A report card on a billion people over 60 years is a daft thing to attempt but if you think of it as a kind of stocktaking, it begins to seem more sensible. In India’s case, the need to take stock is connected to our anxieties about the country’s future. Those of us who aren’t stockbrokers or economists and can’t write sagely about bears and bulls and bubbles should still make an effort to assess the republic’s past. Can Do Better isn’t enough: we know India can. The question is, has it done well enough through these 60 years for us to hope that it Will Do Better?
One of the advantages of being a citizen of a “developing” country is that optimism, unfashionable in the uber-developed West (because progress from a high baseline is hard to discern), is a feasible state of mind here. There are two things that the Indian state has handled exceptionally badly, which I shall come to, but those apart, the short history of the republic has gone better than anyone could have imagined in 1947.
Among the taken-for-granted achievements of the republican state is that it presides over a country that is unified and stable, and whose stability is founded on a time-tested addiction to voting. Indian democracy has so often been used as an alibi for the country’s failures by India’s boosters that people tend to roll their eyes when this claim to political virtue is entered, but you only have to look at Indonesia (the secession of East Timor), Pakistan (the corruption of military rule) and Sri Lanka (majoritarianism and civil war) to know that a stable democracy is a good reason to touch wood and celebrate.
When the members of India’s Constituent Assembly insisted on universal adult franchise for the world’s poorest electorate, they bet the house on democracy against very long odds…and won. We, their descendants, should celebrate their high-risk gamble without apology or self-consciousness. Add to this the endorsement of affirmative action and the relatively peaceful integration of princely India’s kingdoms, and you have political foresight and achievement on an epochal scale.
But the political achievement of the republic doesn’t stop here. The Nehruvian state’s claim to democratic originality is based upon the pluralism that it made integral to the country’s political culture. After Partition, Indian secularism started life as a kind of chivalry, with the country’s Muslim minority cast as the damsel in distress. This republican determination to reassure Indian Muslims that they were full citizens of the new nation, despite the land of the pure that their co-religionists had established next door, was challenged by majoritarian parties and majoritarian violence, but it survived.
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