On reading these words now, however, one is struck by how much better they apply to India today than they did 50 years ago. During the past decade, India has been rediscovering herself, casting off a mantle designed abroad for one more distinctly homespun. As the nation moves into the 21st century it will in all likelihood be less socialist, less secular, less centralized and less Anglicized than it has been since independence.
It is often remarked that Nehru was the last Englishman to rule India. He was indeed a product of England’s great institutions - Harrow, Cambridge, the London bar - but Nehru spent many more years in His Majesty’s prisons than in his schools. He was, above all, an Indian nationalist. But his conception of nationalism was entirely European, a product of Enlightenment ideas about self-determination, liberalism and rationalism in politics. He and his generation of ““freedom fighters’’ created a new India that was secular, democratic and republican, with a strong, centralized state that defined the nation and directed, in a socialist fashion, its economic development. It was a model an English Labour Party leader could have created.
In the past 10 years the founding conception of Indian nationalism - embodied by the Congress party - has been steadily eroded by what V. S. Naipaul has called ““a million little mutinies’’: Hindu pride, lower-caste empowerment, a rising bourgeoisie, regional assertiveness. Perhaps the most powerful of these forces are capitalism and religion - an unlikely combination.
For 40 years India’s mixed economy was famously inefficient. One of the saddest of many sad statistics: in 1986 the Steel Authority of India employed 247,000 people to produce 6 million tons of steel while South Korea’s privately owned Pohan Steel paid 10,000 people to make 14 million tons. But things have changed. The liberalization and free-market reforms of 1991 have unleashed a market revolution. India’s private sector is growing by leaps and bounds. The quality and quantity of goods available to consumers and businesses have shot up. Foreign investment is moving in slowly but steadily. Whether or not India grows fast enough to become another ““Asian tiger’’ (about 7 percent a year is the magic number), capitalism is already remaking India’s economy and, perhaps more important, its society.
The effects are striking. Visit a city or town in India and everybody is on the make. People who once sought government jobs, with security and low salaries, now look for business opportunities, franchises and financing. A society that has, for thousands of years, honored the status of the state, of princes and of caste now exalts the market.
It is no coincidence that just as the socialist basis of India’s nationalism is being challenged, so is its secularism. The two are part of the same old order. The years since 1992 have seen the rise of a powerful Hindu nationalist party, the destruction of mosques and religious riots. Perhaps most important, it has become acceptable to articulate a Hindu fundamentalism unthinkable 25 years ago. The danger of religious conflict haunted India’s founding generation. (Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic who felt betrayed by Gandhi’s ““appeasement’’ of the Muslims.) Indira Gandhi amended the preamble to the Indian Constitution to add the word ““secular’’ to its description of the state. That ideal seems far away today. Outside of a highly cosmopolitan, urban elite, the younger generation of Hindus and Muslims seem less committed to integration than their parents.
The old order has yielded; it cannot be rebuilt. But how India casts off its old garb will determine its future. It needs a new economics, but also the old tolerance. Perhaps it will achieve both. In ““India: From Midnight to the Millennium,’’ Shashi Tharoor recalls that Nehru described India as ““an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously.’’ Building a modern country upon an ancient civilization: that is India’s challenge for the 21st century.
