India
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It is all the more ironic that when a group of Indian nationalists had convened the first-ever Indian National Congress in 1885 — giving birth to the party that won the country’s freedom from British rule six decades later — they chose as their president Allan Octavian Hume, a liberal Scotsman. Well into the twentieth century, the party’s most redoubtable leaders (and elected presidents) included the English-born Annie Besant and the Muslim divine Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who was born in Mecca.
A century later, the same Congress party split over another foreign-born president. Three powerful Congress politicians, Sharad Pawar, Purno Sangma and Tariq Anwar — with classic Congress secularism, a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim — averred that Mrs. Sonia Gandhi was unfit to be prime minister because she was born in Italy. In the extraordinary letter they delivered to her and leaked to the newspapers, the three party leaders declared that “It is not possible that a country of 980 million, with a wealth of education, competence and ability, can have anyone other than an Indian, born of Indian soil, to head its government.” Mrs. Gandhi promptly resigned, precipitating a crisis that ended with the expulsion of the three nativists from the party and her triumphant return as party president. But the genie was out of the bottle: indeed, the trio went so far as to ask her to propose a constitutional amendment requiring that the offices of President and Prime Minister be held only by natural-born Indian citizens. “Our soul, our honour, our pride, our dignity, is rooted in our soil,” they explained. The ruling NDA coalition promptly declared they would, if re-elected, pass such a law themselves.
As it happened, they did not, though they spent the next five years in power at the head of a coalition government. But this territorial notion of Indian nationhood is a curious one for a party with the Congress’s eclectic traditions. The republic’s founding fathers had consciously refused to adopt the American requirement that its head of government be native-born. Even more curious is the implicit repudiation of the views of the Congress’s greatest-ever leader, Mahatma Gandhi, who tried to make the party a representative microcosm of an India he saw as pluralist, diverse and all-inclusive — a “house with all the doors and windows open” through which the winds from around the world would blow, without sweeping Indians off their feet.
Under Gandhi and Nehru, Indian nationalism became a rare animal indeed. It was not based on any of the conventional indices of national identity. Not language, since India’s Constitution recognizes eighteen official languages, and there are thirty-five that are spoken by more than a million people each. Not ethnicity, since the “Indian” accommodates a diversity of racial types in which many Indians have more in common with foreigners than with other Indians — Indian Punjabis and Bengalis, for instance, have more in common with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, respectively, than with other Indians. Not religion, since India is a secular pluralist state that is home to every religion known to mankind, with the possible exception of Shintoism. Not geography, since the natural geography of the subcontinent — the mountains and the sea — was hacked by the Partition of 1947. And not even territory, since, by law, anyone with one grandparent born in pre-Partition India — outside the territorial boundaries of today’s state — is eligible for citizenship. Indian nationalism has therefore always been the nationalism of an idea. It is, as I have tried to demonstrate in this book, the idea of an ever-ever land emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy.
When India celebrated the forty-ninth anniversary of its independence from British rule in 1996, its then prime minister, H. D. Deve Gowda, stood at the ramparts of Delhi’s sixteenth-century Red Fort and delivered the traditional Independence Day address to the nation in Hindi, India’s “national language.” Eight other prime ministers had done exactly the same thing forty-eight times before him, but what was unusual this time was that Deve Gowda, a southerner from the state of Karnataka, spoke to the country in a language of which he did not know a word. Tradition and politics required a speech in Hindi, so he gave one — the words having been written out for him in his native Kannada script, in which they, of course, made no sense.
Such an episode is almost inconceivable elsewhere, but it represents the best of the oddities that help make India India. Only in India could there be a country ruled by a man who does not understand its “national language”; only in India, for that matter, is there a “national language” which half the population does not understand; and only in India could this particular solution have been found to enable the prime minister to address his people. One of Indian cinema’s finest “playback singers,” the Keralite K. J. Yesudas, sang his way to the top of the Hindi music charts with lyrics in that language written in the Malayalam script for him, but to see the same practice elevated to the prime ministerial address on Independence Day was a startling affirmation of Indian pluralism.
For the simple fact is that we are all minorities in India. There has never been an archetypal Indian to stand alongside the archetypal Englishman or Frenchman. If America is a melting-pot, then to me India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast.
The rise of Hindu nationalism as a political phenomenon in recent years has articulated an alternative view of Indian identity — one that is explicitly narrow and definitional. Its pro-Hindu and pro-Hindi, sectarian and anti-secular view of Indianness has not so far found sympathy with three-fourths of the electorate. But the ascent of Sonia Gandhi to the leadership of the Congress, and the very real prospect that she could win power, broadened the debate. The usual chauvinists and xenophobes were joined by political opportunists of various stripes. The spokesperson of the socialist Samata Party, for instance, illiberally declared that it was “an insult to the self-respect of [India] to have a foreigner at the helm.”
But is Sonia a “foreigner”? She is, of course, an Indian by marriage and naturalization, not birth, but traditional Indian culture has always absorbed the daughter-in-law completely into the family fold. Sonia Gandhi has lived in India for thirty-six years — considerably longer than she has lived in her native Italy — and has made her home there despite the assassination in 1991 of her husband, Rajiv. She has declared: “I am Indian and shall remain so till my last breath. India is my motherland, dearer to me than my own life.” But Sonia Gandhi is not the issue. The real issue is whether Indians should let politicians decide who is qualified to be an authentic Indian.
