The Indian state is taking the country back

India’s two longest-serving prime ministers — Jawaharlal Nehru and Narendra Modi — had totally different approaches towards the role of the state. Nehru founded the independent India on August 15, 1947 and was elected by the newly established national assembly to be the country’s prime minister. He remained in office until his death in 1974. He had studied the world and was impressed by two different developments in global history. He admired western liberalism that was the basis of politics in the United States and the countries of Western Europe. According to this way of governing, the state guided the citizens and regulated the institutions that dealt with them. How the citizens lived their lives was up to their own decisions. Given the diversity that was the main feature of the country that Gandhi and Nehru had founded, such an approach brought social, political and economic harmony. Sunil Khilnani, a prominent Indian historian, called this approach “The idea of India”. He wrote a best-selling book that appeared under that title.

At the same time, Nehru was impressed with the role the state had played by what was then called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR. The founding of USSR by Vladimir Lenin and then managed by his successor Josef Stalin had resulted in rapid rate of economic growth and the transformation of their country’s economy from mostly rural to mostly urban. There was some exaggeration in what the Soviet leaders advertised as the rate of growth in their economy since they had taken command of the country. As the historian Alexandre Gerschenkron pointed out in a widely read article, Moscow had wrongly calculated the economy’s rate of growth. In fact, the real growth was much lower than what was advertised.

It was the admiration of the Soviet way of economic management that made Nehru create a state that kept a total hold over the various sectors of the economy. This state came to be called the “license raj” which needed government sanctions of most initiatives planned by private enterprises. The way the government controlled the private sector was memorably told by Prakash Tandon in his three-volume memoir, the first volume of which appeared under the title The Punjabi Century.

The license raj remained in place until the arrival of Dr Manmohan Singh, a well-trained economist who had served most of his working life in western institutions. Singh allowed private entrepreneurs to decide their investments without interference of government bureaucracy. Thus freed, the Indian economy moved forward at a pace it had not known since the country became independent.

Nehru also believed in the state’s tolerance of the enormous differences that existed among different segments of the Indian society. The state remained at a distance, allowing people to follow different religious and caste practices. Modi, the current prime minister, holds views that are very different from those of Nehru. Nehru used the state to modernise the country. “Modi is pushing India to the brink,” titled an article Debasish Roy Chaudhry contributed to the op-ed pages of The New York Times which the newspaper published on August 10, 2023. He had presented his views about the direction India was taking in a book that appeared with the title: To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism. He wrote: “India is a diverse nation, crisscrossed by religious, ethnic, caste, regional and political fault lines. Since Mr. Modi took office in 2014, his ruling party has torn those asunder with dangerous exclusionary politics intended to charge up the party’s base and advance its goal of remaking India’s secular republic into majoritarian Hindu state. The repugnant nature of brand of politics has been clear for some time, but the situation in Manipur shows what’s ahead for India: The world’s most populous country is slowly degenerating into a conflict zone of sectarian violence.”

The reference in this quotation to Manipur is to a state in India’s northeast where two tribal groups, one Hindu and the other animist, have turned their long-lasting conflict into a bloody encounter. The members of the Hindu groups attacked a procession taken out by the rival group, stripped two women naked and then gang-raped them while a large crowd watched. The large Muslim community in India estimated at some 200 million is meeting with the same kind of treatment by the Hindu majority.

Was the Biden administration aware of the direction in which Modi was taking his country? Was that direction acceptable to America’s officialdom? The answer to both questions is yes. The Biden team honoured the Indian prime minister by inviting him on a state visit. The American president had a long meeting with Modi in the Oval Office and then laid down a lavish dinner for the visiting dignitary. The guest list included several prominent members of the Indian diaspora in the United States. Modi then went on to address a joint session of the US Congress where he was given several standing ovations. All this was done while the administration was fully aware that the Indian prime minister and his political party had destroyed the Nehru legacy by taking the state from an inclusive system and making it exclusive by introducing Hindutva as the governing philosophy. “Hindutva” refers to the practices endorsed by various Hindu scriptures.

The Biden administration is not concerned with the way the Indian leadership is managing the nation. Under his leadership, the United States’ principal focus is on constraining the rise of China which has begun to openly challenge the United States’ predominance in the global order. Xi Jinping, China’s supreme leader, believes that he and the political party he leads serves its people better than Western liberalism. Washington is not prepared to accept this approach and is working hard to build a system of alliances in Asia which would distance the Asian nations from Beijing. India is an important pillar in this structure. It follows discriminatory policies towards different ethnic and religious groups and makes no particular effort to improve the status of women in the Indian society. Also, what the sociologist Francis Fukuyama had called “the end of history” when Communism in Europe died, leaving Western liberalism as the dominant system of governance is no longer the case. Before closing, I will refer the readers to another book, this one by Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself in which the author maintains that liberals should “enjoy as many types of perfection as there are types of culture”.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 21^st, 2023.

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