Sunday Posts

China and India stepped back from the brink, at least for the moment. But the flare-up in June - and indeed the ongoing tensions - has strained relationships and nudged India closer to the United States. But, not many people in India would readily buy the argument that India should become a member of the Quad (a grouping of United States, Japan, India and Australia for the control of Indo-Pacific) to face-off China. For them, it really means Indian lives and India's prosperity are put in the line for containing China. Despite all the public outrage at China's misbehaviour and even with all the forthcoming bollywood fare trashing China, that would be a hard sell in India. Indian leaders, despite their almost pagan love for spectacles, are realists. Even though they sell to the public India's impending great power status, they are well aware of the constraints that India's divided polity, widespread poverty and lack of productive manpower impose. For all the transformativ...

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will arrive in Dhaka tomorrow. His is a historic opportunity, to reimagine the relationship with Bangladesh, and to unlock the prosperity cycle that can transform Eastrn India and beyond. To do this, a focus on the future will be needed. Almost all the discussions in South Asia, all the time, is about the past. This is one region caught in endless cycles of memories, revenge and retribution, as if the time never moves forward. This would be the challenge that Mr Modi must overcome. Bangladesh matters. Many Indians may think of it as a poor, weak, insignificant country, pale in significance in comparison with Pakistan or China. But with its 156 million people, it is the 8th most populous country in the world, though that fact does not seem to count much in this very crowded corner. It is a poor country, but despite a lower per capita income compared to India and Pakistan, it betters them on measures that count, higher life expectancy at birth, lower c...

Nisid Hajari makes such an obvious point in Foreign Policy ( see here ) that it surprises. Blaming India for the failure of Pakistan is so cliched! What do we not know of the arguments made? That Gandhi was too religious for secular leaders like Jinnah to put up with, and this is why he went on to set up a religious state? Pakistan faltered because it was not given Calcutta, and later Kashmir? That Indian leaders never wanted Pakistan to succeed? These arguments have been repeated since the 1940s, and promoted assiduously by two groups of participants in the drama, who may each have something not to talk about. First, the Pakistani elite. Nehru did indeed scare them off, but this was not about Hindu majority. If anything, ask the Hindu fundamentalists in India, Nehru and Gandhi would be accused of undermining Hindu majoritarianism. Nehru scared them off because he was dangerously socialist and the founders of Pakistan were mostly landowners. Most political leaders, and the Army t...

I am travelling - covering seven cities in three weeks - and this is the reason for relative silence on this blog. It is not the paucity of time, but the excitement of the real work; not the difficulty of Internet connection, but the abundance of real conversations and friendships, that made me write less and talk more in the last few days. But, the journey so far was full of discoveries, insights and indeed excitement, events and opportunities that make me question my assumptions and desires, and stoke my aspirations and encourage me to raise my activities to a wholly different level. When I was in Dubai airport, on my way to Dhaka, transiting as usual, the air-conditioners in Terminal 3 gave away. Water poured down like a huge cloudburst, closing the shops and dispersing the crowd, blocking the main lobby of the airport. I was lucky as I was sitting in a coffee shop at a distance, so the whole affair looked like a surreal rain rather than the wet mess it was for the people caught o...

The frontiers of civilization keeps shifting: Now it is in Dhaka. Unlike the American formulation, however, this is not about one kind of civilization up against another. It is a different, but known, variety of struggle - of a modern nation of aspirations against the old structures of repression and fear. The Islamists in Bangladesh, powerful as they always were, have finally come out of woodwork and trying to claim the country: In a rematch of the country's liberation war fought forty years ago, they are, in fact, more ideologically formidable, and may be more numerous. However, they are up against a modern young aspirational nation, no less determined than their forefathers a few generation ago, no less able than the military commanders of the earlier generation. This time, the battle is fought in proxies. Most powers will sit out on the fence; they ought to: This is a dangerous battle, mostly fought in ideas. While battling against the government, the reactionary forces ma...

Indian politics has just got interesting in the last few weeks.  Anand Mahindra, a leading industrialist, was quoted by The Economist recently saying that 2012 was possibly the worst year for India's economy and polity for a long time. He is indeed right: For much of 2012, Indian economy was bumping along the bottom and the Government was frozen in a policy paralysis, mired in corruption scandals and unable to do anything at all. The economic growth rate plummeted to 5% mark, which meant, in effect, that more people will remain in poverty and the middle classes will take a lot longer to get the commodities they covet than they previously expected: A recipe for disaster in a country like India. Modern India presents a classic illustration of Ernest Gellner's point that the modern state draws its legitimacy from economic growth and the lack of it may cause an existential trouble for the state. That moment surely arrived in India in 2012. In many a ways, India's democ...

India is an ancient land but a modern nation: The battle to define what it stands for is about to begin. It is common in the history of nations, such battles. Despite the lore, nations are neither perennial nor indispensable, it is only a rather modern construct to define the state with cultural traits and organise the society around it. India as a modern nation, which emerged sixty-five years ago out of a retreating British empire, was based on certain ideas grounded in the belief systems at the time of its creation: of a redeeming optimism at the end of great wars and at the beginning of the end of political imperialism, of the triumph for modern science and technology in beating back our Malthusian destiny and expanding our physical capabilities, and of the faith in human freedom. These lofty visions that defined India, and the nations born thereafter, had one crucial drawback: They were aspirational, and ignored the muddy realities of concocted nations emerging out of centurie...

