India: TIME article

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TIME International, March 25, 1996 Volume 147, No. 13
 
SPECIAL REPORT: INDIA
 
A republic of 940 million bids to become a full member of the 
global marketplace
 
JAMES WALSH
 
In 1783, three years before Sir William Jones discovered that Sanskrit was
closely akin to ancient Latin, Greek and Gothic, the great Edmund Burke rose
before the House of Commons to deplore British neglect of India. "Every
other conqueror, Arab, Tartar or Persian, has left behind him some monument,
either of royal splendour or useful beneficence," he said. "If tomorrow we
were expelled from Hindostan, nothing would remain to indicate that it had
been possessed during the inglorious period of our dominion by any better
tenants than the ourang-outang or the tiger."
 
Burke can be forgiven if his history, as well as his natural lore, was
imprecise: no "Arab" ever conquered India, though Muslims did, and the
orangutan hangs out elsewhere. Yet his warning obviously had an effect. Two
turbulent centuries later, a land that has been independent India for nearly
50 years still commemorates the British raj's end with a stirring spectacle
in New Delhi. As trumpets sound, camels appear on the ramparts of the domed
and turreted government buildings, an expanse of architecture designed by
Sir Edwin Lutyens that forms a majestic fantasy in stone. Down to Vijay
Chowk, the large square below, march bagpipers skirling the bittersweet
strains of Abide with Me, one of Mohandas Gandhi's favorite hymns.
 
At such a moment, the Indias of Gandhi's and Kipling's imaginations seem
eerily to coexist, like a stereopticon brought into subtle focus. The hybrid
traditions of the Beating of the Retreat ceremony display a civilization
that is perhaps the most inclusive in the world: remarkably absorbent of
outside influences while remaining unmistakably itself. Nowadays that
resilience is undergoing a test carrying high promise and high anxiety in
roughly equal measure. Although recurrently invaded down the ages, India
since antiquity has been a universe in itself, barricaded by wide seas, the
world's tallest mountains and other forbidding obstacles. Today's republic
of 940 million people is shedding, albeit unevenly, its romance with
self-sufficiency, together with deep-seated suspicions of the outside world.
It wants a treasury commensurate with its wealth of spirit. It wants
cellular phones and fancy cars and a diplomatic heft more in keeping with
the country's size. In short, India is bidding to become a fully accredited,
paid-up member of the global marketplace.
 
In a land famous for extremes, the cliches of travelog writers--the "triumph
and tragedy" and gold-and-lice schools--have been only too sadly close to
the mark. Echoing a familiar judgment, University of California, Los Angeles
professor Stanley Wolpert wrote, "Everything is there, usually in magnified
form. No extreme of lavish wealth or wretched poverty, no joy or misery, no
beauty or horror is too wonderful, or dreadful, for India." Yet the changes
in evidence on this platitude-wearied ground of late have become dramatic.
The country today has a middle class numbering about 250 million, or around
the same as the entire U.S. populace, a demographic revolution that is
capturing the fancy of many foreign investors.
 
Granted, "middle class" is a variable term, and Indians of that description
do not enjoy the public infrastructure, or the incomes, available to
Japanese, Germans and Americans. Still, thanks to economic reforms carried
out during the past five years by the government of Prime Minister P.V.
Narasimha Rao, many Indians are beginning to earn and buy enough to make
them a factor to be reckoned with in policy calculations. Their kinsmen
overseas, notably in America, are beginning to plow back more and more into
the homeland, not only money but also know-how and cultural experiences
gained abroad. In politics and trade, the Soviet Union's former best friend
in Asia is orienting itself more to the U.S., with its resources of capital
and technology. Unfortunately, this dynamism, besides posing a threat of
social turmoil, is rocking the political structure to its foundations. How
India will carry on from here looks likely to shape the fortunes of what
will be the world's most populous nation in the next century.
 
