This has been a summer of spirited literary reflection
in the West on the state of India, prompted by the 50th anniversary
of its independence, which began at the famous midnight of Aug.
15, 1947. First came Granta, which produced an entire issue of India
meditations this spring. Then arrived the New Yorker's special issue
in June, an enormously interesting and creative collection of (largely
expatriate) Indian memoirs and fiction. Conferences built around
the anniversary have been convened in Washington, New York and London;
scholarly papers have been duly written and collected; and a stunning
exhibition of an ancient Indian manuscript, the Padshahnama, has
been mounted in Washington in commemoration. All this, and the main
parades and celebrations in New Delhi are still to come, beginning
later this week.
If there is a common current in the West's remembrance, it lies
in the continual and sometimes exhausting debate over whether
boisterous, democratic India is best seen, in political-economic
terms, as a glass half-empty or half-full. "Now the time comes
when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure,
but very substantially," declared Jawaharlal Nehru, India's independence
leader and first prime minister, at the moment of the break from
Britain. Hardly anyone in America or Europe would argue that since
then, India has achieved its potential wholly or in full measure.
The question is: how substantially?
"India: From Midnight to the Millennium" is an exceptionally
well-reasoned and thorough reply from what, in India, would be
regarded as the Westernized liberal camp. It comes from Shashi
Tharoor, an accomplished expatriate Indian novelist and essayist
of the neo-Salman Rushdie school. Tharoor earns his living as
a senior United Nations official in New York, but travels back
and forth to India, where he was brought up and attended college.
Blending memoir, essay and empirical argument, Tharoor carefully
reviews the core questions about India's unfinished experiment
in self-governance -- the durability of its constitutional democracy,
its persistent struggles over caste, the rise of Hindu extremist
politics, and the recent and historic attempt to catch up to Asia's
economic tigers through adoption of free-market reforms.
His book argues forcefully, but without naivete, that democracy
is essential to India's progress; that caste discrimination is
fading and can be conquered; that politicians who distort Hinduism
as a tool of nationalism and "majority politics" should be rejected;
and that Nehru's bloated socialist economic model must give way
to free trade and entrepreneurialism. Above all, given the enormous
challenges of India's ethnic, religious and linguistic polyglot,
Tharoor insists, "Only an all-inclusive pluralism will guarantee
the survival and success of the Indian nation."
He dwells at length on an issue much discussed among development
specialists today in Africa, Asia and the former Soviet Union:
Can an impoverished, multiethnic country struggling to find sustainable
prosperity really afford multiparty democracy, with all its noise
and strains and competing, selfish interest groups? Tharoor replies
the way nearly all contemporary Indians would: Such a democracy
is the only practical choice because, in a country so diverse,
it provides the only means by which competing claims for power
and resources can be peacefully and continually renegotiated.
You might think that after 50 years, India would have outgrown
this question, being now in possession of a constitutional democracy
at least as long-lived and efficient as those in, say, France
and Italy. But the recent rise of Hindu nationalism and Islamic
extremist politics raise genuine doubts about India's constitutional
future. And in any event, as Tharoor usefully reminds us, it was
not so long ago that India briefly convinced itself that it could
develop faster with an authoritarian model.
In 1975, rattled by opponents and at the height of her imperiousness,
Indira Gandhi postponed elections, jailed activists, censored
the press, and effectively broke with constitutional traditions.
When she made the arrogant error of putting her Emergency to a
national referendum two years later (and, more arrogant still,
allowed a more or less honest vote to occur), India rose up and
threw her out of office. For Tharoor, coming of age at the time,
"the Emergency became the defining experience of my political
consciousness," a statement that applies to many of his generation.
With great effectiveness, he exhumes and reviews in his book many
of the oily apologies and rationalizations for the Emergency issued
in the West and in India during its early phases -- lines of thinking
and turns of phrase that are used today, as it happens, to rationalize
authoritarian or totalitarian systems from China to Singapore
to the Congo.
Tharoor's book has a few blind spots that seem to arise from
his state of privileged, passionate exile. His discussion of caste
discrimination, wrapped in a memoir of his childhood friendship
with a boy from the "untouchable" classes, is perhaps not as empathetic
or complete as the author believes. And an Indian Muslim reading
his treatment of political Hinduism, affirmative action, and the
legal rights of religious minorities will almost certainly disagree
with important parts of his analysis. But these are relatively
small weaknesses in a book full of cool, persuasive and confident
argument -- argument that benefits, on balance, from Tharoor's
distance from India's daily fray.
India seems intended in some ways as a treatise aimed at the
country's leadership and opinion-making classes, and so an American
reader not familiar with the subcontinent may find some of the
discussion dense and dry, even though the prose is clean and the
necessary background and context is provided. Specialists and
expatriate Indians, particularly those interested in development
issues, will likely find it provocative and engaging. The book's
greatest strength is that on all the most important political
and economic questions facing India today, Tharoor has it right
-- his analysis and prescriptions provide a useful outline for
how to begin the next 50 years.
