Contemporary India: The Basics

Rekha Datta

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351339759
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Asian American Studies

Contemporary India: The Basics provides readers with a clear and accessible guide through the richness, diversity and complexity of twenty-first century India. It explores the reality of the country's cultural diversity which creates both harmony and tension. Covering issues the country faces both domestically and on the global stage, this book analyzes the political, social, cultural and economic landscape of India and investigates how the future might look for India. The book addresses key questions such as:

• How has India risen to be a major economic power?

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• What role does sectarianism play in the world's largest democracy?

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• How do caste and gender affect the structure of Indian society?

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• What is the domestic and international impact of Bollywood?

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Featuring maps, discussion questions and suggestions for further reading, this is the ideal introduction to India for those who are new to the study of this most fascinating and complex of countries.

1

Introduction

Prologue

“India is a country where women wear beautiful, long-flowing colorful clothes…. I don’t know what they are called, but they are very pretty.” This is how a little girl described India to me during a recent discussion session I had with a group of elementary school children on Gandhi, as part of a summer enrichment program for children in an urban area that faces widespread street and domestic violence. In addition, snakes and tigers still dominate their image of India, they said. Their evening sessions always begin with a half-hour devoted to yoga and meditation, an effort on the part of the organizers to use the power of mind-body connection to help the children focus and calm their minds.

Having been born and raised in India, as an educator who has championed global understanding as a fundamental aspect of peace and respect for diverse cultures and for people around the world, I could not but feel proud of how far the contributions of India have come and continue to grow in the contemporary world – yoga and Gandhi still made a lot of sense! As I drove home after the session, a host of questions that I have fielded over the three decades while living in the United States – ranging from whether people still worship cows, why there are so many poor people in India, if I had left India to escape dowry, why women are discriminated against despite the fact that the country has had a female president and prime minister, how has India made such strides in information technology, will India use its nuclear weapons, and many similar ones – flooded my mind. The pride of India and its beauty and color in the little girl’s imagination were, however, tarnished by rewinding to a day after September 11, 2001, when as I was walking in New York City, a visibly angry passer-by hissed, “Go back to your country, the land of Mohammed Gandhi.”

Since that day, and to this day, the challenge to present India with all its beauty, history, culture, politics, and economics has captured my imagination. It is indeed a challenge – no matter how much I pore over the vast body of works on various aspects of this culturally and historically rich and fascinating country, it still becomes an impossible task to capture the entire gamut within the scope of a single comprehensive book. No matter how much I try to root myself in presenting a portrait of contemporary India, its historical landscape and the culture of continuity maintain a stubborn and indelible imprint. This book thus represents an opportunity and a struggle. It is an opportunity to reflect and analyze contemporary India in its historical backdrop. It is also a struggle to make India understandable amidst the complexities of tradition and modernity, poverty and prosperity, and peace and strife!

– Author’s Note, 2016

India is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating countries in the world. For centuries, people around the world have cherished its historical and cultural richness. It is the land of sadhus (ascetics) and scientists; of color and contrasts. Its political and social landscape have been a complex mix of indigenous richness interspersed with a series of foreign interventions spanning several centuries, culminating in the British colonial period that lasted until the middle of the twentieth century. Since independence in 1947, over the last seven decades, India has attained the celebratory, albeit dubious, distinction of becoming the world’s largest democracy. As a democratic polity, despite occasional wrinkles, India has been a beacon of the ballot and a champion of sustained institutional and procedural reliance on peaceful transfer of power. This record of democratic success is simultaneously marked with inequalities of wealth and disparities in development. In recent decades, India has recorded dazzling prospects and prowess in technological, military, and economic areas, but it has also been saddled with continuing challenges surrounding poverty, equity, public health, and governance. Together, these opportunities and challenges have generated widespread interest in understanding how this fascinating country is steering through them and whether it will be able to jostle out of its designation as an emerging power to one that has emerged.

This book is an attempt at introducing India and making it understandable. It seeks to underscore the importance of history and culture in understanding political, economic, and social trends in contemporary India. Beneath the visible changes that dot the landscape in contemporary India are deeper currents that shape its institutions, and, hence, the book contextualizes them in its rich history, complexity, and diversity. It might not be an understatement to suggest that it is impossible to make any generalizations about India. As stated above, it is a land of contrasts with varied richness and complexity. It is impossible to understand India without going into the depths and complexity that make it so unique and fascinating. For example, despite its economic boom in recent decades and the rise of a new middle class, millions of Indians continue to struggle with poverty and lack of resources. Despite an overall commitment and success in establishing a secular democracy, occasional bouts of religious riots by zealots – as witnessed in the riots that followed partition in 1947, the death of Indira Gandhi in 1984, and during the pogrom carried out in Gujarat in 2002 – remain a blemish on its record on secularism. There are numerous challenges that millions of people face as a result of lack of resources, education, infrastructure, and a social security and safety net. Yet, through it all, its 1.2 billion people remain optimistic about the human essence. Through it all, India has most commendably upheld the democratic tradition with its political culture, institutions, and processes.

