Epilogue
The Sikhs may try to set up a separate regime. I think they probably will and that will be only a start of a general decentralization and break-up of the idea that India is a country, whereas it is a subcontinent as varied as Europe. The Punjabi is as different from a Madrassi as a Scot is from an Italian. The British tried to consolidate it but achieved nothing permanent. No one can make a nation out of a continent of many nations.
GENERAL SIR CLAUDE AUCHINLECK, ex Indian army C-in-C, 1948
Unless Russia first collapses, India – Hindustan, if you will – is in grave danger of becoming communist in the not distant future.
SIR FRANCIS TUKER, ex Indian army General, 1950
As the years pass, British rule in India comes to seem as remote as the battle of Agincourt.
MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE,broadcaster and author, 1964
Few people contemplating Indira Gandhi’s funeral in 1984 would have predicted that ten years later India would remain a unity but the Soviet Union would be a memory.
ROBIN JEFFRET, historian, 2000
I
IN ITS ISSUE FOR February 1959, that venerable American magazine The Atlantic Monthly carried an unsigned report on the state of Pakistan. General Ayub Khan had recently assumed power via a military coup. What was missing in Pakistan, wrote the correspondent, was ‘the politicians. They have been banished from public life and their very name is anathema. Even politics in the abstract has disappeared. People no longer seem interested in debating socialism versus free enterprise or Left versus Right. It is as if these controversies, like the forms of parliamentary democracy, were merely something that was inherited willy-nilly from the West and can now be dispensed with.’
The Atlantic reporter believed that ‘the peasants [in Pakistan] welcome the change in government because they want peace’. He saw law and order returning to the countryside, and smugglers and black-marketeers being putin their place. ‘Already the underdog in Pakistan’ is grateful to the army, he wrote, adding: ‘In a poor country ... the success of any government is judged by the price of wheat and rice’, which, he claimed, had fallen since Ayub took over.
Foreign correspondents are not known to be bashful of generalizations, even if these be based on a single fleeting visit to a single unrepresentative country. Our man at the Atlantic Monthly was no exception. From what he saw – or thought he saw – in Pakistan he offered this general lesson: ‘Many of the newly independent countries in Asia and Africa have tried to copy the British parliamentary system. The experiment has failed in the Sudan, Pakistan and Burma, while the system is under great stress in India and Ceylon. The Pakistan experiment [with military rule] will be watched in Asia and Africa with keen interest.’
Forty years later the Atlantic Monthly carried another report on the state of Pakistan. Between times the country had passed from dictatorship to democracy and then back again to rule by men in uniform. It had also been divided, with its eastern wing seceding to form the sovereign state of Bangladesh. And it had witnessed three wars, each one initiated by the generals whom the peasants had hoped would bring them peace.
This fresh Atlantic report was signed, by Robert D. Kaplan, who is something of a travelling specialist on ethnic warfare and the breakdown of nation-states. Kaplan presented a very negative portrayal of Pakistan, of its lawlessness, its ethnic conflicts (Sunni vs. Shia, Mohajir vs. Sindhi, Balochi vs. Punjabi etc.), its economic disparities, and of the training of jihadis and the cult of Osama bin Laden.
Kaplan quoted a Pakistani intellectual who said: ‘We have never defined ourselves in our own right – only in relation to India. That is our tragedy.’ The reporter himself thought that Pakistan ‘could be a Yugoslavia in the making, but with nuclear weapons’. Like Yugoslavia, Pakistan reflected an ‘accumulation of disorder and irrationality that was so striking’. Kaplan’s conclusion was that ‘both military and democratic governments in Pakistan have failed, even as India’s democracy has gone more than half a century without acoup’.1
Kaplan doubtless had not read the very different prognosis of Pakistan offered in his own magazine forsty years previously. What remains striking are the very different assessments of India. In 1959, the Atlantic Monthly pitied India for having a democracy when it might be better off as a military dictatorship. In 1999 the same magazine thought this very democracy had been India’s saving grace.
Two years later the Twin Towers in New York fell. As attempts were made by Western powers to foster democracy by force in Afghanistan and Iraq, India’s record in nurturing democracy from within gathered renewed appreciation. When, in April 2004, India held its fourteenth general election the contrast with Pakistan was being highlighted by Pakistanis themselves: ‘India goes to the polls and the world notices,’ wrote the Karachi columnist Ayaz Amir. ‘Pakistan plunges into another exercise in authoritarian management – and the world notices, but through jaundiced eyes. Are we so dumb that the comparison escapes us?’ ‘When will we wakeup?’ continued Amir, ‘When will we learn? When will it dawn on us that it is not India’s size, population, tourism or IT industry [that is] making us look small, but Indian democracy?’2
II
In those elections of 2004 some 400 million voters exercised their franchise. The ruling alliance, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, was widely expected to win by a comfortable margin, prompting fears of a renewal of the ‘Hindutva’ agenda. As it happened, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance defiedt he pollsters and came to power. The outcome was variously interpreted as a victory for secularism, a revolt of the aam admi (common man) against the rich and an affirmation of the continuing hold of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty over the popular imagination. In the larger context of world history, however, what is important is not why the voters voted as they did but the fact that they voted at all. Ever since the 1952 elections were described as the ‘biggest gamble in history’, obituaries have been written for Indian democracy. It has been said, time and again, that a poor, diverse and divided country cannot sustain the practice of (reasonably) free and fair elections.