Try telling any Indian that nationalism is a dated ideology and they would think you are completely insane: True, nationalism is alive and well in India. Indeed, South Asian region is possibly the most nationally conscious in the whole world now. Follow its newspapers, television, various proclamations of political leaders or the usual dinner table chatter, and one gets to see a nationalism of extremely sensitive variety, often brandished and easily offended. One can count this as a huge achievement. Churchill's observation that India was no more a country than the equator was true at the time of its pronouncement, a mere hundred years ago. The British empire walked into India virtually unnoticed because there was, to be honest, no India in any sense: They traded with various Nabob's territory and bought the empire over a few years. One can argue that India was discovered, somewhat, by the dismemberment of its territory, which every Indian now resents to, and with the creatio...

The world seems to be discovering India. At least, the cityboys are. The talk is that India is that 'emerging' nation now, which will put China behind. My taxi driver says so, one may assert. Besides, the Indian growth rate, compared to the anemic European and North American ones, looks stellar. There are two reasons about this excitement regarding India. The first is Demography. After all, China is ageing, and India is full of young people. Lots of commentators, Nandan Nilkeni among them, talks glowingly about the 'demographic dividend'. The idea is that with so many young hands to work, this is indeed India's moment to lose. The second factor, though a bit cliched, is democracy. Indian democracy is a crowded, chaotic circus, but it is still the country's most crucial asset against the social discord that is bound to happen when a country changes course so dramatically. While the Chinese migrant labour may have to suffer in silence, only to rebel with force and...

Since I wrote about Lord Macaulay in 2008 and praised the brilliance of his scheme, I have been engaged in the debate about Macaulay endlessly. If anyone has any doubts about how profound the effects of an education reform can be, Macaulay is a case in point. He used English Language as a weapon of empire building, and helped dominate a much larger country, India, through the creation of a franchise of privilege based on the language. Indeed, India was divided and had no sense of nation, as John Stratchey would later say. With the breakdown of state power, the indigenous education system was dying. These factors made Macaulay's passage rather easy - he did not have to engineer any full scale cultural revolution. Besides, his scheme was not an original invention as some would like to say. An education system based on the language of the state was an established way of dividing and governing a society, somewhat since the Roman time. In all fairness, Macaulay was only applying the l...

Duality, as in Dualism, is an essential part of the India experience. I said before, whatever you find in India, you will also find the opposite. It is the coexistence that both of opposing, chaotic and diverse world views is the only thing that is truly Indian. India is not an EITHER-OR country, it is mostly an AND country. This is not to say there are no conflicts in India; those tales are just too well known. But the idea that opposites can coexist, non-violently, is an important idea which remained at the core of the idea of India. I have talked about this again and again while talking about democracy and diversity, but the dualism, coexistence, is quite central to Indian cultural ideas as well. But duality is different from diversity, which we already discussed. India's huge diversity brings the idea of reconciliation to the fore all the time, but it is still not the variations of caste, class, religion and language which makes you see two Indias at the same time. Rather, it ...

Diversity is the most obvious dimension of the Indian experience, yet it is the most sublime. Yes, India indeed looks like an endless fancy dress party, a bewildering combination of languages, dresses and appearances. Yet, everyone also keeps telling you about a sense of 'unity in diversity' all the time. That expression comes from Vincent Smith, a British historian who wanted to understand the broad concept of India, in European terms. Since then, the theme of any study of India was to see this 'unity' in all diversity, making a rather tortured effort to root all elements of diversity into an universal Indianness . These attempts are so common that the apparent diversity has become sublime, at least in the interpretative literature, and in the name of political correctness, the sublime unity seems to have become all pervasive. It does not have to be so confusing though, at least if we accept that India is not a nation in the European sense. That should not offend any...

There are times when I encounter a special book. A book which questions fundamental assumptions of my thoughts, the ideas I took as given. Over last couple of weeks, coincidentally, I encountered not one, but two such books. These, along with various experiences and reflections, allow me to think about the idea of India all over again. The first among these is a travelogue. Benard Imhasly , a Swiss cultural anthropologist and someone who knows India quite well, has written a beautiful book - Abschied Von Gandhi - which I read in its English translation, Goodbye to Gandhi . Beautifully presented, this is an attempt to retrace the footsteps of Gandhi - from Porbandar to Champaran to Sevagram - and reflections on modern India from the vantage point of its Gandhian vision. I must not give the impression that it is a biographic commentary or hagiography in any sense, the author travels to Devdungari to see MKSS and its founder, Aruna and Bunker Roy, as well as to Manipur to meet ...

President Obama has spoken. The Presidential Strategic Review is finally over and President has agreed to send troops, thousands of them, to Afghanistan. In the classic politico-speak, he said he is sending them now to bring everyone back earlier. In short, he wanted to appeal to everyone, particularly those in the middle. But, by doing that, he demonstrated, yet again, why the compulsions of democratic governance are hindrances , not help, in solving problems like Afghanistan. The President finally agreed that a surge will work in Afghanistan. More troops and we will make Taliban bleed in their eyeballs, as a British general said it. Get in big now and come out early, the President has said. All clear, popular analogies. Just that most of those metaphors do not work and simply not true in the context of Afghanistan. Taliban isn't a person. It is a political movement, with some extreme ideologies. But, like Naxalites in India or Maoists in Nepal, it is hard to say who Taliban i...