Understandably, India’s multifaceted and complex trajectory of changes and challenges has perplexed many. To anyone visiting India or learning about the country, the enigmatic nature of India’s progress seems baffling. State-of-the-art, high-rise buildings coexist with slums. In 2010 and 2014, I accompanied a group of American college students to explore India. We visited Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, and Kolkata (Calcutta). We also spent time in Shantiniketan, the abode of peace, where India’s Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore established Vishwabharati, or a world university, a place where music, art, and science instruction is often conducted in classrooms nestled in the midst of nature. We met and interacted with people from different walks of life. We visited historical and cultural landmarks, educational institutions, shopping malls, and children living in poverty in urban areas. Despite lessons and readings on India that students had done prior to the trips, visiting India unfolded a reality that easily surpassed what they had previously read about the country.

The contrasting landscape of India is fascinating. History coexists with contemporary reality in a working alignment. Cultural diversity lends color and beauty but has also been the source of occasional and sometimes lingering tension among groups. The gap between the rich and the poor was visible even during a casual stroll along the city sidewalks. Cows and cars jostle for space on the nation’s urban thoroughfares, which are heavily bottlenecked with the chaotic influx of imported and locally manufactured vehicles, auto-rickshaws, and rickshaws. The students were fascinated by India’s rich cultural heritage and history and also perplexed as to why so many people lived on the streets surrounding the rapidly rising high-rise residential complexes. They wanted to know how much the government of India spends on education, healthcare, social welfare, and defense. Other questions they had were how India compared with China, what the future of a U.S.-India partnership would be, would India resolve its differences with Pakistan, and what the status of women was. I found it intriguing that their questions addressed many of the historical continuities and discontinuities, as well as disparities about India. Such questions are also the ones that appear in op-eds, blogs, and narratives about the challenges of the new India – both within the country and outside. These questions serve as cues to a better understanding of the portrait of new India in the backdrop of the old, and they make the approach in this book unique.

Emerging from 200 years of colonial rule, since 1947 India has experimented with and maintained a democratic form of government that, despite its imperfections, has successfully sustained. Despite a largely non-violent overthrow of the British rule, the political history in the immediate aftermath of independence has been plagued with violence that continues to challenge the secular harmony in a multi-religious and multi-ethnic nation that somehow holds its tenuous balance. After colonial India sustained negative to zero growth, and low to modest growth in the early decades of independence, the economic progress of the past few decades has made India second only to China as the fastest-growing economy in the world. Yet as already indicated, the story of India’s rise is mired with contradictions. On the one hand, there is significant economic progress, which has led to improvement in social indicators. “Life expectancy in India today (about 66 years) is more than twice what it was in 1951 (32 years); infant mortality is about one fourth of what it used to be (44 per thousand live births today as opposed to 180 or so in 1951); and female literacy rate has grown up from 9 per cent to 65 per cent” (Drèze and Sen 2013: 5). Opportunities and income in the service sector, particularly in information technology (IT), have grown significantly. Yet, India is saddled with inequitable distribution of this new income; real wages for the working class continue to be stagnant; and large sections of the population remain economically deprived: “Democratic pressures … have gone in other directions rather than rectifying the major injustices that characterize contemporary India” (Drèze and Sen 2013: 9).

Despite such flaws, India’s democracy has been resilient as it seeks to work out power relations. In the contemporary world, such relations among classes and sections of people in more-established democracies are undergoing realignment. Apparent in Brexit and in the primary campaign season leading up to the 2016 presidential elections in the United States is significant voter angst with the respective establishment political parties. It appears that the party establishments in both of these countries are struggling to give voice to all sections of the population, especially those who feel they are forgotten. India’s sojourn with multiple constituencies began decades ago. India has consolidated its democratic institutions through a process of power negotiation that involved social groups, political institutions, and leadership strategies: “First, a delicate balance has been struck, and struck again, between forces of centralization and decentralization. Second, the interests of the powerful in society have been served without fully excluding the weaker groups” (Kohli and Singh 2013: 2). Hence, although paradoxical, India’s democracy and its economic rise represent a constant realignment among the powerful and those seeking power, trying to seek a voice and strike a balance.