Yet it has. In that first general election voter turnout was less than 46 per cent. Over the years this has steadily increased; from the late 1960s about three out of five eligible Indians have voted on election day. In assembly elections the voting percentage has tended to be even higher. When these numbers are disaggregated they reveal a further deepening. In the first two general elections, less than 40 per cent of eligible women voted; by 1998 the figure was in excess of 60 per cent. Besides, as surveys showed, they increasingly exercised their choice independently, that is regardless of their husband’s or father’s views on the matter. Also voting in ever higher numbers were Dalits and tribals, the oppressed and marginalized sections of society. In northern India in particular, Dalits turned out in far greater numbers than high castes. As the political analyst Yogendra Yadav points out, ‘India is perhaps the only large democracy in the world today where the turnout of the lower orders is well above that of the most privileged groups.’3
The Indian love of voting is well illustrated by the case of a cluster of villages on the Andhra/Maharashtra border. Issued voting cards by the administrations of both states, the villagers seized the opportunity to exercise their franchise twice over.4 It is also illustrated by the peasants in Bihar who go to the polls despite threats by Maoist revolutionaries. Dismissing elections as an exercise in bourgeois hypocrisy, the Maoists have been known to blacken the faces of villagers campaigning for political parties, and to warn potential voters that their feet and hands would be chopped off. Yet, as an anthropologist working in central Bihar found, ‘the overall effect of poll-boycott on voter turnout seems to be negligible’. In villages where Maoists had been active for years, ‘in fact, election day was seen as an enjoyable (almost festive) occasion. Women dressed in bright yellows and reds, their hair oiled and adorned with clips, made their way to the polling booth in small groups.’5 Likewise, in parts of the north-east where the writ of the Indian state runs erratically or not at all, insurgents are unable to stop villagers from voting. As the chief election commissioner wryly putit, ‘the Election Commission’s small contribution to the integrity of the country is to make these areas part of the country for just one day, election day’.6
That elections have been successfully indigenized in India is demon-strated by the depth and breadth of their reach – across and into all sections of Indian society – by the passions they evoke, and by the humour that surrounds them. There is a very rich archive of electoral cartoons poking fun at promises made by prospective politicians, their desperation to get a party ticket and much else.7 At other times the humour can be gentle rather than mocking. Consider the career of a cloth merchant from Bhopal named Mohan Lal who contested elections against five different prime ministers. Wearing a wooden crown and a garland gifted by himself, he would walk the streets of his constituency, ringing a bell. He unfailingly lost his deposit, thereby justifying his own self-imposed sobriquet of Dhartipakad, or he who lies, humbled, on the ground. His idea in contesting elections, said Mohan Lal, was ‘to make everyone realise that democracy was meant for one and all’.8
That elections allow all Indians to feel part of India is also made clear by the experience of Goa. When it was united – or reunited – with India by force in 1961 there was much adverse commentary in the Western press. But where in 400 years of Portuguese rule the Goans had never been allowed to choose their own leaders, within a couple of years of coming under the rule of New Delhi they were able to do so. The political scientist Benedict Anderson has tellingly compared India’s treatment of Goa with Indonesia’s treatment of East Timor, that other Portuguese colony ‘liberated’ by armed nationalists:
Nehru had sent his troops to Goa in 1960 [sic] without a drop of blood being spilt. But he was a humane man and the freely elected leader of a democracy; he gave the Goanese their own autonomous state government, and encouraged their full participation in India’s politics. In every respect, General Suharto was Nehru’s polar opposite.9
Considering the size of the electorate, it is overwhelmingly likely that more people have voted in Indian elections than voters in any other democracy. India’s success in this regard is especially striking when compared with the record of its great Asian neighbour, China. That country is larger, but far less divided on ethnic or religious lines, and far less poor as well. Yet there has never been a single election held there. In other ways too China is much less free than India. The flow of information is highly restricted – when the search engine Google setup shop in China in February 2006 it had to agree to submit to state censorship. The movement of people is regulated as well – the permission of the state is usually required to change one’s place of residence. In India, on the other hand, the press can print more or less what they like, and citizens can say exactly what they feel, live where they wish to and travel to any part of the country.
India/China comparisons have long been a staple of scholarly analysis. Now, in a world that becomes more connected by the day, they have become ubiquitous in popular discourse as well. In this comparison China might win on economic grounds but will lose on political ones. Indians like to harp on about their neighbour’s democracy deficit, sometimes directly and at other times by euphemistic allusion. When asked to put on a special show at the World Economic Forum of 2006, the Indian delegation never failed to describe their land, whether in speech or in print or on posters, as the ‘World’s Fastest Growing Democracy’.
If one looks at what we might call the ‘hardware’ of democracy, then the self-congratulation is certainly merited. Indians enjoy freedom of expression and of movement, and they have the vote. However, if we examine the ‘software of democracy, then the picture is less cheering. Most political parties have become family firms. Most politicians are corrupt, and many come from a criminal background. Other institutions central to the functioning of a democracy have also declined precipitously over the years. The percentage of truly independent-minded civil servants has steadily declined, as has the percentage of completely fair-minded judges.
Is India a proper democracy or a sham one? When asked this question, I usually turn for recourse to an immortal line of the great Hindi comic actor Johnny Walker. In a film where he plays the hero’s sidekick, Walker answers every query with the remark: ‘Boss, phipty-phipty’. When asked what prospect he has of marrying the girl he so deeply loves, or of getting the job he so dearly desires, the sidekick tells the boss that the chances are roughly even, 50 per cent of success, or 50 per cent of failure.
Is India a democracy, then? The answer is well, phipty-phipty. It mostly is when it comes to holding elections and permitting freedom of movement and expression. It mostly is not when it comes to the functioning of politicians and political institutions. However, that India is even a 50 per cent democracy flies in the face of tradition, history and the conventional wisdom. Indeed, by its own experience it is rewriting that history and that wisdom. Thus Sunil Khilnani remarked of the 2004 polls that they represented
the largest exercise of democratic election, ever and anywhere, in human history. Clearly, the idea of democracy, brought into being on an Athenian hillside some 2,500 years ago, has travelled far-and today describes a disparate array of political projects and experiences. The peripatetic life of the democratic idea has ensured that the history of Western political ideas can no longer be written coherently from within the terms of the West’s own historical experience.10
III
The history of independent India has amended and modified theories of democracy based on the experience of the West. However, it has confronted even more directly ideas of nationalism emanating from the Western experience.
