelection. According to a detailed review recently published in India’s
Economic & Political Weekly
, between 2004 and 2012, incumbents won 45 percent of elections—their best showing in three decades.

The economic reform of 1991 unleashed new forces that were economic as well as political, and both were virtuous. For a vast majority of Indians, so far the major concerns were of mere survival:
roti, kapda, aur makaan
(food, clothing, and shelter), that great metaphor dominating the entire subcontinent’s politics. And then it faded away. It yielded to a new set of ideas—in fact, aspirations—that went beyond survival:
bijli, sadak, paani
(power, roads, water). And now, continuing on:
padhai, sehat, naukri
(education, health, a proper job).

The change from grievance to aspiration has brought new energies that drive today’s India and redefine its politics, and it is hard to imagine where they will take us. Aspiration on such a scale, riding on a population where more than five hundred million citizens are below the age of twenty-five, comes with increasing impatience, providing a powerful impetus for faster change. The recent surge of urban activism—against corruption or, more recently, for gender rights in the capital—by disparate, ostensibly apolitical groups, is one manifestation of this new energy.

The other demon to have faded away is internal separatism. Even Kashmir is much more stable than in years past. And while Maoists fight on in resource-rich east-central India, their quest is not for a separate nation but for the same republic transformed to their vision, which they have neither the confidence nor the patience to try and achieve through the ballot. Chances are that over time they, too, will join the political mainstream like so many other rebels, armed or peaceful, who are now
counted among the most formidable stakeholders in Indian society and power structure. Dalits, for centuries at the bottom of the awful caste pyramid, now have a leader of national stature in Mayawati. The middle castes—the so-called Other Backward Classes (OBCs)—have seen a revolutionary empowerment now represented by leaders ranging from Nitish Kumar and his rival Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar; Mulayam Singh Yadav and Kalyan Singh in Uttar Pradesh; Shivraj Singh Chauhan and Uma Bharati in Madhya Pradesh; and Narendra Modi in Gujarat. One of the most crucial markers in this strongly contested political terrain is these leaders’ commitment to the security and prosperity of minorities, especially Muslims. We Indians often fret that we have a broken polity. But this broken polity has turned all these rebels into stakeholders. Whether you applaud or abhor the notion of dynastic rule, a polity composed of fifteen diverse and often competing dynasties is a far better proposition than a single dominant and all-consuming dynasty.

The founding fathers were idealists who believed that India’s democracy, its liberalism, its history, philosophy, and spirituality would all combine to give it a moral force that by itself would bring it the status of a globally respected nation, if not a major power in the conventional sense. But we live in a world that sets the bar much higher. It is only now, when India has subsumed its many rebellions and moved on from the politics of anger and grievance to the politics of hope and aspiration, that our nation is in a position to leverage its success as a liberal, diverse democracy—despite what many would see as its weakening center. Nuclear weaponization, the nuclear deal with the United States, the debate on the restructuring of the Security Council to acknowledge the rise of India, among others, are all indications, and a consequence, of this larger success.

Where India will be, one, two, or three decades from now is tough to predict. During the sixties, the grand preoccupation of all the writing, debates, and predictions was India’s prospects for survival. Today, the
primary topics are growth, competitiveness, and equity. So something has worked, is working, and will, hopefully, continue to work.

If there is one thing you can say with confidence, it is that India’s founding fathers were wise in what they imagined for the nation. Millions of Indians, as themselves, and acting through their elected representatives, have taken their idea forward, noisily and chaotically but with tremendous success. I do not, therefore, see the need to reimagine or rethink. Maybe a better goal is to reenergize, reinforce, and renew to meet the challenges of the three transformations that define today’s India.

The only quibble I have with the founding fathers is an editorial one. It’s over a slogan they gave us: “Unity in diversity.” I would prefer “Celebrate diversity.” But you can’t really call this reimagining India: More than a billion diverse and united Indians already are making it a reality. In so doing, they are scripting their own future.

Ashutosh Varshney

Ashutosh Varshney is professor of international studies and the social sciences at Brown University.

At its core, India’s federalism is an answer to an enduring concern of modern Indian politics: How should the nation combine democracy and regional diversity?

The freedom movement led by Mahatma Gandhi wrestled with this question, as did the post-1947 polity led by Jawaharlal Nehru. Of the four major forms of social diversity in India—religion, caste, language, and tribe—the last two are territorially concentrated. Castes can be found virtually all over India and, with the partial exception of Sikhism, religions also are widely spread. In contrast, all languages of India are geographically concentrated, as are the tribal communities. History and political theory teach us that territorially based communities, if disaffected, can acquire separatist and secessionist impulses much more easily than geographically dispersed groups. Territorial concentration requires imaginative political handling.

The key issues always are twofold: How should these territorial communities be ruled? And how should they be made an integral part of the larger polity? India’s federalism is an institutional device to deal with both questions. Almost all major linguistic and tribal communities of India have been given a state of their own in the Indian federation, with constitutionally assigned powers that Delhi can take away only under exceptional conditions, which are listed in the Constitution. All linguistic and tribal groups are, in principle, allowed to participate in the all-India
institutions as well: parliament, executive, judiciary, civil service, police, public media, public education, and others.

