patelism

For India’s founders, political freedom was their great prize. Yet decades on, what that freedom has delivered measures up poorly for many. For India’s business elites eager to compete with China, for the middle classes fed up with corruption, for radical intellectuals, for desperate citizens who have taken up arms against the state – democracy in India is a story of unravelling illusions.Democratic politics itself has come to be seen as impeding the decisive action needed to expand economic possibilities.

In a society of swiftly inflating expectations, where old deference crumbles before youthful impatience, frustration with democracy is perhaps not surprising.

The citizenry’s ire expresses perhaps instinctively something that India’s government, caught in inertial routines, is in danger of missing. Societies are at their most vulnerable when things are improving – not when they are stagnant.

Sliver of time

Yet the gathering pace of history in India has made political judgement more,
not less, important.

An India on the move cannot avoid choices.

The policy choices India will need to make over the coming decade – about
education, about environmental resources, about social and fiscal
responsibility, about foreign relations – will propel it down tracks that will
become difficult to renounce or even revise.

These choices will determine how India handles the daunting tasks it faces.

These include managing the largest-ever rural-to-urban transition under
democratic conditions, and working to develop the human capital and sustain the
ecological and energy resources needed for participatory economic growth.

They will also determine how ably India can contend with
powerful competitor states, contain a volatile neighbourhood, and navigate a
fluid international arena where capital is fly, and where new, unforeseen
threats and risks are facts of life.

It’s an agenda that would test any society at the best of times.

But in India’s case, these tasks will have to be achieved under severe time
and resource constraints.

India will have only a sliver of time, a matter of years, in which to seize
its chances.

Whether it is able to do so will depend less on India’s entrepreneurial
brilliance or technological prowess or the cheapness of its labour, and above
all on politics.

Yet, at this historical moment when emergent possibilities and new problems
are crowding in, the transformative momentum of India’s politics seems to have
dissipated.

It’s a troubling irony: political imagination, judgement and action – the
capacities that first brought India into existence – seem to have deserted it.

Poisonous politics

Democracy, the distinctive source of modern India’s legitimacy has, to many,
become an agent of the country’s ills – and drives some to put their hope in
technocratic fixes.

Today, in many parts of the country, the identity wars that engulfed India
during the 1990s – when religion and caste advanced as the basis of claims to
special privileges – seem to have played themselves out.

The conventional view is that India’s economic surge has stilled those
fights. And although there is some truth in that explanation, it’s too partial.
It doesn’t address, for instance, why one of India’s most-developed and
fast-growing states, the calendar girl of big business – Gujarat – is also the
purveyor of India’s most chauvinistic and poisonous politics.

In fact, what has – at least for an interval – calmed such conflicts has been
the workings, however rickety, of democratic politics.

It’s the capacity of India’s representative democracy to articulate – and
even to incite – India’s diversity, to give voice to differing interests and
ideas of self, rather than merely to aggregate common identities, that has saved
India from the civil conflict and auto-destruction typical of so many other
states.

Consider for a start the ragged history of India’s regional neighbourhood:
though populated by smaller and more homogenous states, their desire to impose a
common identity has broken them down.

What has protected India from such a fate is not any innate Indian virtue or
cultural uniqueness.

Rather, it is the outcome of a political invention, the intricate
architecture of constitutional democracy established by India’s founders.
Democracy’s singular, rather astonishing achievement has been to keep India
united as a political space.

And now that space has become a vast market whose strength lies in its
internal diversity and dynamism.

It is that immense market, of considerable attraction to international
capital, which is now India’s greatest comparative advantage – and one that
makes it a potential engine of the global economy.

In the years ahead, whether the old identity battles of the 1990s stay
becalmed will to a large extent depend on the capacity of India’s political
system to sustain and spread the country’s new growth.

Rising disparities – in income, wealth and opportunity – are a global fact,
but they can be particularly acute in growing economies.

For 21st century India, as economic growth spreads unevenly over the
landscape, the big questions will turn on the disequalising effects of economic
transformation.

This is not a question that any society – democratic or despotic – has been
able to solve, let alone any rapidly growing society.

The search for alternatives to market capitalism inspired the great
revolutionary and reformist movements of modern history.

Sitting duck

Those movements haven’t fared too well: but the living conditions that gave
rise to them remain as intense and painful as ever, not least in the world’s two
major growth economies, China and India.

Part of what it must mean, therefore, for states like India and China to take
their place as major world powers, rests on their ability to invent better
alternative models of market capitalism.

For India, developing such options is a priority in coming years.

It’s imperative for India’s economic future that the global disaffection with
market capitalism doesn’t take wider hold in the country. Most people in India
remain hopeful that their turn will come. Yet, as events of recent weeks have
reminded us, tolerance for disparities, for inequality, can shift very suddenly.

In India’s case, just as six decades and more of democracy have broken down
age-old structures of deference and released a new defiant energy, so too years
of rapid but uneven growth may quite abruptly dismantle the intricate
self-deceptions that have so far kept India’s grotesque disparities protected
from mass protest.

As the Indian political classes exercise their populist instincts, corporate
India, heady with new opulence, lately comports itself like a well-plumed
sitting duck.

Without renewed political imagination and judgement, the disaffection and
alienation of those who are being left out or actively dispossessed by rapid
growth could change the course of India’s history.

By Sunil Khilnani Director, India Institute, King’s College, London