India Read online

  Shashi Tharoor

  INDIA

  From Midnight To The Millennium And Beyond

  Revised and Updated

  Contents

  About the Author

  Praise for the Book

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Preface to the 2007 Edition

  1: A Myth and an Idea

  2: Two Assassinations and a Funeral Deaths and a Dynasty

  3: Unity, Diversity, and Other Contradictions

  4: Scheduled Castes, Unscheduled Change

  5: Of Indians and Other Minorities

  6: NRIs

  7: The Hindu Rate of Growth, and Other Agnostic Legacies

  8: “Better Fed Than Free”

  9: India at Forty-nine

  10: A Future Without Shock

  Map

  Chronology of Major Events

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  INDIA

  Shashi Tharoor is the prize-winning author of ten books, both fiction and non-fiction, and a widely published critic, commentator and columnist (including for The Hindu, Times of India and Newsweek). In 2007 he concluded a nearly twenty-nine-year career with the United Nations, including working for refugees in South-East Asia at the peak of the “boat people” crisis, handling peace-keeping operations in the former Yugoslavia, and culminating as the Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information. In 2006 he was India’s candidate to succeed Kofi Annan as UN Secretary-General, and emerged a strong second out of seven contenders. Dr Tharoor earned his PhD at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at the age of twenty-two, and was named by the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1998 as a ‘Global Leader of Tomorrow’. He was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India’s highest honour for overseas Indians.

  Praise for the Book

  “Shashi Tharoor embarks on a journey from ‘midnight to millennium’, trying to find the answer to the paradox that is India, to discover the essence of the Indian identity, if there is one, and to test the truth of the prophecy of the British historian, E.P. Thompson, that describes India as ‘the most important country for the future of the world’. Indians will soon comprise one-sixth of the world’s population and therefore, the choices they will make are bound to resonate even in areas that they may not directly influence”

  —Telegraph

  “Even as Tharoor forthrightly discusses the sectarian violence that has ripped through the country, the corruption that is rife in the ranks of the Indian administrative service, and the difficulties that face a nation in which 48 per cent of the population remains illiterate, he still writes with a certain optimism about the future”

  —Business World

  “[Tharoor’s] engagement is with the conflicting vision of an imagined India in the diaspora. The book is an intervention in the ongoing fight between the overseas Indian Manhattan liberals and the overseas friends of the BJP”

  —India Today

  “Tharoor has his own scheme of values and clear commitments. First, his commitment to democracy: with all its faults, democracy as it is practised in India is better than the alternatives. Next is his commitment to India’s pluralism, one of the main contributors to its special greatness as a nation, as a singular land of the plural’. Then his commitment to secularism with its concomitant value of tolerance, and his opposition to religious fundamentalism”

  —Frontline

  “Informed, insightful, seldom boring, often moving, this is a one-from-the-heart work where substance takes primacy over style. Tharoor writes feelingly and well, on issues as diverse as Indian socialism, secularism, job reservations, his childhood discovery of the schedule caste ‘difference’, Non Resident Indians including NRI/Italian-turned-Empress Regina: Sonia Gandhi nee Maino of Turino”

  —Outlook

  “What’s fascinating is the way he weaves the past and the present, facts and legends and personal anecdotes and memories into a wonderful tapestry. The mirror he holds up neither distorts nor flatters. If it shows up the ugly warts, it also reflects the positive points”

  —Business Standard

  “A work of remarkable depth”

  —The Hindu

  “Few books in recent years, if any, offer such a comprehensive overview of India . . . Shashi Tharoor is a fluid and powerful writer, one of the best in a generation”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Hard-hitting, powerfully analytical and supremely articulate”

  —Newsday

  “Tharoor is a thoughtful and well-informed observer . . . He writes elegantly and often colorfully . . . When he gets down to India as a concrete personal experience, everything seems new and fresh”

  —New York Times

  “A literate and affecting panorama of the world’s largest democracy”

  —Publishers Weekly

  In loving memory of my father

  CHANDRAN THAROOR

  (December 17, 1929-October 23, 1993)

  who taught me to believe in

  “an India for Indians,”

  this book is dedicated

  to my mother

  LILLY THAROOR

  Introduction

  On August 15, 1997, independent India turns fifty years old. What has been the story of those first fifty years? What does the twenty-first century hold for India? And why should either of these questions matter?