The execution of these federal principles has not been perfect, but in the scholarly literature, India’s federalism is widely viewed as a substantial—and an unlikely—success. Indeed, the magnitude of success cannot be appreciated without understanding its improbability.

The story begins with the dominant conceptions of India more than a century ago. In the higher circles of British rule, India was viewed as a geographical or civilizational construct, much like Europe. It could not possibly be a nation, achieving political unity. A nation is often described by scholars as a political roof over one’s cultural head; India had many cultural heads and no political roof.

John Strachey, one of the most prominent official British voices in the late nineteenth century, reflected prevailing wisdom when he wrote in 1888, “That men of the Punjab, Bengal . . . and Madras, should ever feel that they belong to one Indian nation, is impossible. You might with as much reason and probability look forward to a time when a single nation will have taken the place of the various nations of Europe.” By this logic, just as Europe had so many independent nations, the various units of India could conceivably become separate nations after the British left, but there could not be a single nation in India.

Nor was this conception confined to ruling British circles. After traveling in India in 1896, Mark Twain also concluded that Indian unity was impossible:

India had . . . the first civilization; she had the first accumulation of material wealth; she was populous with deep thinkers and subtle intellects; she had mines, and woods, and a fruitful soil. It would seem as if she should have kept the lead, and should be to-day not the meek dependent of an alien master, but mistress of the world, and delivering law and command to every tribe
and nation in it. But, in truth, there was never any possibility of such supremacy for her. If there had been but one India and one language—but there were eighty of them! Where there are eighty nations and several hundred governments . . . unity of purpose and policy are impossible . . . patriotism can have no healthy growth.

Had they been alive, Strachey and Twain would have found post-1947 India utterly surprising. Today, fifteen languages of India are spoken by at least ten million people each, and yet all these linguistic groups are part of the Indian nation. Independent India has witnessed very few separatist movements. Even at the worst moment, 1989–1991, when insurgency in Punjab raged, separatist violence in Kashmir stirred, and northeastern discontent simmered, not more than 6 percent of India’s total population was directly affected. At no point has India experienced a Sri Lanka–style insurgency affecting 18 to 20 percent of the population, let alone an East Pakistan–style separatism, circa 1970–1971, engulfing a majority of the country’s population.

What explains this? The character of India’s freedom movement played a pivotal role. Consciously breaking from the “one language, one nation” European principle, Mahatma Gandhi and his colleagues launched a new experience in human history. A larger all-India identity would be added to the existing linguistic/regional identity of Indians; linguistic diversity would not be erased. To use today’s language, Indians would be hyphenated Indians, not undifferentiated Indians. The movement, reaching out to millions, created the sense that being a Tamil and an Indian, being a Gujarati and an Indian, being a Bengali and an Indian were simultaneously possible. Bengal, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu did not have to be separate nations. The Congress party, which led the freedom movement, was linguistically organized; it did not follow the provincial boundaries of British India. The movement lasted nearly three decades. An Indian nation was thus politically created where it did not readily exist.

Linguistic states after independence were a logical extension of this principle. Though Nehru, India’s first prime minister (1947–1964), developed
cold feet about linguistic states soon after independence, he eventually gave in, returning to the linguistic commitment of the freedom movement and presiding over the linguistic organization of Indian states.

A natural question follows: How could linguistically organized states and their residents communicate with those outside their boundaries? To facilitate nationwide communication, a three-language formula was also put in place in the late 1950s. The education system would teach three languages to Indians: the regional language, Hindi, and English. This is why educated Indians tend to be tri- or at least effectively bilingual.

In short, India engaged in a two-sided pursuit of nation making: It allowed diversities to flourish, but it also nurtured commitment to the larger Indian political community via politics, administration, and education
.
Nothing exemplifies this better than how the elite Indian Administrative Service (IAS) was conceptualized. The IAS is often lambasted for its red tape, and rightly so, but from a nation-building perspective, the story is more complex. IAS officers are part of both Delhi and states—they are selected by Delhi but allocated to a state cadre, going back and forth between Delhi and states during their careers. If India’s civil service had been entirely state-based, or wholly Delhi-based, the problems of nation building would have been far greater.

Thus, Indian nation making, both before and after independence, sought to break the link between nation and language, which Europe first followed (Belgium and Switzerland being the only exceptions, and Spain partially one) and East Asia later did. To what extent has this departure from the historically given principles of nation building been a success? And to what extent has it been a failure?

Two pieces of survey research illustrate the success of Indian federalism. First, 85 to 90 percent of Indians say they are “proud” or “very proud” of India, a figure higher than in Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium;
and in the same range as in Canada, Spain, Argentina, and Brazil. Only the United States and Australia appear to rank higher. Second, roughly two-thirds of Indians say their identity is “only Indian,” “more Indian than regional,” and “equally regional and Indian.” In contrast, only 20–22 percent of Indians say their identity is “only regional” or “more regional than Indian.” The idea of India has thus gone very far. Trying to erase regional identities would have been a violent, and perhaps failed, enterprise. Accommodation of diversities has built a stronger, not weaker, Indian nationhood.