INDIA: MARY FITZGERALDreviews India: A PortraitBy Patrick French Allen Lane, 392pp. £25
‘INDIA,” WINSTON CHURCHILL once sniped, “is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the equator.” Much has changed since Churchill made this characteristically boorish observation, but his essential point remains relevant. No other nation comes close to the extraordinarily diverse mix of ethnicities, languages, religions, cultural practices and, indeed, contradictions that India, the world’s largest democracy, harbours within its borders. By several measures India shouldn’t work, but it does – just about. And understanding how and why will be crucial as this century unfolds.
China may be racing to become the next superpower, but India is not far behind. Though several factors threaten to hold India back – grossly lopsided development, grinding poverty and rampant corruption – many believe its population, at just over a billion and growing by 1.5 per cent a year, will prove its trump card.
India’s cheerleaders predict that the demographic dividend produced by one of the world’s youngest populations will enable its economy – now edging towards much-prized double-digit growth – soon to outpace that of its rival to the north. The contest between China and India is destined to be one of the greatest of our age, and Patrick French is the latest in a line of writers seeking to explain why India’s time has come, and why it matters.
French, who wrote an acclaimed account of India’s journey to independence, is an Indophile who tempers his obvious affection for the country to offer a rigorous and often searingly honest analysis of the hurdles it faces. Interestingly, French also wrote a revealing biography of VS Naipaul, whose often sulphurous writing on the land of his ancestors is still guaranteed to raise hackles in India.
French dissects many of the divisions and inequalities that still shape life in India, as well as the hierarchies borne of caste, clan and religion that inspired Naipaul’s 1991 description of “a country with a million little mutinies”, but his book is equally concerned with the “little revolutions” that have taken place over the past two decades and the historical impulses that lay behind them.
Distilling what makes modern India tick into just under 400 pages is always going to be a challenge, but French deftly slices his narrative into three sections, each containing several chapters hinging on the same broad theme.
The first concerns rashtra, or nation; the second lakshmi, or wealth; the third samaj, or society. In between are insightful forays into the rise of Hindu nationalism and Maoist insurgency, the horrors of still-prevalent caste prejudice and bonded labour, the fraught relationship with Pakistan, and the experience of India's Muslim minority. Threaded throughout are scores of anecdotes that together reveal much about the country's attempt to negotiate a path between tradition and modernity.
TO UNDERSTAND how far India has come, and has yet to go, French first takes us back to the early years after the subcontinent ruptured to form two nations. A time when India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, combined secularism and socialism as the glue to bind the fledgling state.
As India’s experiment with democracy developed, the paternalism that defined the post-independence period gave way to what is today an often turbulent political landscape populated by parties powered by caste, religion or regional loyalties, where demagogic politicians like Mayawati, the daughter of a Dalit or untouchable, wield huge influence.
One of the many ironies of contemporary India is the way democracy has adapted itself to ancient ills such as caste, and further strengthened it through the growth of caste-based politics. “A transformative revolution is taking place,” observes French, “and it is not always a pretty sight.”
His astute portrait of Sonia Gandhi, Nehru’s Italian-born granddaughter-in-law and current leader of the ruling Congress Party, fittingly prefaces an examination of the extent to which Indian politics has become not just hereditary but “hyper-hereditary”, as French puts it. His research found that every currently serving MP under the age of 30 had inherited his or her seat.
"The problem really is the scale of what is happening," French recently told the Indian current-affairs magazine Outlook. "You have this ironic situation where democracy is deeply entrenched and yet, at the same time, for the top reaches of certain parties, you have to be the son or daughter of an existing leader in order to get anywhere."
It is tempting to imagine what Nehru
would have thought of such a scenario, or indeed how he would have felt about the dismantling of his development model to encourage India’s much trumpeted economic miracle.
Few lamented the end of the Licence Raj, a system of tight controls and permits that had stifled entrepreneurship, from 1991 on. The founder of Infosys, one of the titans of India’s success story, recalls how importing a 150MB disk drive took so long in those days because of all the bureaucratic red tape that the manufacturer had improved the capacity to 300MB by the time the permit came through.
These and other reforms helped usher in a growth rate that has averaged more than 7 per cent since 1997, and fostered the emergence of a middle class now estimated to number up to 300 million.
But French argues that there was nothing inevitable about India’s rise. He uses the personal experiences of rich and poor to illustrate how it happened, and how the prosperity it has brought to some continues to elude hundreds of millions of others.
French offers few prescriptions for all that ails this nation that always appears to be tottering on the edge of either greatness or the abyss. But at its heart his book is something of a wider cautionary tale. “India is a macrocosm,” he notes, “and may be the world’s default setting for the future.”
Mary Fitzgerald is the Irish TimesForeign Affairs Correspondent
