The world’s largest democracy turns 60, having written an epic success story
Friday, August 10, 2007
By Shashi Tharoor
At midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, a new nation was born on a subcontinent ripped apart by a bloody partition. Independent India came into being as flames blazed across the land, corpse-laden trains crossed the new frontier with Pakistan and weary refugees abandoned everything to seek a new life. A less propitious start for a fledgling nation could scarcely be imagined.
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Shashi Tharoor is a former under secretary-general of the United Nations. Copyright Project Syndicate, 2007. (www.projectsyndicate.com)
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Yet, six decades later, India is the world’s largest democracy, poised after years of rapid economic growth to take its place as one of the giants of the 21st century. A country whose very survival seemed in doubt at its founding offers striking lessons in constructing, against all odds, a working democracy.
No other country embraces such an extraordinary profusion of ethnic groups, mutually incomprehensible languages, religions and cultural practices. Given this, and the challenges of administering a new country, integrating the “princely states” into the Indian Union and reorganizing the divided armed forces, India’s first leaders could have been forgiven for demanding dictatorial powers.
Instead, they made a strength out of India’s major weakness. To the American motto, “E Pluribus Unum,” they could only counter, “E Pluribus Pluribum.” Rather than suppressing its diversity in the name of national unity, India’s institutional arrangements acknowledged the country’s pluralism.
This wasn’t always easy. India suffered caste conflicts, clashes over the rights of different linguistic groups, religious riots and separatist threats. But, despite many stresses and strains, India has remained a freewheeling multi-party democracy — corrupt and inefficient, perhaps, but nonetheless flourishing.
It helped that India’s founding fathers, from Mahatma Gandhi on, were convinced democrats. India’s first and longest-serving prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, spent his political career instilling in his people the habits of democracy: disdain for dictators, respect for parliamentary procedures and abiding faith in the constitutional system. Though there was no serious challenger to his authority, Nehru never forgot that he derived his power from India’s people, to whom he remained astonishingly accessible.
By his personal example, democratic values became so entrenched that when his own daughter, Indira Gandhi, suspended India’s freedoms in 1975 with a 21-month state of emergency, she felt compelled to seek vindication from the Indian people. Having imbibed her father’s democratic values, she held a free election, which she overwhelmingly lost.
Of course, Indian politics is hardly immune to the appeal of sectarianism. But its people have come to accept the idea of India as one land embracing many differences of caste, creed, color, culture, cuisine, conviction, costume and custom, yet still rallying around a democratic consensus. The heart of that consensus is the principle that you don’t need to agree all the time — except on the ground rules about how you can disagree.
As a result, no one speaks seriously any more of the danger of disintegration. Separatist movements in far-flung places like Tamil Nadu and Mizoram have been quietly defused by a simple formula: Yesterday’s secessionists become today’s chief ministers (the equivalent of American state governors) and tomorrow’s opposition leaders.
Moreover, Indian democracy is not an elite preoccupation. Whereas in the United States, a majority of the poor do not vote, in India the poor turn out en masse. Thus, the explosive potential of caste division also has been channeled through the ballot box, with the lowest of the low attaining high office. Mayawati, an “untouchable” woman, has ruled India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, as chief minister three times, and now enjoys a secure majority.
More generally, the logic of the electoral marketplace means that no single communal identity can dominate others. Three years ago, India, a country that is 81 percent Hindu, saw a Roman Catholic (Sonia Gandhi) make way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh), who was sworn in as prime minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam). By contrast, the world’s oldest democracy, the United States, has yet to elect a president who is not white, male and Christian.
Democracy has sustained an India that safeguards the common space available to each identity. That idea has knit together a country that many thought would not survive, and whose 60th birthday is therefore well worth celebrating.