In an essay summarizing a lifetime of thinking on the subject, Isaiah Berlin identifies ‘the infliction of a wound on the collective feelings of a society, or at least of its spiritual leaders’, as a ‘necessary’ condition for the birth of nationalist sentiment. For this sentiment to fructify into a more widespread political movement, however, requires ‘one more condition’, namely that the society in question ‘must, in the minds of at least some of its most sensitive members, carry an image of itself as a nation, at least in embryo, in virtue of some general unifying factor or factors – language, ethnic origin, a common history (real or imaginary)’. Later in the same essay, Berlin comments on the ‘astonishingly Europo-centric’ thought of nineteenth – and early twentieth-century political thinkers, where ‘the people of Asia and Africa are discussed either as wards or as victims of Europeans, but seldom, if ever, in their own right, as peoples with histories and cultures of their own; with a past and present and future which must be understood in terms of their own actual character and circumstances.’11
Behind every successful nationalist movement in the Western world has been a certain unifying factor, a glue holding the members of the nation together, this provided by a shared language, a shared religious faith, a shared territory, a common enemy – and sometimes all of the above. Thus, the British nation brought together those who huddled together on a cold island, who were mostly Protestant and who detested France. In the case of France, it was language which powerfully combined with religion. For the Americans a shared language and mostly shared faith worked in tandem with animosity towards the colonists. As for the smaller east European nations – the Poles, the Czechs, the Lithuanians etc. – their populations have been united by a common language, a mostly common faith and a shared and very bitter history of domination by German and Russian oppressors.12
By contrast with these (and other examples) the Indian nation does not privilege a single language or religious faith. Although the majority of its citizens are Hindus, India is not a ‘Hindu’ nation. Its constitution does not discriminate between people on the basis of faith; nor, more crucially, did the nationalist movement that lay behind it. From its inception the Indian National Congress was, as Mukul Kesavan observes, a sort of political Noah’s Ark which sought to keep every species of Indian on board.13 Gandhi’s political programme was built upon harmony and co-operation between India’s two major religious communities, Hindus and Muslims. Although, in the end, his work and example were unsuccessful in stopping the division of India, the failure made his successors even more determined to construct independent India as a secular republic. For Jawaharlal Nehru and his colleagues, if India was anything at all it was not a ‘Hindu Pakistan’.
Like Indian democracy, Indian secularism is also a story that combines success with failure. Membership of a minority religion is no bar to advancement in business or the professions. The richest industrialist in India is a Muslim. Some of the most popular film stars are Muslim. At least three presidents and three chief justices have been Muslim. In 2007, the president of India is a Muslim, the prime minister a Sikh, and the leader of the ruling party a Catholic born in Italy. Many of the country’s most prominent lawyers and doctors have been Christians and Parsis.
On the other hand, there have been periodic episodes of religious rioting, in the worst of which (as in Delhi in1984 and Gujarat in 2002) the minorities have suffered grievous losses of life and property. Still, for the most part the minorities appear to retain faith in the democratic and secular ideal. Very few Indian Muslims have joined terrorist or fundamentalist organizations. Even more than their compatriots, Indian Muslims feel that their opinion and vote matter. One recent survey found that while 69 per cent of all Indians approve and endorse the ideal of democracy, 72 per cent of Muslims did so.And the turnout of Muslims at elections is higher than ever before.14
Building democracy in a poor society was always going to be hard work. Nurturing secularism in a land recently divided was going to be even harder. The creation of an Islamic state on India’s borders was a provocation to those Hindus who themselves wished to merge faith with state. My own view – speaking as a historian rather than citizen – is that as long as Pakistan exists there will be Hindu fundamentalists in India. In times of stability, or when the political leadership is firm, they will be marginal or on the defensive. In times of change, or when the political leadership is irresolute, they will be influential and assertive.
The pluralism of religion was one cornerstone of the foundation of the Indian republic. A second was the pluralism of language. Here again, the intention and the effort well pre-dated Independence. In the 1920s Gandhi reconstituted the provincial committees of the Congress on linguistic lines. The party had promised to form linguistic provinces as soon as the country was free. The promise was not redeemed immediately after 1947, because the creation of Pakistan had promoted fears of further Balkanization. However, in the face of popular protest the government yielded to the demand.
Linguistic states have been in existence for fifty years now. In that time they have deepened and consolidated Indian unity. Within each state a common language has provided the basis of administrative unity and efficiency. It has also led to an efflorescence of cultural creativity, as expressed in film, theatre, fiction and poetry. However, pride in one’s language has rarely been in conflict with a broader identification with the nation as a whole. The three major secessionist movements in independent India – in Nagaland in the 1950s, in Punjab in the 1980s and in Kashmir in the 1990s – have affirmed religious and territorial distinctiveness, not a linguistic one. For the rest, it has proved perfectly possible – indeed, desirable – to be Kannadiga and Indian, Malayali and Indian, Andhra and Indian, Tamil and Indian, Bengali and Indian, Oriya and Indian, Maharashtrian and Indian, Gujarati and Indian and, of course, Hindi-speaking and Indian.
That, in India, unity and pluralism are inseparable is graphically expressed in the country’s currency notes. On one side is printed a portrait of the ‘father of the nation’, Mahatma Gandhi; on the other side apicture of the Houses of Parliament. The note’s denomination – 5, 10, 50, 100 etc. – is printed in words in Hindi and English (the two official languages), but also, in smaller type, in all the other languages of the Union. In this manner, as many as seventeen different scripts are represented. With each language, and each script, comes a distinct culture and regional ethos, here nesting more or less comfortably with the idea of India as a whole.
