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The price of success

This article is more than 16 years old
Leader

"A new star rises ... a new hope comes into being, a vision long cherished materialises." In his speech celebrating India's creation, Jawaharlal Nehru was occasionally guilty of improving on reality. Just before independence arrived at midnight in India, he declared that freedom was dawning "when the world sleeps", amusing residents of London and New York, who at the time were in daylight. Yet his main point was right: the giant born 60 years ago today had formidable ideals to carry. Nationalism has at times been little more than a branch of identity politics, but big countries of disparate population cannot afford to define themselves so narrowly: they need the nourishment of big ideas. America has its Dream, and China Middle Kingdom communism. And India? JBS Haldane, the legendary, eccentric biologist who left Macmillan's fusty Britain to live in Nehru's India, described his new home as "a better model for a possible world organisation. It may of course break up, but it is a wonderful experiment."

What was this experiment in aid of? India's founding ideals are given lapidary form in the preamble to its constitution. It is "solemnly resolved" that this new nation will be "a sovereign, democratic republic". The words "socialist" and "secular" were added later, but they too were from the outset central to the vision of the founding fathers. Freed from the yoke of empire, India was to plot an utterly independent course. In foreign policy it would not follow any new master but would be "non-aligned" to either America or the Soviet Union. Because Indians had only ever experienced capitalism as a tool of the colonialists, even businessmen were sympathetic to progressive alternatives. Democracy and secularism were a response to imperial disfranchisement and the horror of partition. There were other values too, as might be expected from a people who had had decades to figure out how to gain independence, and what it might look like. This, then, was a nation with a much-refined sense of itself. Far from being confined to consitutional parchment, these ideals were very much alive; until recently, politicians would claim to be "Gandhian", and civil servants happily described themselves as "Nehruvian".

Sixty years on, how has the "wonderful experiment" fared? Despite Haldane's fears, it survives intact. Democracy in a country of a billion people was indeed at first widely seen as an experiment; then it was termed by pessimists as an exception; the hope still is that one day it will be an exemplar. If anything India has become more democratic, as the lower castes have taken greater electoral power. Secularism too remains intact, despite some nasty religious riots and the worrying rise of Hindu fundamentalism. Other aspects of the Indian record, however, while celebrated by the rest of the world, represent a sharp divergence from its founding ideals. This can be seen most clearly in its newly pro-American foreign policy and market-orientated economic management.

India is on the verge of becoming a great power, but at what cost? The people who won independence by nonviolence and styled themselves as a "moral superpower" chucked those lofty ideals overboard in 1998 when India became a nuclear superpower. A country that prized itself on independence is increasingly chummy with America, cutting deals on nuclear policy and trade. Urban India is enjoying an economic boom. Since 1991 Delhi has begun opening up markets and cutting red tape. This has been a boon for the 300m-strong educated middle class, who are able to get swanky new jobs in the service sector, but it is no help for the 700m in India's villages, who have been shut out of the new golden age. In a bid for success and superpower status, India has thrown away some noble ideals without yet finding a replacement. That leaves it sufficient to be a powerful nation; but still not quite the great one Gandhi and Nehru had hoped for.

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