E Pluribus, India: Is Indian Modernity Working?

"This book," Khilnani tells us in his introduction, "is an initial venture into the task of retelling the political history of independent India." The qualification is necessary; Khilnani competently organizes a series of reflections on well-worn themes, and despite the occasional lapse into the turgid prose that afflicts all political scientists, generally does so with style. Style is central to both the pleasures and the pitfalls of his narrative. Khilnani is charmingly self-indulgent, fond of sweepingly colorful generalizations. (The Government's Planning Commission is a "retirement home for the socially benevolent," whatever that may mean.) His penchant for sweeping one-liners is fetching in an academic-who can resist a chapter that begins with the sentence "India in the 1950s fell in love with the idea of concrete"?-but he cannot resist an epigram, even when it is more witty than wise. "Like the British empire it supplanted, India's constitutional democracy was established in a fit of absent-mindedness," he declares, ignoring the overwhelming weight of evidence to the contrary in nationalist literature.

Khilnani tells us he is working on a biography of Nehru, and he is sound on the lasting contributions made to the Indian state by that remarkable man, whose extemporization of Indianness remains an enduring legacy to so many Indian liberals. A highly self-aware scholar, Khilnani ends his book with an assertion of the value of Western political theory and a useful if contentious bibliographical essay that students of Indian politics will appreciate. But the unwary should be warned that Khilnani's glibness sometimes trips him up. Any reader of Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography knows that he did not "discover" vegetarianism in Holborn; Nehru was never a head of state; Chandigarh is not "400 kilometers north of Delhi," which would put it in Kashmir; the Mughals entered India in 1526, not 1528 (this would be like a British historian placing the Battle of Hastings in 1068). This sort of carelessness is disconcerting, for it undermines the reader's willingness to take some of the author's more esoteric suggestions seriously. For instance, Khilnani attributes the existence of "less stark inequalities" in the Indian state of Kerala to its "own cultural forms of matrilineal property inheritance"-a dubious proposition at best, since not all Kerala communities are matrilineal and inheritance per se has few redistributive implications, but one made worse by being wholly unsubstantiated.

THE FAILURES

More important, Khilnani's exegesis on Indian modernity inadequately examines its failures. Nehru's legacy to India was a mixed one. It consisted of four major pillars-democratic institution-building, staunch secularism, nonalignment, and socialist economics. The first two were indispensable to the country's survival; the third (not examined by Khilnani) preserved its self-respect and enhanced its international standing, though without bringing any concrete benefits to the Indian people; the fourth was disastrous, condemning the Indian people to poverty and stagnation and engendering inefficiency, red-tapism, and corruption on a scale rarely rivaled elsewhere.

In the five decades since independence, Indian democracy has failed to create a single Indian political community. Instead, we have become more conscious than ever of what divides us: religion, region, caste, language, ethnicity. The Indian political system has become looser and more fragmented. Politicians mobilize support along ever-narrower lines of political identity. It has become more important to be a "backward caste" Yadav, a "tribal" Bodo, or a sectarian Muslim than to be an Indian. This is particularly ironic because one of the early strengths of Nehruvian India-the survival of the nationalist movement as a political party, the Congress Party serving as an all-embracing, all-inclusive agglomeration of the major political tendencies in the country-led to this situation by undermining the evolution of a genuine multiparty system. Had the nationalist movement given birth to, say, three parties-one right of center, one social democrat, one communist-a culture of principled and ideological contestation might have evolved in India's polity.

Instead the Congress Party's dominance stifled this process, and opposition to it (with a few honorable exceptions, like the pro-free enterprise Swatantra Party between 1959 and 1974) was largely based on the assertion of identities to which the Congress was deemed not to have given full expression-regional, religious, or caste-based. With the increasing weakness of the Congress, politicians have been tempted to organize themselves around identities other than party (or to create parties to reflect a particularist identity).