Is India even a country? It’s not an outlandish
question. “India is merely a geographical expression,” Winston Churchill
said in exasperation. “It is no more a single country than the
Equator.” The founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, recently echoed that
sentiment, arguing that “India is not a real country. Instead it is
thirty-two separate nations that happen to be arrayed along the British
rail line.”
India gives diversity new meaning. The country contains at least 15
major languages, hundreds of dialects, several major religions, and
thousands of tribes, castes, and subcastes. A Tamil-speaking Brahmin
from the south shares little with a Sikh from Punjab; each has his own
language, religion, ethnicity, tradition, and mode of life. Look at a
picture of independent India’s first cabinet and you will see a
collection of people, each dressed in regional or religious garb, each
with a distinct title that applies only to members of his or her
community (Pandit, Sardar, Maulana, Babu, Rajkumari).
Or look at Indian politics today. After every parliamentary election
over the last two decades, commentators have searched in vain for a
national trend or theme. In fact, local issues and personalities
dominate from state to state. The majority of India’s states are now
governed by regional parties—defined on linguistic or caste lines—that
are strong in one state but have little draw in any other. The two
national parties, the Indian National Congress and the BJP, are now
largely confined in their appeal to about ten states each.
And yet, there are those who passionately believe that there is an
essential “oneness” about India. Perhaps the most passionate and
articulate of them was Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister.
During one of his many stints in jail, fighting for Indian independence,
he wrote
The Discovery of India, a personal interpretation of
Indian history but one with a political agenda. In the book, Nehru
details a basic continuity in India’s history, starting with the Indus
Valley civilization of 4500 BCE, running through Ashoka’s kingdom in the
third century BCE, through the Mughal era, and all the way to modern
India. He describes an India that was always diverse and enriched by its
varied influences, from Buddhism to Islam to Christianity.
Nehru well understood India’s immense diversity—and its disunity. He had
to deal with it every day in trying to create a national political
movement. The country’s chief divide, between Hindus and Muslims, was to
create havoc with his and Mahatma Gandhi’s dreams for a united India.
But he was making the intellectual case for India as a nation as the
essential background for its national independence. And he had a good
case to make. India has existed as a coherent geographical and political
entity, comprising large parts of what is modern India, for thousands
of years. Despite its dizzying diversity, the country has its own
distinct culture. Perhaps that’s why, for all its troubles, India has
endured.
Where Nehru and Churchill were both wrong was in their political
conception of the nation-state itself. India could not follow the
example of the European single-ethnic, single-religion nations that
sprouted up in the 19th century. The British unified India using
technology—the railroad—and arms. That nationalizing trend produced, in
turn, a unified national opposition to British rule in the Indian
National Congress, bringing together all India’s communities against
foreign rule. But all this was a historical aberration. India had
existed as a loose confederation for much of its history. Even when
there had been a ruler in the national capital, he had exercised power
by co-opting vassals, allowing regions autonomy, letting local
traditions flourish. It was a laissez-faire nation in every sense.
Despite the rise and fall of dynasties, the entry and exit of empires,
village life in India was remarkably continuous—and unaffected by
national politics. “India has historically been a strong society with a
weak state,” says Gurcharan Das, the CEO turned author and philosopher.
Modern India went down a different path. Nehru and many of his
contemporaries were deeply influenced by 19th-century European
nationalism and 20th-century European socialism. They could not conceive
of modern India without a powerful national government. The
centralizing impulses were more forceful in the economic than in the
political sphere, where local leaders were often strong and autonomous.
Even so, by the late 1960s, the Congress started losing ground to
regional parties, first in the south on linguistic grounds and then
later to caste-based parties in the north. The harder the Congress tried
to fight this tendency, the greater the local backlash. This opposition
to New Delhi reached its zenith under Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi,
who as prime minister attempted an extreme form of centralized rule in
the 1970s, dismissing dozens of local governments, hoping to crush or
co-opt regional parties. The result was half a dozen violent
secessionist movements in the north, south, east, and west, one of which
claimed her life in 1984.
Over the last 20 years, India has been moving toward a different model
of nationhood. The power of regions and regional parties is now
undisputed. Starting in the early 1990s, New Delhi has been overturning
the license-permit-quota raj and opening up the economy. The result is
an India that is quite different from the one its founders might have
imagined—a motley collection of communities, languages, and ethnicities
living together in an open political and economic space. Some older
nationalists find this new India too marketized, decentralized, noisy,
vulgar, and messy, but it reflects India’s realities and, for that
reason, it has tremendous resilience.
Now, without central plan or direction, there are forces pushing India
toward a greater sense of nationalism than before. Economic
liberalization has created a national economy, and technology is
creating a national culture. While there has been a proliferation of
regional television channels for news and entertainment, there is also a
growing set of national programs and media events. From cricket to
Bollywood, a common popular culture pervades every Indian’s life. As
India grows, its people will discover that there is much that
distinguishes them from other Asian countries—and that binds them
together.
Economic growth has created one more common element in the country—an
urban middle class whose interests transcend region, caste, and
religion.
This is already having political consequences. Between 2011 and 2013,
millions of Indians took to the streets to protest, first against
corruption and then against the brutal gang rape and murder of a
23-year-old woman in Delhi. The people marching came from cities and
towns. In the past, mass agitations in India often originated in the
countryside, with farmers petitioning for government largesse or some
groups—defined by caste or religion—asking for special rights. The
recent protests have a different quality: They ask the government to
fulfill its basic duties. They seek an end to the corruption that is
rife throughout the Indian political and bureaucratic system. They ask
not for special government programs for women but rather simply that the
police and courts function efficiently so that rape victims actually
get the justice they deserve.