Impulses to cast off a planned economy and emulate the modern West are
hardly unusual, of course. Governments from Poland to Brazil are struggling
to do the same, along with Asia's other center of gravity, China, which has
achieved a formidable head start. What makes the experiment so daunting for
India is the risk of imbalance--no small concern in light of the
subcontinent's dodgy geopolitics, these days threatening an accelerated
nuclear-arms race. The rivalry with Pakistan is just one danger confronting
India. A population that will soon overtake China's, but without anything
close to China's long history of central governance, is venturing to alter
fundamentally its social order. In a territorial vastness 10 times the size
of Germany, incorporating scores of languages and many scripts as well as
two mutually distrustful major religions, the Western import that almost all
Indians agree is worth keeping--parliamentary democracy--is facing
unprecedented trials.
 
Winston Churchill, no friend of Indian independence, argued in a 1931
speech, "India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than
the equator." That may have been true, in a strict political sense, for most
of history, since British India was in fact the first empire that united
almost all the subcontinent. But events since 1947, when the Union Jack was
lowered, have proved Churchill wrong. The pluralism of liberal democracy,
under the extraordinary moral guidance of Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, has
stitched together a workable nation-state that takes pride in its liberties,
despite terrible strains. Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, learned that
lesson when she was unceremoniously ousted from the premiership--and briefly
jailed--following her 21-month fling with authoritarianism under the 1975-77
Emergency.
 
Britain's colonial record on the subcontinent was in many ways exactly what
Burke styled it in his denunciation of "voracious birds of passage,"
describing minions of the English East India Co. But from Burke's day
on--and thanks in part to European recognition of an ancient
ethno-linguistic affinity with India--a Western-style political edifice
slowly took shape, acquiring in the process a predictably distinctive Indian
personality. Along with a Parliament modeled on Westminster's, the modern
republic inherited universities, a dedicated civil service and a disciplined
army that is probably the world's most obeisant to civilian authority: the
1.2 million-strong armed forces do not even have a Joint Chiefs of Staff, or
any Indian counterpart of the Pentagon.
 
Of all the influences that have taken root on this soil over 4,000 years,
from the Vedic gods of the Aryans to the Persian architecture of the Moguls
and John Company's merchant capitalism, this framework of political life is
the country's greatest unifier. Shekhar Gupta, an editor of the Indian
Express, accepts that his homeland has "the most fractious democracy in the
world," with "an exceptional record of civil strife, often separatist, in
one region or another." Even so, he notes, "it has not only survived, it has
actually, if marginally, expanded in size."
 
A half-century after Nehru's ringing "tryst with destiny" speech at the hour
of independence, the gusts blowing through India's more open windows are
approaching monsoon force. Institutions, some of them thousands of years
old, have begun to shake under an upheaval that is remaking the caste
system, the family structure, a large part of the economy and all of
politics. In New Delhi, opposition figures as well as leaders of government
in the ruling Congress Party are falling into discredit right and left as
the most far-reaching corruption scandal in the republic's history keeps
naming names. The sums involved in most of these charges of venality are not
large by international standards, but disillusionment is no less for that.
One day the Janata Dal party is implicated, the next day L.K. Advani, leader
of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata party. Just a few weeks before
national elections, the buzz of the bazaars is speculation about how long
Prime Minister Rao, a man who comports himself in an almost abstracted
manner, can keep above the mess.
 
Says Atul Kohli, an international-affairs professor at Princeton and an
authority on his country's democracy: "Corruption in India doesn't surprise
me. What does surprise me is how widespread and how high up it goes. That's
a quantum leap in political decay." At the same time, observes Balveer
Arora, head of the Center for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru
University, "there is change at every level of government. It's a lot of
change for a short period of time."
 
