Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
It is, of course, possible to put a positive spin on India's way of doing things. Shivshank-
ar Menon, Manmohan Singh's national security adviser, tried to do this in his November
2011 lecture on foreign policy. Answering a question about the turmoil in Indian politics
and government, he said: 'We love arguing about it [India's problems]. We love bringing
ourselves down ... that's up to us. It's part of the way we do our business. We make a huge
amount of noise ... I tell my Chinese friends, “We do in public everything that you do in
private - all the arguing, all the policy making”. At the end of it, after getting to all the
extremes, we come somehow to the middle and we find our way through, and we normally
find a good solution, so I'm not worried by turmoil - turmoil is creative, tension is creative,
and it works.'
The second part of the editor's remark raised a more vital point - that powerful vested
interests do not want India's problems to be tackled and therefore impede effective govern-
ment. The elite, I suggested in the article, had shuddered since 1947 at the prospect of the
poorly fed and poorly educated half of the population rapidly entering mainstream society.
That elite has expanded massively in recent years to include the newly rich and power-
ful, who have their own vested interests in resisting change. Sooner or later, I wrote, the
electorate would tire of non-performing governments. Then a new grouping would emerge,
led by younger politicians 'probably involving the Congress without Sonia Gandhi in the
lead'. India would then move forward again, as it always does. Quite possibly, a national
crisis would suddenly trigger change and help to set the country on a new course, as had
happened in 1991. I thought, however, that the dominant picture would continue to be the
dichotomy of a country that was becoming internationally important in geo-political and
economic terms, but whose democracy was becoming anarchic. That was not the India I
had seen when I arrived in India in the 1980s when newspaper headlines and politicians'
speeches were peppered with phrases saying the country was 'poised for take-off ' and 'on
the springboard for success'.
The question now is whether India has reached that point when it will move forward.
Certainly, the government of Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi has led people to 'tire
of non-performing governments'. There is a generational change in prospect with Rahul
Gandhi, 42, emerging at the top of the Congress party to challenge Narendra Modi, the
63-year-old controversial and abrasive chief minister of Gujarat who is the BJP's prime
ministerial candidate. But they are both being challenged by a popular movement that star-
ted with the country-wide anti-corruption protests three years ago and led on to the mass
demonstrations over rape and the treatment of women at the end of 2012. Out of this
emerged the Aam Aadmi Party, led by Arvind Kejriwal, 45, which has provided a platform
for people to become part of a movement that could be an alternative to self-serving and
corrupt national and regional political parties. India's middle classes - especially the young
- are not (yet) cohesive enough to be mobilised to fight collectively for change, but they are