India’s national identity has long been built on the slogan “unity in diversity.” The “Indian” comes in such varieties that a woman who is fair-skinned, sari-wearing and Italian-speaking, as Sonia is, is not more foreign to my grandmother in Kerala than one who is “wheatish-complexioned,” wears a salwar-kameez and speaks Punjabi. Our nation absorbs both these types of people; both are equally “foreign” to some of us, equally Indian to us all.
India’s founding fathers wrote a constitution for their dreams; we have given passports to their ideals. To start disqualifying Indian citizens from the privileges of Indianness is not just pernicious: it is an affront to the very premise of Indian nationalism. An India that denies itself to some Indians would no longer be the India Mahatma Gandhi fought to free.
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How has India changed since this book was first written? Two phenomena have been the most striking: the country’s dramatic economic growth, averaging 5.9 percent annually at the cusp of the millennium and rising to 8 percent by 2007, with talk of even 10 percent in the next five years; and the eruption of religious violence, most notably in 2002 in the state of Gujarat, when perhaps 2000 people, mainly Muslims, lost their lives. The two seemingly incompatible statistics tell their own story, of an India torn between history and hope.
The economic story is certainly one of hope. India’s gross domestic product is rising so rapidly that i
t increases each year by amounts that exceed the total GDP of Portugal or Norway. India’s foreign reserves in 2007 exceed $140 billion, enough to cover fifteen months’ worth of imports; sixteen years ago, the country had to mortgage its gold in London because the foreign exchange coffers were dry. In Forbes magazine’s published list of the world’s billionaires, twenty-seven of the world’s richest people are Indians, and even more surprising, only four of them live abroad: Indian wealth is staying in India, and it’s growing.
Of course, a rather large portion of the world’s poorest people live in India too. And yet, for all the tragic news of farmers committing suicide and the undeniably sad sight of human beings reduced to begging on our city sidewalks, there have been positive developments here too. In 1991, 36 percent of India’s population (in those days, 846 million people) lived on less than one dollar a day, the World Bank’s classic measure of absolute poverty. That added up to nearly 305 million people, giving India the dubious distinction of being home to the largest collection of poor people in the world. In 2001, our population had grown to 1.02 billion people, but after a decade of economic reforms, however fitful, the percentage of those living on less than a dollar a day had fallen to 26 percent, or some 267 million people. In other words, even though India had added 156 million more people to its population in the decade between those two censuses, the number of poor Indians had actually fallen by 37 million. The liberalized and liberated Indian economy had, in effect, lifted 94 million people out of absolute poverty in ten years — a feat on a scale that no country on earth, other than China, had ever accomplished. Today, five years later, estimates of people below the poverty level stand at 22 percent. Economic growth is steadily chipping away at poverty, and it is doing so far faster than in the first four decades of independence, when statist economic policies ruled the commanding heights in Delhi.
None of this is grounds for complacency. We still have a long way to go; 22 percent is still 250 million people living in conditions that are a blot on our individual and collective consciences. We must take the necessary steps to ensure that every Indian is given the means to live a decent life, to feed his or her family, and to acquire the education that will enable him or her to fulfill their creative potential. Progress is being made: we can take satisfaction from India’s success in carrying out three kinds of revolutions in feeding our people — the “green revolution” in food grains, the “white revolution” in milk production and, at least to some degree, a “blue revolution” in the development of our fisheries. But the benefits of these revolutions have not yet reached the third of our population still living below the poverty line — a poverty line drawn just this side of the funeral pyre.
But the economic progress of India is undeniable, and one visible symbol of it since this book was first published is the ubiquitous cell phone. In 2007, seven million Indians are subscribing to new mobile phones each month. That’s a world record. By 2010, the government tells us, we’ll have 500 million Indian telephone users. What is truly wonderful about the “mobile miracle” (and I’m not embarrassed to call it that) is that it has accomplished something the socialist policies of pre-liberalization India talked about but did little to achieve — it has empowered the less fortunate. The beneficiaries of the new mobile telephones are not just the affluent, but people who in the old days would not even have dreamt of owning a phone. It’s a source of constant delight to me to find cell phones in the hands of the unlikeliest of my fellow citizens: taxi drivers, paanwallahs, farmers, fisher folk. As long as our tax policies keep telecommunications costs low and it’s cheap for people to call on their cell phones, the greatest growth in the use of mobile phones will be in this sector. Communications, in the new India, is the great leveller.
This does not mean that we can afford to forget that India is still a land of rural poverty, fetid slums, throat-searing pollution, inadequate health-care, crippling corruption, tragic water shortages, cities choking on themselves. The challenge of bringing the country’s infrastructure into the twenty-first century — the “hardware” of development — is immense. So too is the “software” — the human capital without which no country develops. We must do much more to promote education, sanitation, basic health and an end to caste and gender discrimination. Only then can we produce Indians truly ready to take India to the top in the twenty-first century.