Some Western observers – usually Americans – believed that this profusion of tongues would be the undoing of India. Based on their own country;s experience, where English had been the glue binding the different waves of immigrants, they thought that a single language – be it Hindi or English – had to be spoken by all Indians. Linguistic states they regarded as a grievous error. Thus, in a book published as late as 1970, and at the end of his stint as the Washington Post’s man in India, Bernard Nossiter wrote despairingly that this was ‘a land of Babel with no common voice’. The creation of linguistic states would ‘further divide the states from each other [and] heighten the impulse toward secession’. From its birth the Indian nation had been ‘plagued by particularist, separatist tendencies’, wrote Nossiter, and ‘the continuing confusion of tongues ... can only further these tendencies and puts in question the future unity of the Indian state’.15
That, to survive, a nation-state had necessarily to privilege one language was a view that the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin shared with American liberals. Stalin insisted that ‘a national community is inconceivable without a common language’, and that ‘there is no nation which at one and the same time speaks several languages’.16 This belief came to inform the language policy of the Soviet Union, in which the learning of Russian was made obligatory. The endeavour, as Stalin himself put it, was to ensure that ‘there is one language in which all citizens of the USSR can more or less express themselves – that is Russian’.17
Like Bernard Nossiter, Stalin too might have feared for the future of the Indian nation-state because of its encouragement of linguistic diversity. In fact, exactly the reverse has happened: the sustenance of linguistic pluralism has worked to tame and domesticate secessionist tendencies. A comparison with neighbouring countries might be helpful. In 1956, the year the states of India were reorganized on the basis of language, the Parliament of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon)introduced legislation recognizing Sinhala as the sole official language of the country. The intention was to make Sinhala the medium of instruction in all state schools and colleges, in public examinations and in the courts. Potentially the hardest hit were the Tamil-speaking minority who lived in the north of the island, and whose feelings were eloquently expressed by their representatives in Parliament. ‘When you deny me my language’, said one Tamil MP, ‘you deny me everything.’ ‘You are hoping for a divided Ceylon’, warned another, adding: ‘Do not fear, I assure you [that you] will have a divided Ceylon.’ A left-wing member, himself Sinhala speaking, predicted that if the government did not change its mind and insisted on the act being passed, ‘two torn little bleeding states might yet arise out of one little state’.18
In 1971 two torn medium-sized states arose out of one large-sized one. The country being divided was Pakistan, rather than Sri Lanka, but the cause for the division was, in fact, language. For the founders of Pakistan likewise believed that their state had to be based on a single language as well as a single religion. In his first speech in the capital of East Pakistan, Dacca, Mohammad Ali Jinnah warned his audience that they would have to take to Urdu sooner rather than later. ‘Let me make it very clear to you’, said Jinnah to his Bengali audience, ‘that the State Language of Pakistanis going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without one State language, no nation can remain tied up solidly together and function.’19
In the 1950s bloody riots broke out when the Pakistan government tried to impose Urdu on recalcitrant students. The sentiment of being discriminated against on the grounds of language persisted, and ultimately resulted in the formation of the independent state of Bangladesh.
Pakistan was created on the basis of religion, but divided on the basis of language. And for more than two decades now a bloody civil war has raged in Sri Lanka, the disputants divided somewhat by territory and faith but most of all by language. The lesson from these cases might well be: ‘One language, two nations’. Had Hindi been imposed on the whole of India the lesson might well have been: ‘One language, twenty-two nations’.
That Indians spoke many languages and followed many faiths made their nation unnatural in the eyes of some Western observers, both lay and academic. In truth, many Indians thought so too. Likewise basing themselves on the European experience, they believed that the only way for independent India to survive and prosper would be to forge a bond, or bonds, that overlay or submerged the diversity that lay below. The glue, as in Europe, could be provided by religion, or language, or both. Such was the nationalism once promoted by the old Jana Sangh and promoted now, in a more sophisticated form, by the BJP. This reaches deep into the past to invoke a common (albeit mostly mythical) ‘Aryan ancestry for the Hindus, a common history of suffering at the hands of (mostly Muslim) invaders, with the suffering tempered here and there by resistance by valiant ‘Hindu’ chieftains such as Rana Pratap and Shivaji.
A popular slogan of the original Jana Sangh was ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustani’. The attempt was to makeIndian nationalism more natural, by making – or persuading – all Indiansto speak the same language and worship the same gods. In time, the bid to impose a uniform language was dropped. But the desire to impose the will of the majority religion persisted. This has led, as we have seen in this book, to much conflict, violence, rioting and death. Particularly after the Gujarat riots of 2002, which were condoned and to some extent even approved by the central government, fears were expressed about the survival of a secular and democratic India. Thus, in a lecture delivered in the university town of Aligarh, the writer Arundhati Roy went so far as to characterize the BJP regime as ‘fascist’. In fact, she used the term ‘fascism eleven times in a single paragraph while describing the actions of the government in New Delhi.20
Here again, Indian events and experiences were being analysed in terms carelessly borrowed from European history. To call the BJP ‘fascist is to diminish the severity and seriousness of the murderous crimes committed by the original fascists in Italy and Germany. Many leaders of the BJP are less than appealing, but to see the party as ‘fascist’ would be both to overestimate its powers and to underestimate the democratic traditions of the Indian people. Notably, the BJP now vigorously promotes linguistic pluralism. No longer are its leaders from the Hindi heartland alone; and it has expanded its influence in the southern states. And it is obliged to pay at least lip service to religious pluralism. One of its general secretaries is a Muslim; even if he is dismissed as a token, the ideology he and his party promote goes by the name of ‘positive secularism’. The qualifier only underlines the larger concession – that even if some BJP leaders privately wish for a theocratic Hindu state, for public consumption they must endorse the secular ideals of the Indian Constitution.
Finally, despite all their best efforts, the BJP was not able to disturb the democratic edifice of the Indian polity. A month after Arundhati Roy delivered her speech, the BJP alliance lost power in a general election that it had called. Its leaders moved out of office and allowed their victors to move in instead. When was the last time a ‘fascist’ regime permitted such an orderly transfer of power?
The holding of the 1977 elections – called by an individual who had proven dictatorial tendencies – and of the 2004 elections – called by a party unreliably committed to democratic procedure – were both testimony to the deep roots that democracy had struck in the soil of India. In this respect, the country was fortunate in the calibre of its founding figures, and in the fact that they lived as long as they did. Few nations have had leaders of such acknowledged intelligence and integrity as Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and B. R. Ambedkar all living and working at the same time. Within a few years of Independence Patel had died and Ambedkar had left office; but by then the one had successfully overseen the political integration of the country and the other the forging of a democratic constitution. As Nehru lived on, he was kept company by outstanding leaders in his own party – K. Kamaraj and Morarji Desai, for instance – and in the opposition, in whose ranks were such men as J. B. Kripalani and C. Rajagopalachari.
Jawaharlal Nehru served three full terms in office, a privilege denied comparable figures in the countries of South Asia, where, for example, Aung San was murdered on the eve of the British departure from Burma, Jinnah died within a few years of Pakistan’s freedom, Mujib within a few years of Bangladesh’s independence and the Nepali democrat B. P. Koirala was allowed only a year as prime minister before being dismissed (and then jailed) by the monarchy. What might those men have done if they had enjoyed power as long as Nehru, and if they had had the kind of supporting cast that he did?21
Of course, there has been a rapid, even alarming, decline in the quality of the men and women who rule India. In a book published in 2003 the political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote feelingly of ‘the corruption, mediocrity, indiscipline, venality and lack of moral imagination of the [Indian] political class’. Within the Indian state, he continued, ‘the lines between legality and illegality, order and disorder, state and criminality, have come to be increasingly porous’.22
That said, the distance – intellectual or moral – between Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, or between B. R. Ambedkar and Mulayam Singh Yadav, is not necessarily greater than between, say, Abraham Lincoln and George W. Bush. It is in the nature of democracies, perhaps, that while visionaries are sometimes necessary to make them, once made they can be managed by mediocrities. In India, the sapling was planted by the nation’s founders, who lived long enough (and worked hard enough) to nurture it to adulthood. Those who came afterwards could disturb and degrade the tree of democracy but, try as they might, could not uproot or destroy it.