  Twenty-one years ago, when I was fresh out of college and about to go to the United States for postgraduate studies, a leading Indian national newspaper asked me to do an article for their Independence Day supplement. The Emergency had just been declared; politicians had been locked up, the press censored; even one of my short stories, a police-detective effort called “The Political Murder,” had been banned by censors who thought the very notion of a political murder dangerous and antinational. Around me, newspapermen and journalists were cowed and resentful. The freedoms for which our independence struggle had been waged seemed in peril; and yet weren’t we, the literate minority, disqualified by our privileged status from objecting to measures designed, as the government claimed, to benefit “the common man?” I was angry, cynical, and confused — a combination of emotions appropriate both to my age and to the times. This is how I began my article:

  Independent India is twenty-eight years old today. I was nineteen a few months ago. In school they told me I was the citizen of tomorrow. Around me I saw the citizens of today, and wondered what purpose I was going to serve. They seemed worn and jaded and cynical. To my fellow-citizens-of-the-future, Independence Day merely meant early mornings in starched uniforms on parade grounds, relieved only by the comforting thought of no more classes. In college they were more sensible. They just gave us a holiday, and the chowkidar unfurled the flag.

  I look at a fading photocopy of the piece today, and marvel that they published it at all. By August, of course, censorship by unimaginative government babus had given way to self-censorship by imaginative subeditors, and mine were evidently more daring than most. “Independence,” I went on in adolescent passion,

  conjures up visions of mammoth patriotic rallies outside Red Fort; a reminder of freedom and self-reliance and the hope of unexploited progress. But when the drums have been beaten and the cavalcade has passed, the cheering invariably seems to subside into a desultory grumble. Our capacity for unproductive complaint is seemingly limitless; but then we appear to have developed the art of destructive criticism to the proportions of a national characteristic. Perhaps it is because, as a former colony, we are used to bemoaning our lot without being able to do anything about it....

  The divisions [that matter] are less between Indian and Indian — whethe
r Hindu-Muslim, Brahmin-untouchable, landlord-peasant or bureaucrat-revolutionary — than between Indian and India. And what is far more fearsome than economic stagnation or political apathy is that atrophy of the line of association that binds the one’s fortunes indissolubly to the other’s. For otherwise we have the strange spectacle of a nation without nationals, of Indians who are not involved in India.

  “Atrophy.” “Indissolubly.” I was nineteen, I liked big words. But beneath the overdeveloped vocabulary I had a message from my generation. After a couple of paragraphs savaging “cocktail-toting polemicists” at “boxwallah gatherings” for their lack of a “sense of belonging” to India, I argued: “That one is an all-too-dispensable part [of the Indian reality] is surely all the more reason why one should take one’s role all the more seriously, instead of affecting the dislocated detach ment that has become the untaxed perquisite of citizenship.” That was my point: we had to belong, we had to care, we had to be involved in what became of our independence. This “sense of belonging”(the phrase with which I tided the article) would be vital “to me and those of my generation who now stand on the threshold of that which has, over the last twenty-eight years, been made to mean so little.”

  It was easy enough to say this, I suppose, when I was holding a ticket to the United States and escaping from my responsibility to do anything about it. But as I read these words now, I wonder how much they might resonate in the mind and spirit of a nineteen-year-old collegian in today’s India. A year and a half after I wrote this article, boys and girls very much like me, children of executives in Hindustanized multinationals, accustomed to ease and privilege, came out in the streets of Calcutta and Delhi, threw off the apolitical detachment I had described, and campaigned door-to-door to unseat an authoritarian government. They asserted the “sense of belonging” I was afraid we had all lost.

  Today the issues that confront India are, in a strikingly different way, as important as those that faced my contemporaries two decades ago. There is no immediate threat of a suspension of our basic freedoms, as there was then. But in this book I propose to argue that India is, in a phrase first used (though in a different context) by the British historian E. P. Thompson, “the most important country for the future of the world.” For Indians stand at the intersection of four of the most important debates facing the world at the end of the twentieth century:

  • The bread-versus-freedom debate. Can democracy “deliver the goods” to alleviate desperate poverty, or do its inbuilt inefficiencies only impede rapid growth? Is the instability of political contention (and of makeshift coalitions) a luxury that a developing country cannot afford? As today’s young concentrate on making their bread, should they consider political freedom a dispensable distraction?

  • The centralization-versus-federalism debate. Does tomorrow’s India need to be run by a strong central government able to transcend the fissiparous tendencies of language, caste, and region, or is that government best which centralizes least?

  • The pluralism-versus-fundamentalism debate. Is the secularism established in India’s Constitution, and now increasingly attacked as a westernized affectation, essential in a pluralist society, or should India, like many other Third World countries, find refuge in the assertion of its own religious identity?

  • The “Coca-colonization” debate, or globalization versus self-reliance. Should India, where economic self-sufficiency has been a mantra for more than four decades, open itself further to the world economy, or does the entry of Western consumer goods bring in alien influences that threaten to disrupt Indian society in ways too vital to be allowed? Should we raise the barriers to shield our youth from the pernicious seductions of MTV and McDonald’s?

  These are not merely academic debates; they are now being enacted on the national and world stage, and the choices we make will determine the kind of India our children will inherit in the twenty-first century. And since the century will begin with Indians accounting for a sixth of the world’s population, their choices will resonate throughout the globe.

