Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (6 page)

Furthermore, the state played a greater role in India’s rise than is often recognized. India and its people created prosperity thanks to the state, not despite it, because the state quietly provided a modicum of protection for property rights, a degree of personal security, and an acceptable level of law and order. Today, however, that minimal performance is no longer sufficient if India is even to approach its true potential.

What India needs now is a strong, efficient, and enabling state with a robust rule of law and greater accountability. A strong liberal state is efficient in the sense that it enforces fairly and forcefully the rule of law.
It is strong because it has independent regulators who are tough on corruption and ensure that no one is above the law. It is enabling because it delivers services honestly to all citizens. It is a rules-based order with a light, invisible touch over citizens’ lives.

the indian state was historically weak

It is a mistake to think that the Indian state was weakened in recent times because of coalition politics, feckless leadership, and economic liberalization. India historically had a weak state, though one counterbalanced by a strong society—the mirror image of China. India’s history is one of political disunity with constant struggles among kingdoms, unlike China’s history of strong empires. The type of despotic and intrusive governments that emerged in China and divested people of their property and their rights has never existed in India.

The king in Indian history was a distant figure who hardly touched the life of the ordinary person. The law, dharma, preceded the state and placed limits on the king’s power in premodern India. The king also did not interpret the law, unlike in China; the Brahmin, a scholar class, assumed that function. This division of powers may have contributed to a weak Indian state at birth, but it also prevented oppression by the state.

The modern Indian state is also a product of British rule, which beginning in the mid-nineteenth century imposed a rule of law with explicit codes and regulations. Though efficient, that state was not accountable to its citizens. That changed in 1947, as independent India took those institutions of governance and made them accountable by developing into a vibrant, if untidy, democracy.

In the twenty-first century, true to its history, India is rising economically from below, quite unlike China, whose success has been scripted from above by an amazing technocratic state. It is also not surprising that India’s traditionally strong society is evolving into a vibrant civil one. The
mass movement led by the political activist Anna Hazare, which forced India’s political elite to consider a strong anticorruption law in 2011, is only the most recent example of a historically weak state colliding with a strong society. A successful nation needs both a strong state and strong society to keep a check on each other.

what is to be done?

Unfortunately, Anna Hazare’s movement, with its chanting multitudes inspired by a mystical faith in the collective popular will, might awaken people to the need for reform, but it cannot execute the hard work necessary to transform India’s tottering state into a strong, liberal one. The passage of a sweeping anticorruption law was important, but it was only a first step. It will take patient, determined efforts to reform the key institutions of governance—the bureaucracy, judiciary, police, and parliament—along well-known lines articulated by numerous committees. The federal trend, which is shifting power away from the center and to the states, is a virtuous one, as is the slow decentralizing of power and funds downward to foster vigorous, local self-government in villages and municipalities.

But those trends do not address the central issue of how to reform the state institutions. If it is lucky, India might throw up a strong leader who is a reformer of institutions. But Indira Gandhi was a strong leader, and she turned out to be a destroyer of institutions. The next best hope is that the electorate will simply demand reform. The aspiring younger generation, now about a third of the population—and destined to make up half of the electorate in a decade—has no one to vote for because few politicians speak the language of good governance and the common good. The existing parties treat voters as poor, ignorant masses who need to be appeased briefly at election time with populist giveaways and appeal to the victim in the voter.

With high growth, mobility, and a demographic revolution, Indians
who aspire to a better life will soon outnumber those who see themselves as victims. Pew surveys show that a majority of Indians believe that they are better off than their parents and that their children will do even better. The person who got the 900 millionth cell phone number was a village migrant from Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s most impoverished states, and no one in India’s political life captures his hopes. This rising youthful cohort will no longer accept a civic life shaped by those who are powerful and corrupt. Young Indians also have shown considerable ability in mobilizing media and employing the new technology of social media. Political life is thus set to change.

filling india’s political void

Who will fill the empty secular political space at the right of center in Indian politics? The aspiring young are puzzled by the fact that their tolerant nation offers astonishing religious and political freedom but at the same time fails to provide economic freedom. In a country where two out of five people are self-employed, it takes forty-two days to start a business, and the entrepreneur is a victim of endless red tape and corrupt inspectors. No wonder India ranks 119 on the global Index of Economic Freedom and 132 on the World Bank’s ease of doing business index.

India reforms furtively because no political party has bothered to explain the difference between being promarket and probusiness, leaving people with the impression that liberal reforms help mostly the rich. They don’t understand that a promarket economy fosters competition, which helps keep prices low, raises the quality of products, and leads to a rules-based capitalism that serves everyone. The probusiness mind-set, on the contrary, allows politicians and officials to distort the market’s authority over economic decisions, leading to crony capitalism. This confusion explains the timidity of reform and why India does not perform to its potential.

If no existing party can fill the empty space, aspiring India may well demand a new liberal party that trusts markets rather than officials for economic outcomes and relentlessly focuses on the reform of institutions. Such a party may not win votes quickly, but it will bring governance
reform to center stage and gradually prove to voters that open markets and rules-based government are the only civilized ways to lift living standards and achieve shared prosperity.

finding india’s new moral core

Reforming corrupt government institutions is always difficult but is particularly so in India with its tradition of a weak state. Fortunately, history is not destiny, and people in the end obey the law when they think it is fair and just and because they become morally habituated to it. Obeying the law then becomes a form of self-restraint and character. Therefore, the demand for governance reform must also emerge out of a reinvigorated Indian moral core. The notion of dharma imposed this moral core in premodern India. The task for India’s twenty-first-century politics is to recover constitutional morality.