IV
Indian nationalism has not been based on a shared language, religion, or ethnic identity. Perhaps one should then invoke the presence of a common enemy, namely European colonialism. The problem here is the methods used to achieve India’s freedom. The historian Michael Howard claims that ‘no Nation, in the true sense of the word ... could be born without war ... no self-conscious community could establish itself as a new and independent actor on the world scene without an armed conflict or the threat of one’.23Once again, India must count as an exception. Certainly, it was the movement against British rule that first united men and women from different parts of the subcontinent in a common and shared endeavour. However, their (eventually successful) movement for political freedom eschewed violent revolution in favour of non-violent resistance. India emerged as a nation on the world stage without an armed conflict or, indeed, the threat of one.
Gandhi and company have been widely praised for preferring peaceful protest to armed struggle. However, they should be equally commended for having the wisdom to retain, after the British left, such aspects of the colonial legacy as might prove useful in the new nation.
The colonialists were often chastised by the nationalists for promoting democracy at home while denying it in the colonies. When the British finally left, it was expected the Indians would embrace metropolitan traditions such as parliamentary democracy and Cabinet government. More surprising perhaps was their endorsement and retention of a quintessentially colonial tradition – the civil service.
The key men in British India were the members of the Indian Civil Service (ICS). In the countryside they kept the peace and collected the taxes, while in the Secretariat they oversaw policy and generally kept the machinery of state well oiled. Although there was the odd rotten egg, these were mostly men of integrity and ability.24 A majority were British, but there were also a fair number of Indians in the ICS.
When Independence came, the new government had to decide what to do with the Indian civil servants. Nationalists who had been jailed by them argued that they should be dismissed or at least put in their place. The home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, however, felt that they should be allowed to retain their pay and perquisites, and in fact be placed in positions of greater authority. In October 1949 a furious debate broke out on the subject in the Constituent Assembly of India. Some members complained that the ICS men still had the ‘mentality [of rulers] lingering in them’. They had apparently ‘not changed their manners’, ‘not reconciled themselves to the new situation’. ‘They do not feel that they are part and parcel of this country’, insisted one nationalist.
Vallabhbhai Patel had himself been jailed many times by ICS men, but this experience had only confirmed his admiration for them. He knew that without them the Pax Britannica would simply have been inconceivable. And he understood that the complex machinery of a modern independent nation-state needed such officers even more. As he reminded the members of the assembly, the new constitution could be worked only ‘by a ring of Service which will keep the country intact’. He testified to the ability of the ICS men, but also to their sense of service. As Patel put it, the officers had ‘served very ably, very loyally the then Government and later the present Government’. Patel was clear that ‘these people are the instruments [of national unity]. Remove them and I see nothing but a picture of chaos all over the country.’25
In those first, terribly difficult years of Indian freedom, the ICS men vindicated Vallabhbhai Patel’s trust in them. They helped integrate the princely states, resettle the refugees and plan and oversee the first general election. Other tasks assigned to them were more humdrum but equally consequential – such as maintaining law and order in the districts, working with ministers in the Secretariat and supervising famine relief. In 1947 Patel inaugurated a new cadre modelled on the ICS but with a name untainted by the colonial experience. This was the Indian Administrative Service, or IAS.
In 2008 there are some 5,000 IAS officers in the employment of the government of India. The IAS is complemented, as in British days, by other ‘all India’ services, among them the police, forest, revenue and customs services. These serve as an essential link between the centre and the states. Officers are assigned to a particular state; they spend at least half of their service career in that province, the rest in the centre. To the older duties of tax collection and the maintenance of law and order have been added a whole range of new responsibilities. Conducting elections is one; the supervising of development programmes another. In the course of his career an average IAS officer would acquire at least a passing familiarity with such different and divergent subjects as criminal jurisprudence, irrigation management, soil and water conservation and primary health care.
This, like its predecessor, is truly an ‘elite’ cadre. The competition to enter the higher civil services is ferocious. In 1996, 120,712 candidates appeared for the examination, of whom a mere 738 were finally selected. Their intelligence and ability is of a very high order. However, there are complaints of increasing corruption among its members, and of their succumbing too easily to their political masters. Perhaps if the IAS is abolished at one stroke the country will not descend into chaos. But as it stands IAS officers play a vital role in maintaining its unity.26 In times of crisis they tend to rise to the challenge. After the tsunami of 2004, for example, IAS officers in Tamil Nadu were commended for their outstanding work in relief and rehabilitation.
It was an ICS man, Sukumar Sen, who laid the groundwork for elections in India, and it has been IAS men who have kept the machinery going. The chief election commissioners in the states are drawn from the service. Junior officers supervise polls in their districts; those in the middle ranks serve as election observers, reporting on violations of procedure. More generally, the civil services serve as a bridge between state and society. In the course of their work, these administrators meet thousands of members of the public, drawn from all walks of life. Living and working in a democracy, they are obliged to pay close attention to what people think and demand. In this respect, their job is probably even harder than that of their predecessors in the ICS.
A colonial institution that has played an equally vital role is the Indian army. Its reputation took a battering after the China war of 1962, before it redeemed itself through its performance in successive wars with Pakistan. The blows inflicted by Tamil insurgents in Sri Lanka in 1987–8 dented the army somewhat, but then honour was restored by the successful ousting of the Kargil intruders a decade later. While its reputation as a fighting force has gone up and down, as an agency for maintaining order in peacetime the Indian army has usually commanded the highest respect. In times of communal rioting, the mere appearance of soldiers in uniform is usually enough to make the rioters flee. And in times of natural disaster they bring succour to the suffering. When there is a flood, famine, cyclone or earthquake, it is the army which is often first on the scene, and always the most efficient and reliable actor around.