  In the pages that follow I embark upon a sweeping and highly personalized examination of contemporary India, with these debates in mind. This book is not a survey of modern Indian history, though it touches upon many of the principal events of the last five decades. It is not “reportage,” though I do draw anecdotally upon my own travels and conversations in India. It is instead a subjective account, I hope both informed and impassioned, of the forces that have made (and nearly unmade) today’s India, and about the India that I hope my sons will inherit in the second half-century after independence.

  Not all agree with my vision of India. There are those who wish it to become a Hindu Rashtra, a land of and for the Hindu majority; those who wish to raise higher the protectionist barriers against foreign investment that are slowly beginning to come down; those who believe that a firm hand at the national helm would be preferable to the failures of democracy (one prominent nationalist even called recently for the army to take over the government). As far back as 1949, during the debates on the draft Constitution of India, its principal draftsman, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, had pointed out that Indian democracy was as old as its ancient village republics. India had political assemblies with elaborate parliamentary rules of procedure at a time when most of the rest of the world suffered under despotism or anarchy. “This democratic system,” Ambedkar said movingly, “India lost. Will she lose it a second time?”

  I will argue that the only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts. An India that denies itself to some Indians could end up being denied to all Indians.

  In asserting this, a few words of explanation are in order. This book is a paean to India, yet it emanates from the pen of a United Nations official who has lived outside India for most of his adult life. I am, indeed, often asked how I can reconcile my passionate faith in India with my internationalist work for the United Nations. I see no contradiction; indeed, both emerge from the same pluralist convictions. The Indian adventure is that of human beings of different ethnicities and religions, customs and costumes, cuisines and colors, languages and accents, working together under the same roof, sharing the same dreams. That is also what the United Nations, at its best, seeks to achieve. It is arguably easier for Indians than for most others to work with people who are unlike them, since that is what we are brought up to do at home.

  The second explanation, however, deals with that collective “we.” Who are the Indians of whom I speak so proprietarily? In his magisterial essay on life and thought in Mexico, The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz observed that his thoughts were not concerned with the entire Mexican population, but rather with those among them “who are conscious of themselves, for one reason or another, as Mexicans.” The same applies, for comparable reasons, to this book, which speaks of an India that exists in the imagination of most, but not all, of my countrymen and countrywomen. Paz went on to serve as Mexico’s ambassador to India in the 1960s, and I imagine he saw that, as in the Mexico he was writing about in 1950, several historical epochs and states of development coexist simultaneously in India. This is still the case, and it would be foolish as well as presumptuous to seek to speak for them all in a general notion of Indianness. In the last fifty years not all Indians have learned to think of themselves as Indians, and to speak of an Indian identity is really to subsume a number of identities that vary depending upon class, caste, region, and language. But this variety is in itself integral to my idea of Indianness; the singular thing about India is that you can only speak of it in the plural. India is fundamentally a pluralist state; its pluralism emerges from its geography, is reflected in its history, and is confirmed by its ethnography. It is this that I hark to in my writing, which — when it succumbs to generalization — will generalize for the many rather than for the mass.

  This is hardly a new predicament. The narrator of my book The Great Indian Novel confesses his own subjectivity to his scribe, Ganapathi, and a
cknowledges the validity of alternative viewpoints on everything he has had to say:

  This is my story of the India I know, with its biases, selections, omissions, distortions, all mine. But you cannot derive your cosmogony from a single birth, Ganapathi. Every Indian must forever carry with him, in his head and heart, his own history of India.

  I couldn’t have put it better myself.

  It would not matter what kind of mess they made—and they would make a mess, if they governed themselves, the people of India. They would probably make the greatest muddle possible.

  —D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod

  My legacy to India? Hopefully, it is 400 million people capable of governing themselves.

  —Jawaharlal Nehru

  If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India.

  —Romain Rolland

  Preface to the 2007 Edition

  Since India: From Midnight to the Millennium was written at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence, a decade has passed, and India has celebrated the completion of its sixth decade as a free country. India’s (now) 650 million registered voters have lined up in the hot sun four times in seven years to determine anew who will govern them. The details of the results of these electoral exercises will not be found in this revised volume, but they do not undermine its thesis. Indeed, the last Indian general election of the millennium will be remembered for having thrown up a vital question of national identity that is central to the spirit of this book: the question “who is an Indian?”

  As Indian political parties geared up for the 2004 polls, this question arose again. Before the previous elections, in 1999, the leading Opposition party, the Congress, had split over the issue of the eligibility of its Italian-born party president, Sonia Gandhi, to lead the country. The controversy dominated the election campaign itself, with the ruling National Democratic Alliance openly declaiming a choice between “videshi” (foreign) and “swadeshi” (indigenous) rule.