India still popular with most nations

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The astonishing thing about India, after fifty years of independence, is that it is liked by practically everybody. Being an Indian ambassador abroad must be one of the least stressful jobs in the world.

India's neighbors don't all love it, of course. Pakistan fears and mistrusts it, Bangladesh is ambivalent, and Sri Lanka and Nepal work hard to keep their distance. As Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau once remarked about living next to the United States, it's hard being in bed with an elephant. But go beyond the immediate neighborhood, and the good-will toward India is unanimous.

It isn't normal for countries as big as India to be liked. 'Poor little Kuwait' or 'plucky little Chechnya', maybe (if you're far enough away and of a sentimental turn of mind), but few people who aren't actually native-born experience a flood of warm emotions at the words 'United States', or 'Russia', or even 'Indonesia'.

I'm walking on thin ice here, because this column appears in all these countries, but I am not being abusive. It's just that big countries have complicated foreign relations with a lot of other places, and rarely resist the opportunity to throw their weight around. So they tend to accumulate...not enemies, exactly, but deeply disillusioned partners, shall we say, who may get on well with ordinary Americans/Russians/Indonesians, but have large reservations about the policies made in Washington/Moscow/Jakarta.

In striking contrast, the rest of the world likes not just ordinary Indians, but India itself. Which is more than most Indians can manage, much of the time. The remarkable thing about the golden anniversary of India's independence on Aug. 15 is how little Indians are celebrating it.

The multi-party coalition government led by Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral has been "behaving as if it had been ambushed by an unexpected happening", wrote the newsmagazine India Today. That might be explained by the fact that it is India's fourth government in a year, and that it is a minority government, and that pieces of it keep falling off at inopportune moments. But the Indian in the street also seems distinctly sour on the occasion.

It's as though Indians were asking: what is there to celebrate? One-quarter of India's population, 250 million people, are now defined as 'middle-class', and since the economy was liberalized in the early 1990s economic growth has been running at 5-7 percent a year. But 'middle-class' is a slippery term that may mean barely enough disposable income for a bicycle and a television set -- and almost one-third of Indians live below the poverty line.

Indeed, one-third of Indians are still illiterate. Moreover, India's politics is so corrupt and chaotic that it would make Colombians blush. In Salman Rushdie's novel The Moor's Last Sigh, he has a character define modern Indian democracy as "one man, one bribe". The same character propounds the 'Indian Law of Relativity': "Everything is for relatives." It's a deeply rooted pattern of behavior that drives Indians mad with frustration -- even when they are doing it themselves.

So modern Indians are depressed by the country's apparent failure to progress -- especially as they watch smaller, nimbler countries in Southeast and East Asia race ahead. Per capita income in South Korea was lower than East Bengal's in 1953; now it's nearing developed world standards. Even in the midst of a huge financial crisis, Thais enjoy ten times the average income of Indians. Why can't India get the same results?

One reason is simply its size. South Korea has only 45 million people, and Thailand has 75 million. India has 970 million. The only country in the world that compares to it is China -- and then the comparisons become distinctly less embarrassing.

China has endured 48 years of iron tyranny under Communist rule. At least 10 million people have been killed in the various campaigns against real and imaginary enemies of the regime, and around 30 million more have died of starvation as a result of various lunatic economic schemes imposed on the country by its Marxist rulers (most notably the 'Great Leap Forward'). And what has China to show for all this sacrifice?

The level of illiteracy is lower in China, if you believe government statistics -- maybe as low as 10 percent. The families of Party bosses in China are certainly richer than even the most corrupt leaders of Indian parties. But apart from that, the level of economic development is about the same, and so are the social divisions: many people moving into the consumer society, many others sunk in the most desperate poverty.

Then why do Indian cities look so much poorer than Chinese cities, with vast slums and squatter camps surrounding them and families literally living on the pavements?

Because India is a free country where whole families are free to move to the city if they choose. In China, the families are kept in their impoverished villages while only their men are allowed to go to the cities to seek work. Indeed, the Chinese regime's biggest nightmare is the 50-100 million part-time laborers who surge around the country on the railroads.

India is living proof that even the most incompetent and corrupt of democratic governments will produce, over a long period of time, about as much economic growth and social justice as the most rigorous and ruthless of dictatorships. Why? Perhaps because no democratic government can afford to be as capricious, irrational and self-contradictory as even the mildest dictatorship.

This is reason enough for Indians to cheer up about their country and stop flagellating themselves, but it doesn't explain why other people like India so much. Most foreigners know virtually nothing about the fine detail of Indian economic policy and social structure; they just have a vague feeling that India is doing something right. What could that be?

The Indian writer Sunil Khilnani put his finger on it in his excellent new book The Idea of India: "Half a century later, it is easy to miss the sheer novelty of what was attempted in the first two decades after independence. Today, the idea of multiculturalism is a familiar if vague one...yet in the late forties, it was certainly not a standard way to envisage the construction of a new state."

India contains within its borders a greater ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity than all of Europe from Ireland to Russia, and more people, too. No empire before the British had brought all of India under a single ruler, and many people believed in 1947 that it would break up again once the firm smack of imperial authority was removed.

Winston Churchill, an imperialist to the core, practically frothed at the mouth on the topic. "India," he ranted, "is an abstraction. India is no more a political personality than Europe. India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator." Mercifully, he was out of government in 1947 -- and as usual, he was wrong.

India was really created after 1947, mainly under the rule of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. "I am the last Englishman to rule India," Nehru once joked -- not true, of course, but he did belong to a British-educated elite that was somewhat removed from the clashing realities of daily life in India.

It was precisely this distance that let Nehru see India whole, and understand that stressing the usual unifiers of nation-states (a single language, a common religion, shared historical myths) would actually work against India's unity. On the contrary, India's only hope was to found its very identity on diversity and democracy. And to an amazing extent, Nehru's strategy worked.

Around 80 percent of Indians are Hindus, but its presidents have included two Sikhs, one Muslim, and now a Dalit (untouchable). Chauvinists in northern India keep trying to turn Hindi, spoken by over a third of the population, into the sole 'national language', but they never prevail against the common- sense argument that the country must have a common national language (English) in which people from every part of the country are at an equal disadvantage.

And despite the poverty and the corruption, India has remained democratic. Indeed, it has got much more democratic -- which is, of course, a double-edged sword.

The old Nehruvian elite is gone, and the Congress Party's stranglehold on power has been broken. But the new breed of politicians includes many nasty elements: people who are merely criminal, like the monumentally corrupt Laloo Yadav who was just removed as first minister of the state of Bihar, and people who cynically incite and exploit religious and ethnic hatreds, like Bal Thackeray of the sub-fascist Shiv Sena party that now runs Bombay.

Even at the federal level, India's secular and multicultural character is under challenge by the Bharatiya Janata Party, which publicly claims to 'protect' Hinduism from the excessive privileges of the minorities (and less openly works to defend the interests of upper-caste Hindus from the demands of the lower castes). The political scene is a chaotic and fragmented mess. And yet...

As democracy took deeper root in India, the old mass parties were bound to fragment, and new parties appealing to regional, religious, and caste prejudices were bound to grow. Theoretically, they could destroy the whole system -- but if Indian democracy was ever to mature, it had to let them free to do their worst.

It's going to a bumpy ten years until these ugly new forces lose their current novelty value. Even the country's brightening economic prospects could be jeopardized if the regional and religious parties grow too strong. But for all the shouting, there is as yet no grave threat to India's steadfast commitment to diversity and tolerance -- and if you're still wondering why India is so well liked in the world, you need look no further.