What India would like to be and what it really is

Size usually translates if not into greatness than at least into importance. India is a large country. It is now the world’s largest country in terms of the size of its population. It also overtook Britain to become the world’s fifth largest economy, after the US, China, Japan and Germany. By size it is the world’s seventh largest country after Russia, Canada, the US, Brazil and Australia. It is the world’s second largest producer of rice, coming after China. Even if it is not as yet a member of the important groups of nations such as G7, its head of state is usually invited to attend the group’s meetings.

As China rises in terms of the size of its economy, the size and sophistication of its military and its ambitions as a global power, the US in particular is grooming India as a counterpower. It is already a member of what is called the ‘Quad’, a group of nations which, in addition to India, includes the US, Japan and Australia. When strategic thinkers in Washington reflect on the state of the globe, they have begun to talk about the Indo-Pacific region that is centred around India and includes all the countries bounded by the Indian Ocean.

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister who held that position for seventeen years until his death in 1974, coined the term ‘non-aligned nations’ — a group that kept its distance from the superpowers of the day — the US and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the USSR. When the USSR ceased to exist in 1991, it granted independence to its constituent republics in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ukraine was one of those states that became independent. New Delhi did not change in any significant way the posture towards the successor state of Russia. When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to invade the neighbouring Ukraine, most of the world responded by uniting against Moscow’s aggression. India chose to remain unaligned; buying Russian oil at a low price when its export was blocked by the West. Washington, while taking note of this posture, continued to woo India. For it, China’s rise was a more important strategic threat than India’s continued non-alliance.

Nehru was succeeded by several unimpressive leaders who governed the large country for four decades, from 1974 to 2014. In 2014 Narendra Modi at the head of the Hindu Nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party, the BJP, won in the national election and moved into the prime minister’s residence in New Delhi. The BJP won enough seats in Lok Sabah, the lower house of the Indian parliament, to rule on its own, not needing the support of smaller parties. Coalition rule had become the norm in India; governing on its own gave Modi and his party the power ruling governments had not enjoyed for many years. Once in total control, Modi had two ambitions: to give India a prominent geopolitical role and to make India a committed Hindu state.

India’s goal to become a prominent global power meant that it could manage well its domestic affairs. Viewed from this context the three-train crash in the eastern Indian state of Odisha on June 3, 2023 is a good indication of the poor state of infrastructure. The train was on its way to the western part of the country carrying an estimated 1,500 passengers in tightly packed coaches that was the norm for the country. About 300 people were killed and another 700 were injured, some seriously. The death toll was likely to rise. There was some irony in the fact that Prime Minister Modi had to leave the scene at which a long distance and high-speed train track was being laid and he was to perform the opening ceremony. As a report carried on the front page of The New York Times put it, “the toll, exceptionally large in a nation with a long history of deadly crashes, has renewed longstanding questions about safety problems in a system that transports more than eight billion passengers a year.” This translates into 6 trips a year per person, an indication of the importance of the system for the country and its economy.

Without contesting the view that India has the potential of becoming a great world power, it is not improper to focus on some of the problems the country faces and the leadership must show that it has the strength and the political will to deal with them. The malfunctioning railways system is just one of them, others include the caste system, the downgrading of the large Muslim minority and the poor treatment of women. What makes the last two particularly troublesome is the frequency at which they overlap. In 2002, when Modi was the chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, brutal violence between Hindus and Muslims swept through the area. Bilkis Bano, a 19-year old Muslim woman and pregnant, was gang-raped by a Hindu mob which also killed 14 of her relatives, including her three-year old daughter. In August 2022, eleven men who were sentenced for life in prison for Bano’s murder were released on the recommendation of review committee stacked with members of the BJP, Modi’s ruling party. After they came out of the jail, they were greeted with garlands by the members of the BJP.

The situation of women in India is worsening. According to government data, in 2011, a woman was raped every 20 minutes in the country. The pace quickened to about every 16 minutes by 2021, when more than 31,000 rapes were reported, a 20 per cent increase over the previous year. The authorities reported that in 2021, as many as 2,200 gang rapes occurred. As Indian author Vidya Krishnan put it in a recent article, these grotesque numbers tell only part of the story: 77 per cent of Indian women who have experienced physical or sexual abuse never tell anyone. When men are tried, they seldom go to prison. The poor status of women would serve as a drag on India’s economic progress and social advance. As the Lahore-based Burki Institute of Public Policy emphasised in its 2022 annual report, without focusing on improving the situation of Pakistani women in the economy and society, a country cannot hope to achieve sustainable economic growth and cultural advance. Pakistan needs to address this problem but so does India.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, June 12^th, 2023.

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