To anyone visiting India or learning about the country, the enigmatic nature of India’s progress is visible at the outset and seems baffling. As already stated and as we will see in the subsequent chapters in this book, since independence, India has followed a tale of two profiles: one that shows progress, the other that is stifled under age-old problems; one that calls for more emphasis on military and nuclear advancement as key to its position of power and progress, the other that calls for a larger emphasis on social and educational expenditures. This book will attempt to offer a picture of India’s story and capture its historical and contemporary aspects of development and complexities, interspersed with firsthand narratives and analysis.

The scholarship on India is rich, complex, and varied. While many of these secondary resources have provided the backdrop for this analysis, there remain many important ones that the book has not been able to include. In its humble attempt to offer a simple portrayal of India, this book makes no pretension that it is an exhaustive analysis. Rather, it is an attempt to provide an introductory overview with a historical trajectory of the political, economic, and socio-cultural evolution of policies and trends that have shaped the country and continue to impact contemporary India. Each chapter attempts to provide an overview and contemporary trends that are set in a historical context, and each is primarily based on secondary reference and analysis. Hence, the chapters try to encapsulate what can best be described as a snapshot, creating the pathway to the major socio-political and economic aspects of India’s development, with their challenges and opportunities. Books on India cover a wide variety of subject areas. Because of the complexity of the historical, social, cultural, political, and economic aspects of India’s development, it is often a challenge to gain a basic overall understanding of the country. This book seeks to cover the major areas that anyone seeking to become familiar with India would be looking to acquire.

To reiterate, untangling the complex questions surrounding India’s prospects as a leading economic power in Asia, and the world, is indeed a difficult task. Making a contribution that adds to the already burgeoning literature about contemporary India is formidable as well. This book will offer a glimpse into the reality and the dream that is the new India, struggling with nettlesome issues mired in history, culture, economic priorities, security challenges, governance, and the overall quality-of-life issues for the ordinary citizen. The framework will explore the questions one might have, just like my students had, upon confronting ‘India,’ attempting to make sense of the dynamic changes and the age-old processes and institutions that together make India so complex and fascinating.

Adopting this perspective, each chapter will begin with a reflection related to the topic of discussion as it is seen in contemporary India, trace its origins, and unfold the policies and changes pertaining to it. The approach will follow the format of the other books in the Basics series and introduce India to a general readership that is more informed now, having access to various forms of print and electronic sources of information.

Even though the book is on contemporary India, it will begin with a journey through the highlights of ancient India, which will enable readers to familiarize themselves with India’s past as it is still witnessed and experienced, and with its bearings on the landscape of India’s modern and contemporary life. Taking the lead from Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India, which he (India’s first prime minister) wrote while in prison (1942–1946), Chapter 2 will present a brief survey of India’s history since the days of the Indus Valley Civilization until the British colonial period. The key focus of the chapter will be on presenting India’s historical continuity and its bearings on the landscape of the country’s modern and contemporary life. Embedded in the portrayal are questions and debates surrounding issues such as how much of India’s present is influenced by its experience with foreign rulers. Was democracy imported through any such rule? Can India look to its past to address any of its contemporary challenges? Some of these questions will weave their way throughout the book.

During our visits to Indian universities and meetings with political analysts, American students, who came with some understanding of India, had many questions that they sought answers to from experts. Such questions centered on: Did the British bring democracy to India? How does India’s mystical past corroborate with its more contemporary reality of diversity and technological and scientific advancement? What makes India the largest democracy in the world, accommodating a diverse tapestry and the nexus of castes, religions, and languages? Taking a cue from Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian (2005), Chapter 3 will begin by examining the cultural aspects of India’s democratic tradition, which lie at the root of promoting India’s skeptical culture and allow for dialectical reasoning and policy formulation, essential for democracy.

As is expected, India’s democratic traditions and challenges encompass a wide range of institutions and trends. The discussion in this chapter will focus on the roots of pluralism as embedded in its political culture and as represented in the constitutional structures and the party system. The discussion of pluralism is carried on to the next chapter, where the focus is on sectarian politics and the challenges to India’s democratic governance that have emanated in the decades since independence.

Having looked at India’s rich tradition of diversity, it is natural for any observer to ask why it is that, despite such democratic roots, India still faces problems of sectarian violence rooted in differences in religion, language, and caste, and why the mistreatmen...