Most of India’s wealth is generated from its cities and towns. Urban
India accounts for almost 70 percent of the country’s GDP. But almost 70
percent of its people still live in rural India. “As a consequence,”
writes Ashutosh Varshney of Brown University, “for politicians, the city
has primarily become a site of extraction, and the countryside is
predominantly a site of legitimacy and power. The countryside is where
the vote is; the city is where the money is.”
The United States is a middle-class society. Most of the country
considers itself middle class, and politicians cater to that vast group
in every speech and policy proposal. In India, politicians have
generally pandered to the villager. No party has a serious urban agenda,
but all have elaborate rural schemes. Popular culture used to reinforce
this divide. Village life in traditional Bollywood movies reflected
simplicity and virtue. Cities were centers of crime and conflict,
controlled by a small, wealthy, often debauched elite.
This focus on the rural poor has, ironically, been one of the major
obstacles to alleviating poverty. For decades the national political
parties handed out lavish subsidies for work, food, and energy—among
other things—thus distorting all these markets and perpetuating many of
India’s basic economic problems. Even after India’s economic reforms
started, these patronage schemes continued, and this mentality has often
taken precedence over good governance, efficient regulations, and
fiscal sanity. Policies that actually alleviate poverty by promoting
economic growth are often enacted quietly and are even guiltily called
“stealth reform” by their advocates. In a broader sense, too much of the
political elite still thinks of India as a poor, third-world country, a
victim of larger global forces rather than one of the world’s emerging
great powers that could and should be governed by the highest standards.
The middle class itself has played into this narrative, traditionally
thinking it was politically irrelevant and so adopting an apolitical
stance. Its response to India’s problems was to expect little of
government. Rather than demanding better government schools, they sent
their kids to expensive private academies. Rather than trusting the
police, they hired security guards for their homes and neighborhoods.
Rather than running for office themselves, they didn’t bother to vote
and pined for the authoritarian efficiency of Singapore or, now, China.
But 20 years of strong economic growth have transformed the country. The
Indian middle class now numbers more than 250 million; over 30 percent
of the population of 1.2 billion lives in urban areas. And these numbers
are growing fast. Indian movies are now often focused on this group,
seen as young, aspiring, and filled with idealism and ambition.
Globalization has raised the expectations that this new urban middle
class has for itself and its government. The opening of the Indian
economy has exposed them to a new world—a world in which other countries
like India are growing fast, building modern infrastructure, and
establishing efficient government. Whereas they used to assume that to
get rich one needed political connections, today they can dare simply to
have good ideas and work hard. India is still a parochial country—for
good reason, given its size and internal complexity—but this middle
class sees no reason why its democracy shouldn’t work for them too.
Technology is giving them the power to make their voices heard, even
when outnumbered by other interest groups. India is unusual in combining
the growth of an emerging market with the openness of a freewheeling
democracy. (China has the former but not the latter.) The result has
been an information explosion. The country boasts more than 170
television news channels, in dozens of languages. Three-quarters of the
population has mobile phones. Texting and similar methods have now
become a routine way to petition government, organize protests, and
raise awareness. The Aadhaar program (
aadhaar means
“foundation” in Hindi), spearheaded by India’s tech pioneer Nandan
Nilekani, which will give every Indian a unique biometric identity,
could have a much larger impact than imagined. Its stated goal is to
make it possible for Indians to get the rights and benefits they
deserve, without middlemen, corruption, or inefficiency blocking their
path. But it could also make it possible for Indians to think of
themselves for the first time as individuals, not merely members of a
religion, caste, or tribe.
Many foreign observers, particularly Western businesspeople, look at
India today and despair. The country simply cannot reform at the pace
necessary to fulfill its ambitions for growth and progress. Everything
gets mired in political paralysis, and the governing class remains
committed to a politics of patronage and pandering. This is all true and
deeply unfortunate. But it is a snapshot of today’s reality, not a
moving picture of an evolving society. In states as disparate as
Gujarat, Odisha, and Bihar, state governments are aggressively promoting
economic growth. And this is not simply a story about Narendra Modi,
the controversial chief minister of Gujarat. That state of 60 million
people has grown faster than China over the last two decades—with three
different chief ministers. India itself, for all its problems, has been
one of the fastest-growing large economies in the world over that
period.
Can the country live up to its potential? If so, it will happen only
because of a bottom-up process of protest and politics that forces
change in New Delhi. India will never be a China, a country where the
population is homogeneous and where a ruling elite directs the nation’s
economic and political development. In China, the great question is
whether the new president, Xi Jinping, is a reformer—he will need to
order change, top-down, for that country.
In India, the questions are different: Are Indians reformers? Can
millions of people mobilize and petition and clamor for change? Can they
persist in a way that makes reform inevitable? That is the only way
change will come in a big, open, raucous democracy like India. And when
that change comes, it is likely to be more integrated into the fabric of
the country and thus more durable.
I remain optimistic. We are watching the birth of a new sense of
nationhood in India, drawn from the aspiring middle classes in its
cities and towns, who are linked together by commerce and technology.
They have common aspirations and ambitions, a common Indian dream—rising
standards of living, good government, and a celebration of India’s
diversity. That might not be as romantic a basis for nationalism as in
days of old, but it is a powerful and durable base for a modern country
that seeks to make its mark on the world.
About the author
Fareed Zakaria is host of CNN’s
Fareed Zakaria GPS, an editor-at-large for
Time magazine, and author of
The Post-American World (W. W. Norton & Company, April 2008). This essay is excerpted from
Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower.
Copyright © 2013 by McKinsey & Company. Published by Simon &
Schuster, Inc. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