The effect is as if the Hindu god Siva, the Destroyer, had made an epochal
visitation. What makes such a passage doubly fraught is the threat of the
destructive overwhelming the creative. The gingerly but steadfast economic
reforms pursued to date under the direction of Rao's talented Finance
Minister, Manmohan Singh, could come tumbling down under the weight of
pandering to fears and threatened interests. That would be truly tragic, for
the potential of India as a world player is huge, as foreign visitors have
recognized for centuries. Despite the open sore of Kashmir, where violent
Muslim secessionists meet the danda raj--the rule of the stick--by New
Delhi, the basically decent instincts of a nation with redoubtable talents
deserves more than just the first fruits of Western-style economic
performance. By right, and with luck, it will get much more.
 
India's new calculation of where its best future lies did not come easily.
The Soviet Union's demise, by now a familiar culprit, spelled the end of
India's major arms supplier and strategic patron. Nehru's form of Fabian
socialism was never so drastic and brutalizing as Moscow's Stalinism, but
for four decades Fabian socialism directed the country's growth with
five-year plans and a sprawling state network of industries. Import
substitution, much in favor during the independence era, squared perfectly
with India's time-honored view of itself as a cosmos apart. This system, the
Congress Party's only article of faith beyond anticolonialism, came crashing
down in 1991. Foreign-exchange reserves fell to $1 billion, a dire threat to
oil supplies and other vital imports.
 
After Rajiv Gandhi, Indira's son, was assassinated that year, a wave of
sympathy votes unexpectedly restored Congress to power under Rao. Without
any mandate as such for liberalization, he and Singh proceeded to open many
of the airlocks and pressure valves that had long kept out foreigners who
wanted to do business in India. From these gradual loosenings of tariffs,
capital controls and other insulations flowed a degree of enterprise the
ordinary Indian would not have predicted. With its purchasing power, a
rising middle class, admittedly based almost wholly in the cities so far,
developed tastes for creature comforts and new luxuries ranging from color
TVs to cars, not to mention basic labor-saving devices. According to Judith
Brown, professor of Commonwealth history at Oxford and an author of many
books on India, washing machines have been a hot ticket. She adds, "And the
latest craze is gardens--garden centers are blossoming. As people have more
disposable income, the first thing they do is improve their houses."
 
Brown also notes the signal reorientation of Indians' sights overseas. "The
more India is opened up to the West, the more the influence is
American--through the media and because of the large number of Indians who
live in the U.S. Today America is the preferred destination of nonresident
Indians, rather than Britain." Lately, in a country that lost some of its
finest brainpower to such Western enterprises as the U.S. space program, the
homegrown technopolis centered in Banglalore in southern India has its
cutting-edge developments in aerospace and software.
 
The fact that Rao's regime has helped accomplish all this under a democratic
system has made such rewards all the sweeter. In Nehru's day, Indians could
always comfort themselves in their poverty by noting the considerable lead
that the West enjoyed in economic development. The rationale became
increasingly hard to sustain over the past 20 years as Asians to the east,
from Singapore to South Korea, surpassed India by giant strides in
prosperity. Even the post-Marcos Philippines, which had lagged behind the
Little Dragons for quite a while, was percolating with growth. A source of
pride for India nowadays is that, unlike China, it is starting to join this
major league of Asian go-getters with a fully functioning system of
political liberties.
 
The system is messy and inefficient, to be sure, and economic liberalization
is not everyone's cup of Darjeeling. With every instance of social
dislocation or threat of competition to domestic market monopolies comes a
hail of attacks from the right and left. The Rao government's decision to
sign the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which
set up the new World Trade Organization, was billed by oppositionists as a
shocking sacrifice of sovereignty--no less than presidential hopeful Pat
Buchanan has demonized the wto in America. The truth is that more open trade
is far likelier to disrupt normal life in India than it ever could in the
U.S. for the simple reason that it represents such a drastic departure.
 