One Indian city, Bombay, seems to epitomize India’s contradictions all by itself. It is India’s commercial capital, the home of the country’s main stock exchange, a city that pays 38 percent of India’s taxes; it manufactures the grandiose dreams of “Bollywood” (making four times as many films annually as the US); it houses the country’s most opulent hotels and boasts of commercial rents higher than Manhattan or Tokyo (in a city where half the population is homeless); and it supports India’s most innovative theatres and art galleries while millions of its residents eke out a bare subsistence in the world’s largest slums. Bombay is a city of appalling contrasts — a bottle of champagne at one of the city’s many five-start hotels sells for one and a half times the national average annual income, when 40 percent of the city has no safe drinking water; the world’s largest film industry thrives in a city where plumbing, telephones and law and order break down regularly; millions starve in filthy slums while the city supports several hundred slimming clinics. And violence lurks not very far from the surface in a city where appalling Hindu-Muslim riots had erupted in 1992 and where the reach and power of the criminal underworld rivals that of Chicago in the 1920s.
Ten years after the Bombay riots, it was Gujarat that exploded, when the torching alive of fifty-nine Hindu pilgrims in a train compartment led to a retaliatory pogrom against Muslim civilians. “I’ll tell you what your problem is in India,” the American businessman said. “You have too much history. Far more than you can use peacefully. So you end up wielding history like a battleaxe, against each other.”
All right, he didn’t really say it. The American in question is a fictional character in my last novel, Riot, about a Hindu-Muslim riot that erupts in the course of a campaign to construct a Hindu temple on the site occupied for four and a half centuries by a Muslim mosque. As headlines in 2002, months after the novel’s publication, spoke of a renewed cycle of killings and mob violence over the same issue, I received dozens of comments on the eerie similarity between art and life. Some callers point to the Afterword to my novel, in which I alert readers to the threat by Hindu extremists to commence construction of their temple, in defiance of court orders. I seek no credit for prescience. The tragedy in India is that even those who know history seem condemned to repeat it.
It is one of the ironies of India’s muddled march into the twenty-first century that it has a technologically inspired vision of the future and yet appears shackled to the dogmas of the past. The temple town of Ayodhya, in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, has no computer software labs; it is devoted to religion and old-fashioned industry. In 1992, a howling mob of Hindu extremists tore down a disused sixteenth-century mosque, the Babri Masjid, which occupied a prominent spot in a town otherwise overflowing with temples. The mosque had been built in the 1520s by India’s first Mughal emperor, Babur; the Hindu zealots vowed to replace it with a temple to the Hindu god Ram, which they say had stood on the spot for millennia before the Mughal invader tore it down to make room for his mosque. In other words, they want to avenge history, to undo the shame of half a millennium ago with a reassertion of their glory today.
India is a land where history, myth and legend often overlap; sometimes Indians cannot tell the difference. Some Hindus claim, with more zeal than evidence, that the Babri Masjid stood on the exact spot of Lord Ram’s birth, and had been placed there by the Mughal emperor as a reminder to a conquered people of their own subjugation. Historians — most of them Hindus — reply that there is no proof that Lord Ram ever existed in human form, let alone that he was born where the believers claim he was. More to the point, there is no proof th
at Babur actually demolished a Ram temple to build his mosque. Of course, proof is not a valid currency on issues of faith; but to destroy the mosque and replace it with a temple would not, they say, be righting an old wrong but perpetrating a new one.
To most Indian Muslims, the dispute is not about a specific mosque — which had in fact lain disused for half a century before its destruction, most of Ayodhya’s Muslim minority having emigrated to Pakistan upon the partition of the country in 1947 — but about their place in Indian society. For decades after independence, successive Indian governments had guaranteed their security in a secular state, permitting the retention of Muslim Personal Law separate from the country’s civil code and even financing Haj pilgrimages to Mecca. Two of India’s first five Presidents were Muslims, as were innumerable cabinet ministers, ambassadors, generals, and Supreme Court justices. Till the mid-1990s India’s Muslim population exceeded Pakistan’s. The destruction of the mosque seemed an appalling betrayal of the compact that had sustained the Muslim community as a vital part of India’s pluralist democracy.
The Hindu fanatics who attacked the mosque had little faith in the institutions of Indian democracy. They saw the state as soft, pandering to minorities out of a misplaced and westernized secularism. To them, an independent India, freed after nearly a thousand years of alien rule (first Muslim, then British), and rid of a sizeable portion of its Muslim population by Partition, had an obligation to assert its own identity, one that would be triumphantly and indigenously Hindu. They are not fundamentalists in any meaningful sense of the term, since Hinduism is uniquely a religion without fundamentals: there is no Hindu Pope, no Hindu Sunday, no single Hindu holy book, and indeed no such thing as Hindu heresy. They are, instead, chauvinists, who root their Hinduism not in any of its soaring philosophical or spiritual underpinnings — and, unlike their Islamic counterparts, not in the theology of their faith — but rather in its role as a source of identity. They seek revenge in the name of Hinduism-as-badge, rather than of Hinduism-as-doctrine.