A glorious past does not guarantee India a place in the sun tomorrow
Aditi Shetty contributes a special essay
Dear readers,
I’d like to share a piece written by one of our listeners to the podcast, Aditi Shetty, who wrote to me and wished to contribute a piece for the platform. A special thanks to Aditi for all the effort and enthusiasm you put into preparing this piece. As an undergrad at Mt Carmel College in Bangalore, she clearly has a lot of potential.
If you’d like to listen to the recent episodes she references, check out my conversation with Dr. Aparna Pande here or with Anvesh Jain here.
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A glorious past does not guarantee India a place in the sun tomorrow
2020 was the year that wasn't for India. Economically, the pandemic exacerbated the ebbing of economic growth, which has been on a downward cycle since December 2016. The country also witnessed an exodus of a staggering 11.5 million migrants, while being tagged “partly free” by Freedom House and an “electoral autocracy” by Varieties-of-Democracy House. All is not well in the world’s largest democracy.
On a recent episode of the Policy people podcast, Dr. Aparna Pande, Research Fellow and Director of the India Initiative at Hudson Institute, dived deep into India’s past, present, and future and pondered whether its rise to superpower status was a forthcoming reality or a distant vision.
Cradle of Humanity
India has a grand civilizational legacy stretching back over 8000 years ago, birthing major world religions, schools of scientific inquiry “Charvaka”, and a plethora of other cultural assets that continue to shape life even today.
Though outside admirers like Mark Twain praise India as “the cradle of the human race”, eminent Indian writers, like Ramchandra Guha, have lamented the legacy, saying “lucky is the country that does not have a glorious history.”
Pande discerns India’s reluctance to push itself as stemming from a complacent belief that it’s great past has secured its inevitable future as a superpower. Pande says India needs to make concerted efforts to reform the manufacturing sector, generate political will, foster social cohesion, and chart a grand strategy.
Civilizational Calling
The embrace of civilizationalism as a guiding philosophy by China, India, and Russia is triggering revisions to each countries’ social, political and economic institutions.
Putin's proclamation of Russia being “a distinct civilisation", and one that must be protected by a wall of technology and genetics, is just one of the more prominent war cries of the movement.
Indian civilizationalism means the “Indian polity having a symbiotic relationship with its spiritual and philosophical patrimony”, says Anvesh Jain in a separate episode of Policy People Podcast. The recent call to “Indianise the legal system of India'' by the Chief Justice of India NV Ramana can be seen as a prelude of this civilizationalist turn, which Jain says is only just beginning.
The BJP government’s rewriting of history to frame itself as the true inheritor of the Gandhian legacy reflects how civilizationalism transcends party politics (Gandhi being a member of the Congress opposition) and rests instead on pillars of religion, philosophy and culture.
Anvesh says India should be aware Western governments, (including its “natural ally” the US) will probably not be so keen on its civilizationtionist aspirations, fearing it to be a thin-veil for illiberal policy. Anvesh says that while restoring pride is important for the civilisationalists, they also must work towards betterment of humanity too and prevent the “Huntingtonian civilizational clash.”
Caste Curse
Casteism is a ghost of India’s civilizational history that thwarted all preceptors of rationality and threatens to undermine humanism in Indian society.
Every 10 minutes, a member of the Scheduled Castes (dalits or lowest-ranked groups) in India was a victim of a crime during the pandemic, per the National Crime Records Bureau. As violence against the members of the lower castes surged, especially targeting innocent women and girls, not much is done by Indian institutions which remain bastions of power for the upper castes.
Opportunities Knocking
India is a nation whose strategic location, resources, plurality and progressive spirit have attracted global attention. Pande opined that “The India that the world wants to rise is a Nehruvian and Gandhian democracy.... A secular India.”
The illiberal rise of communalism in recent times is a threat that needs stymying not backing.
Right now the BJP is the first to have a single party majority since 1992 when reforms liberalized India. The stage is set, but with dilly-dallied delays to second generation reforms, Prime Minister Modi may squander this propitious opportunity for India to swap in its “golden ticket to global super-powerdom.”
Pande says India’s soft power is commendable -- it has broken into the Soft Power 30 index -- but it must also realise hard power propels nations to formidability, especially when the dragon lurks nearby. India should learn from its past Panipat Syndrome, wherein Indian rulers failed to anticipate and prepare for attacks, assuming every threat to be a nascent one.
Delhi in Wonderland
A health check on democracy in the world’s ‘capital of Internet shutdowns’ is needed. With post-poll violence and Pegasus snooping scandals in Delhi, the symptoms are growing. As geopolitics shifts to the Indo-Pacific and India becomes increasingly involved with other regional democracies in the Quad, a healthy political system is the country's true kryptonite.
Toward the end of the episode, Pande invokes a conversation from Alice in Wonderland, where Alice asks the Cheshire Cat, “Where should I go?” The cat replies, “Where do you want to go?”
India similarly needs to know where it wants its future to lie as a regional or global superpower and draw its game plan accordingly. Despite being presently disoriented, China may be to India what the Queen of Hearts was to Alice — as Pande says, an “existential threat” that forces India to stand for its values and find its way in the coming century.
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Stay well and stay safe,
- Liam
Founder of Policy People