The Indian army is a professional and wholly non-sectarian body. It is also apolitical. Almost from the first moments of Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru made it clear to the army top brass that in matters of state – both large and small – they had to subordinate themselves to the elected politicians. At the time of the transfer of power the army was still headed by a British general, who had ordered that the public be kept away from a flag-hoisting ceremony to be held on the day after Independence. As prime minister, Nehru rescinded the order, and wrote to the general as follows:
While I am desirous of paying attention to the views and susceptibilities of our senior officers, British and Indian, it seems to me that there is a grave misunderstanding about the matter. In any policy that is to be pursued, in the Army or otherwise, the views of the Government of India and the policy they lay down must prevail. If any person is unable to lay down that policy, he has no place in the Indian Army, or in the Indian structure of Government. I think this should be made perfectly clear at this stage.27
A year later it was Vallabhbhai Patel’s turn to put a British general in his place. When the government decided to move against the Nizam, the commander-in-chief, General Roy Bucher, warned that sending troops into Hyderabad might provoke Pakistan to attack Amritsar. Patel told Bucher that if he opposed the Hyderabad action he was free to resign. The general backed down, and sent the troops as ordered.28
Shortly afterwards Bucher retired, to be succeeded by the first Indian C-in-C, General K. M. Cariappa. At the beginning of his tenure Cariappa restricted himself to military matters, but as he grew into the job he began to offer his views on such questions as India’s preferred model of economic development. In October 1952 Nehru wrote advising him to give fewer press conferences, and at any rate to stick to safe subjects. He also enclosed a letter from one of his Cabinet colleagues, which complained that Cariappa was ‘giving so many speeches and holding so many Press Conferences all over the country’, giving the impression that he was ‘playing the role of apolitical or semi-political leader’.29
The message seems to have gone home, for when Cariappa demitted office in January 1953, in his farewell speech he ‘exhorted soldiers to give a wide berth to politics’. The army’s job, he said, was not ‘to meddle in politics but to give unstinted loyalty to the elected Government’.30 Nehru knew, however, that the general was something of a loose cannon, who could not be completely trusted to follow his own advice. Within three months of his retirement Cariappa was appointed high commissioner to Australia. The general was not entirely pleased, for, as he told the prime minister, ‘by going away from home to the other end of the world for whatever period you want me in Australia, I shall be depriving myself of being in continuous and constant touch with the people .Nehru consoled the general that as a sportsman himself he was superbly qualified to represent India to a sporting nation. But the real intention, clearly, was to get him as far away from the people as possible.31
As the first Indian to head the army, Cariappa carried a certain cachet, which lost its lustre with every passing month after he had left office. By the time he came back from Australia Cariappa was a forgotten man. Nehru’s foresight was confirmed, however, by the statements the general made from time to time. In 1958 he visited Pakistan, where army officers who had served with him in undivided India had just effected a coup. Cariappa publicly praised them, saying that it was ‘the chaotic internal situation which forced these two patriotic Generals to plan together to impose Martial Law in the country to save their homeland from utter ruination’.32 Ten years later, he sent an article to the Indian Express, in which he argued that the chaotic internal situation in West Bengal demanded that President’s Rule be imposed for a minimum of five years. The recommendation was in violation of both the letter and the spirit of the constitution. Fortunately, the piece was returned by the editor, who pointed out to the general that ‘it would be embarrassing in the circumstances both to you and to us to publish this article’.33
The pattern set in those early years has persisted into the present. As Lieutenant General J. S. Aurora notes, Nehru ‘laid down some very good norms’, which ensured that ‘politics in the army has been almost absent’. ‘The army is not a political animal in any terms’, remarks Aurora, and the officers especially ‘must be the most apolitical people on earth!’34 It is a striking fact that no army commander has ever fought an election. Aurora himself became a national hero after overseeing the liberation of Bangladesh, but neither he nor other officers have sought to convert glory won on the battlefield into political advantage. If they have taken public office after retirement, it has been at the invitation of the government. Some, like Cariappa, have been sent as ambassadors overseas; others have served as state governors.
The army, like the civil services, is a colonial institution that has been successfully indigenized. The same might be said about the English language. In British times the intelligentsia and professional classes communicated with one another in English. So did the nationalist elite. Patel, Bose, Nehru, Gandhi and Ambedkar all spoke and wrote in their native tongue, and also in English. To reach out to regions other than one’s own, its use was indispensable. Thus a pan-Indian, anti-British consciousness was created, in good part by thinkers and activists writing in the English language.
After Independence, among the most articulate advocates for English was C. Rajagopalachari. The colonial rulers, he wrote, had ‘for certain accidental reasons, causes and purposes ... left behind [in India] a vast body of the English language’. But now it had come there was no need for it to go away. For English ‘is ours. We need not send it back to Britain along with Englishmen. He humorously added that, according to Indian tradition, it was a Hindu goddess, Saraswati, who had given birth to all the languages of the world. Thus English ‘belonged to us by origin, the originator being Saraswati, and also by acquisition’.35
On the other hand, there were some very influential nationalists who believed that English must be thrown out of India with the British. In Nehru’s day, fitful attempts were made to replace English with Hindi as the language of inter-provincial communication. But it continued to be in use within and outside government. Visiting India in 1961 the Canadian writer George Woodcock found that, despite India’s strangeness, its ‘immense variety of custom, landscape and physical types’, this was ‘a foreign setting in which one’s language was always understood by someone nearby, and in which to speak with an English accent meant that one was seen as a kind of cousin bred out of the odd, temporary marriage of two peoples into which love and hate entered with equal intensity’.36
After Nehru’s death the efforts to extinguish English were renewed. Despite pleas from the southern states, on 26 January 1965 Hindi became the sole official language of inter-provincial communication. As we have seen, this provoked protests so intense and furious that the order was with drawn within a fortnight. Thus English continued as the language of the central government, the superior courts and higher education.
Over the years English has confirmed, consolidated and deepened its position as the language of the pan-Indian elite. The language of the colonizers has, in independent India, become the language of power and prestige, the language of individual as well as social advancement. As the historian Sarvepalli Gopal observes, ‘that knowledge of English is the passport for employment at higher levels in all fields, is the unavoidable avenue to status and wealth and is mandatory to all those planning to migrate abroad, has meant a tremendous enthusiasm since independence to study it’. But, as Gopal also writes, English ‘may be described as the only non-regional language in India. It is a link language in a more than administrative sense, in that it counters blinkered provincialism.’37
Those, like Nehru and Rajaji, who sought to retain English, sensed that it might help consolidate national unity and further scientific advance. That it has done, but largely unanticipated has been its role in fuelling economic growth. For behind the spectacular rise of the software industry lies the proficiency of Indian engineers in English.
