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WHEN VIEWED AGAINST THE ALMOST five millennia that have elapsed since the beginnings of the Harappān civilisation, India’s existence as an independent nation is an insignificant blip. Even two centuries of colonial rule counts for little more than a footnote in this broad historical sweep. The Mauryan, Gupta and Mughal empires still come out in front in longevity – some would even say in glory. No one can argue with India’s achievements during these golden ages, whether in the fields of philosophy or literature, mathematics or medicine, architecture or the arts.
As India looks beyond the seventy-fifth anniversary of its independence in 2022, the burden of history and the desire to restore this past glory is weighing heavily on its politics and society. In the early 1700s, India was the world’s largest economy. By the time the British left, India’s share of global economic output had dropped to less than 4 per cent. Newly independent India was synonymous with famine and deprivation. Despite the progress that has been made since then, India has yet to shake off these stereotypes or live up to its full potential.
For the first time in 300 years, India’s main strategic and economic rival, China, is tantalisingly close to turning the tables on the dominance of the West. India sees its rightful place as being alongside China in reasserting the pre-Renaissance status quo. On certain measures India is inching up the global rankings. Even considering the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is on track to surpass Japan to become the world’s third-largest economy by the beginning of the 2030s. It will become the globe’s most populous nation in the middle of the current decade. It is also expected to retain its third-place position for military spending. But on almost every calculation aside from population, China is racing ahead: building aircraft carriers that will extend its strategic reach, increasing its share of world trade and attracting the bulk of foreign investment going into Asia. China has successfully deployed its Belt and Road Initiative in all of India’s neighbours, projecting itself further into the Indian Ocean region and intruding into New Delhi’s strongest sphere of influence.
With India’s political landscape firmly dominated by the BJP, the discussion around righting the wrongs of the past is dominating the political narrative. Executive posts in once politically neutral institutions such as universities, scientific and cultural institutions are being filled with government appointees. Histories and school curriculums are being rewritten. Even sport is not immune from this creeping xenophobia. In late 2021, seven Indian Muslims in the state of Uttar Pradesh were arrested for allegedly celebrating Pakistan’s T20 World Cup victory over India. Far worse has been the recent spate of lynching of Muslims on suspicion of consuming beef or for merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time, with beatings and abuse being aired on social media drawing little or no condemnation from the government. Critics of the BJP, both domestic and foreign, are also firmly in the party’s sights. In early 2021, pro-Modi protesters burned effigies of climate activist Greta Thunberg after she tweeted support for striking farmers in Delhi. A few months later, Twitter came under pressure to delete posts critical of the government’s handling of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.
No other event in post-Independence India has thrown such a harsh light on India’s failure of governance, the pitiful state of its health services and the plight of workers in the informal sector. Prior to the pandemic, India took pride in being the largest supplier of generic medicines in the world. As countries scrambled to manufacture Covid-19 vaccines, India touted itself as the nation that would ‘save humanity from a big disaster’. In February 2021, the BJP passed a resolution proclaiming that ‘the able, sensible, committed and visionary leadership of Prime Minister Modi’ had defeated Covid-19. Two months later, India became the global epicentre of the virus. Mass gatherings at the Kumbh Mela religious festival in Haridwar and political rallies during state elections exploded into superspreader events. Images of relatives begging for oxygen to save their loved ones, of funeral pyres being lit in parking lots as crematoriums ran out of space and of the bloated bodies of Covid-19 victims floating down the Ganges will haunt the world’s perceptions of India for many years to come.
More than anything, the pandemic highlighted the gap between government promises and performance. By one estimate, Covid-induced lockdowns saw an additional 230 million individuals fall below the national poverty line. Half of all women working in the formal and informal sectors lost their jobs. During the 2020/21 financial year, the economy shrank by 7.3 per cent, the largest contraction in the country’s history. Even Modi’s staunchest supporters accused him of hubris and complacency. A once-compliant media stationed reporters outside hospitals and morgues and found evidence that rates of Covid-19 infections and deaths were up to ten times higher than revealed in official statistics. A concerted vaccination drive starting in the second half of 2021 helped stem the pandemic, but at the expense of other sectors of the country’s creaking health system.
Devastating though its consequences have been, the Covid-19 pandemic is unlikely to stall the entrenched drift to the right in Indian politics. A Pew Research Center poll published in 2021 found that while a large majority of Indians viewed respect for other religions as an important part of being Indian, they displayed a high desire for religious segregation, especially when it came to marriage and accepting people of certain faiths as neighbours. This innate conservatism, combined with the lack of a coherent political opposition, will continue to work in favour of the BJP and its allies.
