International Affairs: A few years ago, with the invasion looming, I was in Baghdad chatting to an Indian diplomat who told me that his own country was on the way to being classed as an economic superpower. "We have gone from being famine-torn to being an exporter of food."
Reading Edward Luce's book In Spite of the Gods, I found myself asking - a major exporter of food? So what, if corruption, bribery, ineptitude, gender-inequality, favouritism, political turmoil and chauvinism are as rampant as Luce - the Financial Times's man in New Delhi for four years - leads us to believe.
A universal rural irrigation scheme benefits only those farmers with cash to install pumps and the money to buy the fuel to drive them. Those without, go without. Corrupt judges have a sliding scale for bribes: X thousand rupees for bail for manslaughter, Y thousand for a narcotics offence, and so on.
Rural job creation schemes - digging ditches by hand and so on - are a waste of money, and counterproductive, since the ditches refill with water during the next rainy season. Somewhere, a bullet is probably waiting to take away the life of Rahul Gandhi as one did his father, Rajiv Gandhi, and his grandmother, Indira Gandhi, political assassinations being part of the electoral process. And there is more: vested interest, doing very nicely out of the caste system, does not want change; troop manoeuvres in disputed Kashmir; the abuse thrown at Sonia Gandhi such as dumb doll, bitch, cow, and so on, not to mention five underground nuclear tests in May 1998 which undoubtedly prompted Pakistan to test six a fortnight later. All this before we get on to the subject of sacred cows, call centres and politicians' houses as vulgar as they are opulent.
Three-quarters of the way through the depressing litany of things the author didn't like about India - and some of them I didn't like either - my heart starts to lift as Luce reminds us of India's struggle. This is the country that, led by two London-educated lawyers, Nehru and Gandhi, untied the strangling knot of British colonialism and sought to establish a secular state while acknowledging the presence of two major religions, Islam and Hinduism. Nehru's three aims had been to have an India that was democratic, secular and socialist. (It was his daughter, Indira, who tried to impose the last with an iron fist.)
This was the country that refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty as long as the five big powers had their own nuclear weapons, that brought leaders such as Nasser and Tito to stand, together and non-aligned, against the dominant powers of the day and that, more recently, enraged US investors by refusing to buy electricity from the soon-to-be-bankrupt Enron power plant near Mumbai because, they said, it was too expensive. Don't you just love them?
India's population is 1.1 billion, with only a very few engaged in, whisper it, proper jobs. Which means only about 35 per cent are actually paying income tax. If you're working for the Financial Times, this can be unsettling but, as Luce found out at his own wedding (to an Indian woman), it all pans out in the end. The system, described by Kenneth Galbraith, US ambassador to New Delhi in the 1960s, as "functioning anarchy", seems to work, for, apart from feeding others as well as its own huge population, if India's economy continues to grow at its current rate of 7 per cent, it looks set to overtake Japan within 20 years.
In his final chapter, Luce quotes from EP Thompson: "There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or the East that is not active in some Indian mind." This book is a warning to the rest of us: though the Bush family's disastrous dynasty is on the wane, India is still waiting in the wings.
Mary Russell is a writer with a special interest in world affairs
In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India By Edward Luce Little Brown, 388pp. £20