V
If India is roughly 50 per cent democratic, it is approximately 80 per cent united. Some parts of Kashmir and the north-east are under the control of insurgents seeking political independence. Some forested districts in central India are in the grip of Maoist revolutionaries. However, these areas, large enough in themselves, constitute considerably less than a quarter of the total land mass claimed by the Indian nation.
Over four-fifths of India, the elected government enjoys a legitimacy of power and authority. Throughout this territory the citizens of India are free to live, study, take employment and invest in businesses.
The economic integration of India is a consequence of its political integration. They act in a mutually reinforcing loop. The greater the movement of goods and capital and people across India, the greater the sense that this is, after all, one country. In the first decades of Independence it was the public sector that did most to further this sense of unity. In plants such as the great steel mill in Bhilai, Andhras laboured and lived alongside Punjabis and Gujaratis, fostering appreciation of other tongues, customs and cuisine, while underlining the fact that they were all part of the same nation. As the anthropologist Jonathan Parry remarks, in the Nehruvian imagination ‘Bhilai and its steel plant were seen as bearing the torch of history, and as being as much about forging a new kind of society as about forging steel’. The attempt was not unsuccessful; among the children of the first generation of workers, themselves born and raised in Bhilai, provincial loyalties were superseded by a more inclusive patriotism, a ‘more cosmopolitan cultural style’.38
More recently, it has been the private sector which has, if with less intent, furthered the process of national integration. Firms headquartered in Tamil Nadu set up cement plants in Haryana; doctors born and educated in Assam establish clinics in Bombay. Many of the engineers in Hyderabad’s IT industry come from Bihar. The migration is not restricted to the professional classes; there are barbers from Uttar Pradesh working in the city of Bangalore, as well as carpenters from Rajasthan. However, it must be said that the flow is not symmetrical. While the cities and towns that are ‘booming’ become ever more cosmopolitan, economically laggard states sink deeper into provincialism.
VI
Apart from elements of politics and economics, cultural factors have also contributed to national unity. Pre-eminent here is the Hindi film. This is the great popular passion of the Indian people, watched and followed by Indians of all ages, genders, castes, classes, religions and linguistic groups.
Each formally recognized state of the Union, says the lyricist Javed Akhtar, ‘has its different culture, tradition and style. In Gujarat, you have one kind of culture, then you go to Punjab, you have another, and the same applies in Rajasthan, Bengal, Orissa or Kerala. Then Akhtar adds, ‘There is one more state in this country, and that is Hindi cinema.’39
This is a stunning insight which asks to be developed further. As a separate state of India, Hindi cinema acts as a receptacle for all that (in a cultural sense) is most creative in the other states. Thus its actors, musicians, technicians and directors come from all parts of India. Thus also it draws ecumenically from cultural forms prevalent in different regions. For example a single song may feature both the Punjabi folk dance called the bhangra and its Tamil classical counterpart, bharatan-atyam.
Having borrowed elements from here, there and everywhere, the Hindi film then sends the synthesized product out for appreciation to the other states of the Union. The most widely revered Indians are film stars. Yet cinema does not merely provide Indians with a common pantheon of heroes; it also gives them a common language and universe of discourse. Lines from film songs and snatches from film dialogue are ubiquitously used in conversations in schools, colleges, homes and offices – and on the street. Because it is one more state of the Union, Hindi cinema also speaks its own language – one that is understood by all the others.
The last sentence is meant literally as well as metaphorically. Hindi cinema provides a stock of social situations and moral conundrums which widely resonate with the citizenry as a whole. But, over time, it has also made the Hindi language more comprehensible to those who previously never spoke or understood it. When imposed by fiat by the central government, Hindi was resisted by the people of the south and the east. When conveyed seductively by the medium of cinema and television, Hindi has been accepted by them. In Bangalore and Hyderabad Hindi has become the preferred medium of communication between those who speak mutually incomprehensible tongues. Finally, one might instance the banning of Hindi films, DVDs and videos by insurgents in the north-east: this, in its own way, is a considerable tribute to the part played by the Hindi film in uniting India.
In 1888 John Strachey wrote that he could never imagine that Punjab and Madras could ever form part of a single political entity. But in 1947 they did, along with many other provinces Strachey regarded as distinct ‘nations’. While in 1947 the unity might have been mostly political, in the decades since it has been shown also to be economic, cultural and, it must be said, emotional. Perhaps many Kashmiris and Nagas yet feel alien and separate. And perhaps some revolutionaries believe that India is a land of many nationalities. But the bulk of those who are legally citizens of India are happy to be counted as such. Some four-fifths of the population, living in some four-fifths of the country, clearly feel themselves to be part of a single nation.
VII
One might think of independent India as being Europe’s past as well as its future. It is Europe’s past, in that it has reproduced, albeit more fiercely and intensely, the conflicts of a modernizing, industrializing and urbanizing society. But it is also its future in that it anticipated, by some fifty years, the European attempt to create a multilingual, multireligious, multiethnic, political and economic community.
Or one might compare India with the United States, a country justly celebrated as ‘the planet’s first multiethnic democracy’.40 Born nearly two centuries later, the Republic of India is today comfortably the world’s largest multiethnic democracy. However, the means by which it has regulated (and moderated) relations between its constituent ethnicities have been somewhat different. For, as Samuel Huntingdon has recently argued, the American nation has been held together by a ‘credal culture’ whose ‘central elements’ have included ‘the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English language, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music’. Indeed, ‘America was created as a Protestant society just as and for some of the reasons Pakistan and Israel were created as Muslim and Jewish societies in the twentieth century.’
The United States is, of course, a nation of immigrants. For much of the country’s history the new groups that came in merged themselves with the dominant culture. ‘Throughout American history’, writes Huntingdon, ‘people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Americans by adopting America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and political values’. Of late, however, newer groups of immigrants have tended to maintain their distinct identities. The largest of these are the Hispanics, who live in enclaves where they cook their own food, listen to their own kind of music, follow their own faith and – most importantly – speak their own language. Huntingdon worries that if these communities are not quickly brought in to line, they will ‘transform America as a whole into a bilingual, bicultural society .