Early in the freedom struggle, Mohandas Gandhi discovered that the liberal language of constitutional morality did not resonate with the masses, but the moral language of dharma did. So, the consummate mythmaker resuscitated the universal ethic of
sadharana dharma
, not unlike the Buddhist emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE, who embarked on a program to build new “habits of the heart” based on
dhamma
(
dharma
in Pali). Gandhi was not able to end untouchability, but he breathed life into the freedom movement. In the same manner, our challenge is make the Constitution a moral mirror by transmitting its ideas to the young as part of a broad citizenship project until they also become habits of the heart.

Impatient voices in India today clamor for a civil war to bring accountability into public life. Although urgent, the current crisis should be addressed not through mobs on the street but through politics and institutional reform. The cautionary message we all should draw from the success of Anna Hazare and his followers in bringing change is that if the political class is not ready to embrace governance as a central platform, then it better be prepared for an uglier revolt.

Anand Giridharadas

Anand Giridharadas writes the “Currents” column for the
New York Times
and is the author of
India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking.

Must a country aspiring to significance possess its own bespoke dream? There is an American dream often discussed, although a great many Americans struggle to locate it these days. The French might argue for a dream centered on the preservation, savoring, and endless perfecting of a certain kind of life. For South Africans, perhaps it is the dream of making unitary light of their racial rainbow. Most places, of course, are too small, humble, or stuck in the grind to worry about the nature of their national dream. I have met some Cambodians, for instance, and none spoke a word about the Cambodian dream.

Is there an Indian dream? If so, what is it? Is it, like the street-hawked books at Haji Ali in Mumbai, a pirated dream—a crude cut-and-paste job from some other place’s dream? Or is something rich and particular to India surfacing in this era of churn?

There are those who see the Indian dream in civilizational terms: India as a uniquely open-source republic, with a long history of multiplicity and toleration, whose highest purpose now is giving proof that kaleidoscopic pluralism, even if burdened by poverty and illiteracy and disease, can thrive under democracy. One hears a neo-Gandhian version of the dream, in which India returns to the villages, but those villages are reinvented for new realities; a Hindu chauvinist version of the dream, in which pride and the resurrection of a trampled culture are the focus; a
geopolitical version of the dream, in which India, the only nation to get its name on an ocean, superintends the region around it.

But in the time I have spent in India, traversing its cities and villages and market towns, collecting people’s tales one gem at a time, a rather different vision of the dream has come to me. It is the dream of self-invention: of having the freedom and the means of authoring yourself into being. Your caste, your class, your native place, your religion, your parents’ occupation, your family dietary habits—all these things be damned. It is the dream of becoming yourself, free of history and judgment and guilt.

The dream, presented this way, may seem too small to some. Is there no bigger thing that can be said about a great people than that they desire to become themselves? To which I would answer: The desire to do so rarely feels small to people who cannot.

Let others talk of “bigger” things. The Indian dream, as I’ve witnessed it again and again, in Jallowal and Bangalore, Mysore and Umred, Verla and Manchar, Mumbai and Kanchipuram, is modest and focused and fiery. It is a million acts of private daring.

The daring happens every time a young woman in a Delhi slum finally says, no, she will not marry that man, no matter how much sense it makes to all these people who won’t be there night after night to endure his rum breath and slaps. It happens every time a young man in Pune gets his first cell phone and senses that, for the first time in his life, he has something akin to his own bedroom—a sphere of privacy and individual identity never known before. It happens every time they have one of those personality contests in Umred, and the young contestants, unaccustomed to being asked by adults what they think, walk onstage with a mandate, perhaps for the first time in their lives, to stand out rather than sublimate and blend.

It happens, in short, every time someone questions: the authority of elders, the dictates of caste, the way things always were. We tend to think of revolutions as waged against faraway, unknowable powers—feudal
lords, gilded kings, bunker-dwelling tyrants. The Indian case belies this imagery. Here the revolution is within—within the skulls of those who resolve, against the odds, to make themselves new; within the family, an institution more guilty of suffocating Indian potential than most people are willing to admit; within the larger clan, which faces new challenges from people desiring—heaven forfend!—to think for themselves.

But there is more to the Indian dream than this centrifugal impulse, this longing for selfhood. Were the dream just this, it would indeed feel like a crude derivation. But the dream is buffeted, as it ought to be, by countervailing currents.

A significant difference between India’s period of modernization today and analogous periods in the history of the West is that Indians can see how their forerunners have fared. The West walked blindly into the revolution of selfhood. There was no way to anticipate what it would bring. Today’s Indian, by contrast, can look at the changes around her and feel great excitement, but she also can sense how these changes, without careful rethinking, will play out. The afflictions of the West are, after all, no secret.

She may seek more freedom for Indians to love whom they wish and escape bad unions; but she fears her society’s going so far as to replicate the West’s divorce rates. She may cheer every time an Indian child flouts his parents’ commands and pursues the vocation of his choosing; but she worries that the country will lose something if parents come to be ignored and discarded as readily as it appears in the West. She may celebrate a new meritocracy in which it no longer takes the effort of a whole family to push a child into success; but she looks at Western families, which often function like federations of independent contractors, and hesitates to destroy the habit of intergenerational sacrifice and investment. She welcomes more space for solitude in India, more time and freedom to think for oneself; but she considers the atomized, lonely lives she has seen in the West to be equally, oppositely maddening. She embraces the new power of money culture and consumption to challenge India’s old hierarchies; but she looks at the West and reflects on how sad it would be if buying stuff became India’s principal boulevard to meaning.