Monikers such as the ‘New India’ and the ‘Second Republic’ are entering mainstream discourse as decades of secular nationalism based on cultural pluralism are being replaced by cultural nationalism based on a majoritarian religion, namely Hinduism. The mantra of self-reliance in the twenty-first century is being weaponised in a way that has little to do with Gandhi’s concept of swaraj. Supermarkets are replacing spinning wheels. Middle-class Indians prefer shopping at H&M outlets than at government-run khadi cooperatives where handmade garments are sold. Rather than seeing itself as a balancing power, India now aspires to be a leading power – a move the United States welcomes as it seeks ways to counter China’s influence in the region.
While the tensions between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, aggravated by the Kashmir question and state sponsorship of terrorism, still give policymakers sleepless nights, it is the stand-off between New Delhi and Beijing that is now being labelled as the ‘most dangerous great-power relationship in the world’. A toxic mix of nationalist tendencies, decades-long unresolved territorial disputes, misperceptions of each other’s foreign policy goals and mistrust as to their intentions are fuelling dangerous new rivalries. In June 2020, at least twenty Indian soldiers died in hand-to-hand-fighting in the Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh. They were the first deaths on the Line of Actual Control, as the de-facto border between the two countries is known, in more than half a century. Had it not been for bilateral agreements that prohibit the use of weapons to resolve border disputes, the death toll could have been much higher. Following the clashes, both countries expanded their military deployments on the border, backing them up with new infrastructure to resupply and reinforce them.
What was viewed as Chinese aggression spurred a newfound enthusiasm on India’s part to embrace the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. Known as the Quad, it brings it together India, the United States, Japan and Australia in a joint effort to counterbalance Beijing’s influence in the Indo-Pacific. Time will tell whether the Quad can mitigate the tensions and misunderstandings that threaten bring India and China into open conflict. Such a scenario would cause unimaginable suffering and destruction, not to mention the longer-term consequence of undermining both countries’ ambition to restore the Old-World order, when Western traders wearing neck frills and breeches were forced to beg for trading rights before their respective emperors.
The postcolonial period may have been a mere postscript in India’s long and eventful history, but it is one of which its people can be proud. In 1931, the average Indian could expect to live to the age of twenty-seven. The challenges of feeding its large population were such that Mahatma Gandhi once said, ‘If God were to appear in India, He would have to take the form of a loaf of bread.’ Since Independence, the rate of extreme poverty in India has fallen to 21 per cent, and infant mortality has more than halved in the past two decades. In 2021, life expectancy was just shy of seventy years. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, the ranks of the middle class will have increased tenfold, from 50 million in 2005 to more than to 550 million in 2025. By the middle of the next decade, India will have more English speakers than the United States, giving it an enormous advantage in the global labour market.
Despite these achievements, the challenges for India, no matter where one looks, remain enormous. A 2020 UNICEF report found that 38.4 per cent of children are stunted due to poor malnutrition, and only 42.5 per cent in Grade Three can read a Grade One text. India is among the few countries in the world where the mortality rate among under-five-year-olds is worse for girls than boys, largely due to cultural factors that see males receiving better treatment. India’s ratio of 914 girls born for every 1000 boys is also one of the worst in the world. Despite laws against the use of pre-natal diagnostic techniques for sex detection, the practice of gender-biased sex selection is widespread.
Based on demographic trends, India will need to generate a million jobs a year in the non-farm sector to absorb the 60 million new workers who will enter the economy by 2030. To get to the 8 to 8.5 per cent growth per annum required to generate this level of employment, India will have to invest heavily in creating globally competitive manufacturing hubs, further capitalising on its advantages in areas such as IT and digital services, medical and care-based products, and high-value tourism.
Most of these jobs will have to be generated in mushrooming urban conglomerates, where a lack of planning and investment has left millions lacking in basic amenities such as power, water and sanitation. Seventeen of the twenty fastest-growing cities globally between 2019 and 2035 will be from India, according to an Oxford Economics Global Cities report. High levels of pollution and congestion have already made many of these cities almost unliveable. In 2020 India had twenty-one of the thirty most polluted cities in the world, with New Delhi topping the list. India is also home to several of the world’s most polluted rivers, including the sacred Ganges. Up to 40 per cent of the population may not have access to clean drinking water by 2030.
Yet India also has the world’s largest tertiary-age (eighteen to twenty-two) population. This is projected to peak at 126 million in 2026, before stabilising at 118 million by 2035. If quality educational opportunities can be found for these young adults, the pool of skilled workers will be enormous. The hurdles are significant: Indian enrolment in higher education (27 per cent) lags far behind countries such as China (43 per cent). A staggering 700 new universities will be needed to satisfy demand.
On the plus side, India’s strongly federalist polity has allowed state governments to introduce their own reform agendas to attract investment and create jobs, with southern states such as Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala leading the way. India still outflanks its competitors in outsourced offshore software development and there is little doubt that its global dominance will continue as AI becomes increasingly ubiquitous. Even in this sector, however, its performance is patchy. While Indian Institutes of Technology retain their Ivy League reputation, the rest of the IT education sector lags behind. About one-third of Indians securing IT jobs are self-taught and a majority of graduates hired by tech companies need retraining. New Delhi also lags behind Beijing in R&D spending, investing just 1 per cent of GDP in the sector compared with China’s 2 per cent.