The older American model of assimilation was called ‘the melting-pot’. Individual groups poured all their flavours into the pot, then drank asingle, uniform – or uniformly tasting – drink. Now it appears that the society, and nation, are coming to resemble a ‘salad bowl’, with each group starkly standing out, different and distinctive in how it looks and behaves.
Huntingdon himself is less than enthusiastic about the idea of the salad bowl. For him, America has long been, and must always be, a ‘society with a single pervasive national culture’. He observes that Americans identify most strongly with that culture when the nation is under threat. War leads not merely to national consolidation, but also to cultural unity. The original American Creed was forged as a consequence of the wars against the Native Americans, the English colonists and the Southern States. The events of 9/11 once more brought patriotism and national solidarity to the fore. Concerned that these energies will dissipate, Huntingdon urges a more thoroughgoing return to the creed that, in his view, was responsible for ‘the unity and strength of my country’.41
Interestingly, Huntingdon’s views find an echo in recent statements by the prime minister of Australia, John Howard. That country too has been subject to successive waves of immigration, mostly or wholly European to begin with, but more recently of a markedly Asian character. Howard rejects the possibility of a plurality of cultures co-existing in Australia. ‘You ve got to have a dominant culture’, he says, adding, ‘Ours is Anglo-Saxon – our language, our literature, our institutions.’42
The Huntingdon–Howard line of reasoning is, of course, quite familiar to students of Indian history. It has been made in India by political ideologues such as M. S. Golwalkar and by political parties such as the Jana Sangh and the BJP. They have argued that India has ‘got to have a dominant culture’, and that this culture is ‘Hindu’. As it happened, those views were not endorsed by the founders of the Indian nation, by those who wrote the Indian Constitution and led the first few governments of independent India. Thus India became a salad-bowl nation rather than a melting-pot one.
And it has stayed that way. It has sustained a diversity of religions and languages, precisely the diversities that the likes of Howard and Huntingdon deem inimical to national survival and national solidarity. It has resisted the pressures to go in the other direction, to follow Israel and Pakistan by favouring citizens who follow a certain faith or speak a particular language.
VIII
The most eloquent tribute to the idea of India that I have come across rests in some unpublished letters of the biologist J. B. S. Haldane. In his native Britain, Haldane was a figure of considerable fame and some notoriety. In 1956, already past sixty, he decided to leave his post in University College London and take up residence in Calcutta. He joined the Indian Statistical Institute, became an Indian citizen, wore Indian clothes and ate Indian food. He also travelled energetically around the country, engaging with its scientists but also with the citizenry at large.43
Five years after Haldane had moved to India, an American science writer described him in print as a ‘citizen of the world’. Haldane replied:
No doubt I am in some sense a citizen of the world. But I believe with Thomas Jefferson that one of the chief duties of a citizen is to be a nuisance to the government of his state. As there is no world state, I cannot do this . . . On the other hand I can be, and am, a nuisance to the government of India, which has the merit of permitting a good deal of criticism, though it reacts to it rather slowly. I also happen to be proud of being a citizen of India, which is a lot more diverse than Europe, let alone the USA, USSR, or China, and thus a better model for a possible world organisation. It may of course break up, but it is a wonderful experiment. So I want to be labelled as a citizen of India.44
On another occasion Haldane described India as ‘the closest approximation to the Free World’. An American friend protested, saying his impression was that ‘India has its fair share of scoundrels and a tremendous amount of poor unthinking and disgustingly subservient individuals who are not attractive’.45 To this Haldane responded:
Perhaps one is freer to be as coundrel in India than elsewhere. So one was in the USA in the days of people like Jay Gould, when (in my opinion) there was more internal freedom in the USA than there is today. The ‘disgusting subservience’ of the others has its limits. The people of Calcutta riot, upset trams, and refuse to obey police regulations, in a manner which would have delighted Jefferson. I don’t think their activities are very efficient, but that is not the question at issue.46
Forty years down the line, what Haldane called a ‘wonderful experiment’ might be counted as a success, a modest success. Poverty persists in some (admittedly broad) pockets, yet one can now be certain that India will not go the way of sub-Saharan Africa and witness widespread famine. Secessionist movements are active here and there, but there is no longer any fear that India will follow the former Yugoslavia and break up into a dozen fratricidal parts. The powers of the state are sometimes grossly abused, but no one seriously thinks that India will emulate neighbouring Pakistan, where the chief of army staff is generally also head of government.
As a modern nation, India is simply sui generic. It stands on its own, different and distinct from the alternative political models on offer – be these Anglo-Saxon liberalism, French republicanism, atheistic communism, or Islamic theocracy. Back in 1971, at the time of the Bangladesh crisis, when India found itself simultaneously at odds with communist China, Islamic Pakistan and America, an Indian diplomat captured his country’s uniqueness in this way:
India is regarded warily in the West because she is against the concept of Imperialism and because she ‘invented’ the ‘Third World’.
India is looked on with suspicion in the ‘Third World’ because of her (subversive) sentiments for democracy, human rights, etc.; the Muslim world is wrathful because of our secularism.
The Communist countries regard India as insolent – and potentially dangerous – because we have rejected Communism as the prime condition for Progress.
We are, of course, on the side of God. But is God on our side?47
The writer whose lines open this book, the nineteenth-century poet Ghalib, thought that God was indeed on the side of India. All around him were conflict and privation, but doomsday had not yet come. ‘Why does not the Last Trumpet sound? asked Ghalib of a sage in the holy city of Benares. ‘Who holds the reins of the Final Catastrophe?’ This was the answer he got:
The hoary old man of lucent ken
Pointed towards Kashi and gently smiled.
‘The Architect’, he said, ‘is fond of this edifice
Because of which there is colour in life; He
Would not like it to perish and fall’.
Ghalib and his interlocutor were speaking then of India, the civilization. Speaking now of India, the nation-state, one must insist that its future lies not in the hands of God but in the mundane works of men. So long as the constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails, so long as citizens can speak and write in the language of their choosing, so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army, and – lest I forget – so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung, India will survive.