Pranay Gupte: The New India, and the Old

Everywhere ones goes in this leafy capital city, the talk is of India’s emergence as an economic superpower – well, at least major power. But one doesn’t get the sense that Indians are much prepared for this status, or that they much care.

They are much more accustomed to what the late John Kenneth Galbraith called a “functioning anarchy.” Mr. Galbraith, although born a Canadian, was President John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to India; a naturalized US citizen, he’s remembered here as much for that memorable phrase as he is for the elegant prose of his extensive economic works.

Functioning anarchy it still is, some 50 years after Professor Galbraith showed up as America’s envoy. Parliamentarians howl in the national legislature, hurling words at one another that they wouldn’t want their children to hear, let alone learn. (That said, many Indian children have little to learn from their parents; they possess supremely colorful vocabularies.) It’s common knowledge that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s coalition government is largely feeble and mostly corrupt, but there doesn’t seem to be a sensible solution for better governance other than to throw the rascals out.

But then what? Another costly election? More bribes? More exhortations to the electorate to vote early and often? More efforts to persuade vote banks to yield dividends at polling booths?

And after all that? More functioning anarchy?

Several Arab delegations happened to be in town the last few days when I came to New Delhi from my home in Dubai, and many visitors wondered if their own authoritarian systems weren’t more conducive to sustainable economic and social development than the loud and messy democracy of India.

Of course, the aggregate population of the mostly authoritarian 22 countries of the Arab World is around 365 million; India’s population is 1.2 billion, and growing by around 18 million each year, or nearly the size of Australia. Hard to impose authoritarianism in India, as the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ruefully found out.

She suspended the Constitution in 1975 because of political pandemonium, and then held elections two years later to validate her decision. During those two years, trains ran on time, people generally showed up to work on time, school children attended classes on time, government bureaucrats reported to their offices on time, and few demanded overtime.

It did not last. India’s voters yearned for their habitual gallimaufry; they longed to spit on pavements; they missed not being able to scratch their privates in public. Mrs. Gandhi lost the 1977 national elections to a motley assortment of generally rightwing parties who then proceeded to re-define political incompetence. In short order, Indira Gandhi was back in power, but before she could suspend the Constitution again and stamp her will on the polity, Sikh bodyguards shot and killed the prime minister in the garden of her own home in New Delhi. Those soldiers sympathized with a separatist movement in their native Punjab state. That was in October 1984.

I remembered Indira Gandhi with some self interest during my latest trip to the country in which I was born (but whose citizenship I exchanged long ago for that of the United States, where I studied and came of age professionally). Penguin just published the paperback edition of my book, “Mother India: A Political Biography of Indira Gandhi,” and I thought it only appropriate to mark its release in India which, after all, shaped Mrs. Gandhi and which, in turn, was dramatically shaped by her during 17 years of prime ministership.

It was shaped dramatically, indeed, but not necessarily for the better. Making trains run on time for two years when one has ruled for 17 isn’t much of a legacy. Indira Gandhi could have worked more vigorously to expedite economic development; instead, she was mired in failed socialist shibboleths. Indira Gandhi could have done more to empower India’s vast pool of talented women; instead, she inexplicably kept women out of politics, for the most part. Did she fear waking up every day and smelling the estrogen around her? We will never know.

What we do know is that the corruption in India’s political system was deepened by Mrs. Gandhi; “donations” were sought from businessmen and others for party coffers. And while Indira wasn’t personally corrupt, she acquiesced to despicable behavior on the part of her close aides.

What we also know now is that she missed out on launching India on the path to more efficient economic development, perhaps through a stronger partnership of the public and private sectors. Such a partnership, of course, would have demanded greater transparency in governance. Indira could not countenance that: in her mind, she wasn’t accountable to anyone, not even to the yearning masses of India who’d invested so much faith in her over long years after independence from the British Raj.

But why do I cavil? Indira Gandhi has been good to me: four of my 14 books have dealt with her career, and the biography has done well in the market and with critics. The publisher has high hopes for the new paperback. An old woman was shot in her own garden in New Delhi by her own guards 27 years ago, so why pick on her now?

Nevertheless, some critical review of her political life is in order. I think that Indira could have shown better foresight about India’s economic prospects. Even in her time, a lot of smart people expected that India would one day become an economic giant on account of its demography, the natural entrepreneurial talents of its people, and its huge reservoirs of natural resources. Even in her time, when the Cold War was still on, and only two superpowers dominated the global economy – the United States and the erstwhile Soviet Union – there were those who anticipated that India would one day join the ranks of the economically influential through the sheer momentum of history.

Indira wasn’t one of those. She wasn’t one of those who thought of strategizing for a day when India would break out of the psychologically debilitating category of “underdeveloped nation.” She wasn’t one of those who saw the need to advance India’s commercial interests in a world where technological innovations and sophisticated techno-savvy cohorts – such as what India amply produces now – would be in high demand.

She wasn’t one of those who thought of strengthening the elite Indian Administrative Services and the Indian Foreign Service, instead of blighting their cadres with political interference.

Indira wasn’t one of those who saw beyond India’s typical moral posturing and preaching to the world about nonalignment and ethical geopolitics – when Indira embraced the Soviets warmly and played the geopolitical game poorly.

And so we are left with a big nation with a trillion-dollar economy that can legitimately flex its economic muscles, but doesn’t. We are left with a people whose sensibilities ought to be more sensible about a rapidly changing world, but isn’t. We are left with a people who should possess more pride in their stride, but don’t. We are left with a form of government that should be a beacon for aspiring democracies around the world, but isn’t.

Too many “isn’ts”; not enough “is’s.”

(Pranay Gupte is Editor-in-Chief of Al Arabiya English Website and Web TV. He can be reached at: [email protected])