EVERY VOTE STILL COUNTS
India’s proudest achievement has been, without doubt, its almost unbroken record as a liberal democracy. When India finally achieved independence in 1947, many foreign commentators believed that the country would not survive: linguistic and regional differences would make Balkanisation inevitable; caste was alien to the concept of equality and therefore democracy, while high levels of illiteracy were at odds with political expression.
India’s transition from colony to a modern functioning republic has not been perfect – continuing high levels of corruption, state repression in Kashmir and growing inequality are some of its most glaring failures. Yet over more than seven decades it has successfully conducted seventeen general elections and hundreds of state polls, with participation rates that regularly outstrip that of the world’s next largest democratic nation, the United States. A free and vibrant press and a strong civil society keep a check on the inevitable lapses of its political class. As the eminent writer Ved Mehta noted, India’s democratic tradition has served as ‘a safety valve for every kind of national, religious, and caste rivalry’. Among its more impressive outcomes was the election of an Untouchable woman, Mayawati, as chief minister of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, on four occasions, most recently from 2007 to 2012.
But as the Indian-born economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen warns,
It is not enough to continue to have systematic elections, safeguard political liberties and civil rights, and guarantee free speech and an open media. Nor is it adequate to eliminate famine, or to reduce the lead of China on longevity and survival. A more vigorous – and vocal – use of democratic participation can do much more in India than it has already achieved.
Sen sees India deriving its strength from its ability to learn from elsewhere, transform ideas and make them its own. The ubiquity of the chilli pepper, which was brought to India by the Portuguese and is now a fundamental part of Indian cooking, is an example. He also believes that India’s ‘argumentative tradition’, as he calls it, based on public reasoning, is the country’s best defence against authoritarian tendencies and growing inequalities.
What India has lost, and what will be hardest to restore, is the state’s commitment to secularism. When Lal Bahadur Shastri – India’s second prime minister, serving from 1964 to 1966, was asked by a journalist to talk about his faith, he responded, ‘One should not discuss one’s religion in public.’ He was partly taking his cue from Nehru, an avowed atheist. Today, Nehru’s Congress Party, once the champion and protector of secularism, openly identifies itself with causes such as building a Ram temple in Ayodhya, to win back the voters it lost to the BJP juggernaut.
In recent decades, notions of India as a historical entity, a people and a civilisation have become highly politicised. Hindu nationalists refer to India as Bharat Varsha, the ancient Sanskrit name for a Hindu homeland that stretches from the ‘Indus to the Seas’. The evidence for charting India’s history is no longer found in the archaeological record or genetic DNA but in mythological epics such as the Mahābhārata. India’s ‘real heritage’ is contained in even older texts such as the Vedas. ‘The central battle in Indian civilisation today is between those who acknowledge that, as a result of India’s historical experience, our culture is as diverse as it is vast, and those who have presumptuously taken it upon themselves to define, in ever narrower terms, what and who is “truly” Indian,’ writes Indian author and Congress politician Shashi Tharoor. For all the talk of religious tolerance, members of the country’s large Muslim minority remain conspicuously absent from senior positions in public institutions such as the armed forces, the police, courts, universities and the media.
Despite the vast base the BJP can draw on through organisations such as the RSS, and the lack of viable political alternatives, there is nothing inevitable about India’s drift towards majoritarianism. As the noted political scientist Sumit Ganguly argues:
The sheer cultural, linguistic, and ethnic variety of the country will not be easily steamrolled. India’s inherent diversity will stand in the way of forging a regime that embraces illiberalism. Indeed, it can be argued that India has endured as a working, if chaotic, state precisely because of its commitment (even if flawed and partial) to liberal democracy.
Ultimately, India’s present and its future lie not in the hands of its politicians or its priests, but in those of its people: the rural poor who are prepared to save every rupee they can to invest in their children’s education; the restless youth who aspire to a better quality of life; the vibrant middle class that is increasingly demanding accountability from elected officials; the dynamic diaspora that is showcasing India’s talent to the world.
The Indian experiment is at once inspirational and flawed. But as a civilisation, India has shown remarkable resilience, tackling challenges such as growing inequality and authoritarianism and providing a model to the world. Visionary leaders and thinkers will emerge who can unite their country’s diverse communities and ensure that the benefits of social and economic progress are spread equitably and sustainably. India has produced such individuals in the past, from Asoka to Gandhi, Kautilya to Tagore. As the world’s oldest continuous civilisation, India has much to draw on, and even more to offer to the world. If its billion-plus citizens are given the chance to achieve their full potential, its greatest moments are yet to come.