Business & Technology
Read an excerpt from Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India (continued):
The challenge we have faced across our ideas is in uniting our people and policy makers toward urgent and necessary solutions. Our coalition governments at the center often give themselves labels that reiterate unity and a common purpose—the United Front, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). But in reality they represent fiercely sparring ideals and reflect an India that is intensely fractured, its divisions sharply defined not so much by ideology as by religion, caste, class and region.
But the reason I am optimistic is that we have achieved consensus before. Through our history, our divisions and debates have been in constant flux, as the ideas that define and animate us as a people changed and evolved.
What Nehru remembered, and all that he forgot
In India, people live among looming reminders of the past. We find ancient temples, most of them still in use, in the heart of our cities, with hawkers selling glossy prints and sandalwood replicas of gods and goddesses outside their steps; Mughal-era palaces and tombs stand in the middle of busy, crowded localities; and we are all deeply familiar with our rituals and ancient epics like the Mahabharata, which is nine times longer than the Iliad, and far better remembered. Yet the writer Ved Mehta wrote that in India we have propped up our country "with a dead history." The problem was that the curve of India's history and its ideas had been an extremely discontinuous one—a foreign occupation had long divorced the region from its pre-British ideas and economic and social structures. It is true that many of those ideas were horribly primitive and ones that we can be glad to be rid of—sati, child marriage and a highly repressive caste system were only the more egregious sins of a very feudal people. Our medieval past was, as Rabindranath Tagore once said, "a place from which we were glad to be rescued." But British rule also created a deep disconnect among educated Indians from the best of India's early literature, philosophy, history and identity.
What we saw in its place instead was a strange grafting of the Indian identity with an entirely new culture. The British brought with them the English language and Western education, and with such education came the ideas of modern nationalism, self-determination and democracy. However, these ideas only reached a small elite—the British consensus was that, on the whole, Indians and their customs were best left alone. The large majority of Indians were left unmoored, disconnected from both their foreign government and their English-educated Indian leaders, and untouched by the rise of the modern economy and liberal ideas around the world. Colonial India as a result stagnated in terms of income growth, urbanization and education. In fact the British often collaborated with India's traditional elites and the lumpen aristocracy, deliberately strengthening feudal systems. For instance, they protected landlords from land transfers to an emerging urban capitalist class, and encouraged the martial, patriarchal systems of the Jats, Bhumihars, Rajputs and Sikhs since these "warrior castes" were a significant source of manpower for the British army.
This divide gave rise to a strange, two-tiered cultural hierarchy in India, with such a vast space in between that the Indian identity seemed a split personality. Many of the elite, upper-middle-class Indians who were educated n British schools embraced the Renaissance ideas of democracy, self-determination and nationalism, and several among them became leaders of the national freedom movement. On the other side of the chasm was India's vast majority, defined by the subcontinent's common culture, dominated by the iron rules of caste, religion and social custom.
There was little in common in ideas across this divide, and India's reformers stood at one bank and stared across, appalled at what they saw. The reformer Bipin Chandra Pal wrote, "We loved the abstraction we called India but…hated the thing it actually was."
No one exemplified the divide between India's leaders and the rest of the country more strongly than Jawaharlal Nehru. Understanding him is, I think, key to understanding the role ideas have had in shaping and uniting the country. In retrospect, Nehru was an odd man to have prevailed in shaping the Indian identity. He had described himself as "the last Englishman to rule India"—he had grown up under the eye of a Westernized father, a successful lawyer and a late convert to the cause of India's independence from the British. Motilal Nehru insisted on knives and forks at the dining table, spoke in English at home (although his wife did not know the language) and employed British tutors for his children. Nehru was sent to England when he was a teenager, to study in Harrow, then Cambridge and the Inns of Court.
Nehru was thus very much a child of the Western Enlightenment. Even while he admired Gandhi's mass appeal and determination—he called him "as clear-cut as a diamond"—he also disagreed with his more traditional beliefs, once writing, "Ideologically, he [is] sometimes amazingly backward." He was not religious in the least and responded to questions about his faith with a shrug and a quote from Voltaire: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." And he was wary of the political pulls in India, especially after he became the country's first prime minister. While his allegiances to India were clear, he was uncomfortable with its deeply rooted social, regional and caste divisions. The distance between Nehru's personal beliefs and what he experienced in the heart of India was sometimes stark: during a visit to Uttar Pradesh, the local Congress leader Kalka Prasad introduced Nehru as the "new king," and the peasants gathered echoed, "The king, the king has arrived," to Nehru's great astonishment and anger.
But Nehru eventually proved to be the only statesman who could navigate India's intense divides and unite the country under a core political and economic idea. Ironically, this may have been precisely because of his distance from the country, rather than in spite of it. His greatest strength was that even as the rest of India doubted its own capacity as a nation, Nehru never did. These romantic notions of his were backed up by an iron will and a remarkable ability to bridge disagreements. There was also the great gift of his charisma: he could talk persuasively and build towering visions. He helped construct a national consciousness—by giving people the universal right to vote and a secular government—during the most tempestuous years after independence. When India's divisions—religious and regional—did assert themselves despite his leadership and Gandhi's influence, they took him by surprise. The brutality and violence of Partition, which left more than a million people dead, was especially devastating for him.
Nehru had other early advantages in pushing through ideas of secularism and rationality in a country so deeply divided. The independence movement had helped shunt aside all other loyalties in favor of a singular national identity. This early unity helped the champions of secular government to drown out other, more divisive voices—the ideologies of Hindu chauvinists, whose idea of pluralism was that India would be "a country of Hindus, Hindu Muslims, Hindu Christians and Hindu Sikhs"; and Muslim leaders who demanded to be the sole representatives of the country's Muslim population.
But even as Nehru and his colleagues in government managed to quiet India's fissiparous tendencies for a while, they also did not address them head on. There was no attempt to bridge the distances between the many countries within the country. The government instead ignored the vast space that existed between the educated leaders who put in place India's constitution and the masses, most of whom could not read the constitution and who, even if they could, would have failed to understand its appeal. The policies that would have narrowed this distance and made the theories of secularism and liberty popular—such as a mass education system and urbanization—were ones that the state failed to implement. And the government's hostility to business meant that entrepreneurship, so critical in strengthening the foundation of a modern civil society, was constrained.
The lack of a large middle class in India only deepened this division. There was some movement in the 1970s toward the creation of an Indian bourgeoisie when the high noon of the public sector and bank nationalization by Indira Gandhi created a sizable middle class comprising government and public sector employees. But this was still a tiny percentage of the country's population. The great gap between the old India and the India of the leaders and the elite remained, and we are still caught between the different tempers of these two nations—between "the feudal and the secular, the rational and the traditional." India in the first twenty or twenty-five years after independence was united mainly by residual popular feelings for the independence movement and the Congress party that had led it. Later, the wars with Pakistan and China did bring Indians together for brief periods—during these times, people turned up at railway stations to cheer army jawans on their way to do battle, and playback singers traveled to border posts to sing of the motherland and the valor of her sons. Nevertheless, it was a tenuous unity.