Karl Marx once did a study of Indian history and wondered why the
civilization seemed to persist in such basically changeless form under a
succession of conquerors. He concluded that village life was the staple. The
better answer, though, would have been the caste system, a complex weave of
inherited jobs and privileges that crossed all political lines of the
moment. For millenniums, the horizontally linked castes, or rather
subcastes, continued to keep alive the idea of India as a unified culture.
What this distinctive social fabric also achieved, however, was the
prevention of upward social mobility. As the 20th century draws to a close,
the arrival of unaccustomed economic opportunities is starting to unravel
the institution. Paul Kreisberg, a senior fellow at Washington's Woodrow
Wilson Center, remarks simply, "Traditional ways of doing things are under
more intense pressure for change than has ever taken place in India."
 
Small wonder that politicians from communists to Hindu chauvinists believe
they can harness anxieties. At a time when the nation has solid grounds for
optimism, an accompanying strain on politics as usual is also extending to
the everyday business conducted by the bureaucratic raj. A resurgence in the
past decade of Hindu-Muslim communal violence, illustrated most vividly in
Bombay's street mayhem and the destruction of a mosque in Ayodhya in 1992,
has cast a shadow over the civil service's old sense of mission in governing
all India for the good of all India. Even as the economy decentralizes,
political power is gravitating toward state governments, which in Indira
Gandhi's time were virtual Congress vassals. Editor Gupta notes that the
Hindi-speaking belt, which stretches along the Gangetic plain in the north,
is losing its old status as the nation's political-cultural heartland. "It
is likely that much of the fresh investment will be cornered by the more
enterprising states such as Maharashtra and Gujurat in the west and
Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in the south," he says.
 
This evolution, which Gupta describes as "haphazard" rather than free, might
be enough to give pause to any reformer, although Manmohan Singh still
professes the view that measured doses of liberalization are the answer.
Heaven knows, the measures to date have barely scratched the
state-controlled sector, a vast corporate machine that turns out
wristwatches and jet planes, generates power and runs hotels. Robert
Bradnock, a South Asia specialist at London's School of Oriental and African
Studies, wonders whether all too much is being made of the reform campaign's
accomplishments so far. Although the re-entry of Coca-Cola and Kentucky
Fried Chicken's pathmaking into India have been politically charged,
Bradnock predicts that "the next steps will be more difficult"--electricity,
road building and the like. Backsliding seems a definite risk, but Bradnock
in any case thinks a period of consolidation is in store.
 
Adjusting course seems to be an equally safe bet for the political-party
system. Corruption is merely one symptom of an order of allegiances that has
outgrown its usefulness. However the Congress electrified the country during
the independence movement, its postcolonial effort to be all things to all
Indians has plainly come a cropper. The great banyan of patronage and
favoritism fostered under prolonged rule by a single party can no longer
serve a people testing their individual confidence on the world stage. The
outward and visible signs of democracy that Indians have cherished for 50
years--the vote, a constitutional government--were not matched during those
decades by the kind of democratic civil society from which European
liberalism emerged. When the small farmer and machine-tool maker acquire
financial independence, their votes will seek out choices greater than those
that shopworn ideologies can offer.
 
The land that Burke's preachments sought to help rescue still harbors much
of the world's most desperately poor--a plight that a half-century's worth
of self-sufficiency has only marginally relieved. The dreampolitik of the
Mahatma's spinning wheel and Pandit Nehru's socialism is only just starting
to adjust to the realities of the globe beyond those mountains and seas.
Indians who have sought their personal fortunes on those farther shores have
lighted the way for a homeland ready to catch up with dynamic East Asia.
India will not quickly cast off the dead hand of the past, in the form of
antagonisms with Pakistan or a foreign policy that still sees "nonalignment"
as a fresh idea. But Indians are too talented, too various and irrepressible
to remain aloof from influences they have welcomed through the ages.
Throughout it all, and despite today's age of high anxiety, India will
remain somehow thoroughly itself.
 
--Reported by Helen Gibson/London and William Stewart and Dick Thompson/New
Delhi