India is a third-world power that can feel first-world status within its grasp. It may be ready to use nuclear weapons in order to prove it, reports John Lloyd
India is currently undergoing two quite different cultural revolutions apparently at war with each other. One is nationalist and is expressed, at its simplest, by a phrase used by one of the nationalists' chief ideologists, Tarun Vijay, who edits the influential Hindi weekly Panchjanya. "Our God is India," he told me.
The other revolution is growth, and the high-tech sector that helps to fuel it. By the standards of successful developing states, India had grown slowly since independence. But in the Eighties, it began to pick up, growing by over 5 per cent, and by the Nineties, economic growth was up to 6 per cent. Forecasts are that it will soon move up to 7.5 per cent, approaching Chinese levels. Foreign exchange reserves are going up, external debt is falling, inflation is low.
Based on these figures, the Nineties has been a decade mirabilis; a decade in which liberalisation of the economy in 1991 and a robust information technology sector have together transformed India. And will transform it further. Dr Rakesh Mohan, the head of India's National Council of Applied Economic Research, says that, for the foreseeable future, "middle-class, upper-middle and upper households" will grow much more rapidly than will the "lower-middle" or "the poor". "The acceleration of growth", he says, "will take us all by surprise."
The nationalism of the BJP, the main party in the ruling coalition - and of its intellectual and ethical backbone, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), of which Panchjanya is the leading voice - is harsh, intolerant of religious differences and seeks to put Hindu tradition, expressed in the sacred status of the cow, in the centre of national life. The nationalist revolution is explicitly attempting to rework India's mindset.
After independence, when the subcontinent was partitioned into India and Pakistan, the largest transfers of populations ever were undertaken, accompanied by mass murders, pogroms and seizure of property. Given that, in crude (but never absolute) terms, Pakistan was created for the Muslims and India for the Hindus, the first post-independence governments in India could have created a confessional, or communal, state: an India for Hindus only.
Nehru was pressed to do just that by the Hindu nationalists of the RSS and those close to them; many people in Congress - a national movement rather than a party - agreed with their views. He did not; nor did Indira Gandhi, his daughter. The post-independence zeitgeist under Nehru and his daughter was secular, socialist and internationalist. And that secular state is what the RSS/BJP is trying to unpick. "This is a Hindu society," says Vijay. "There can be other groups than Hindu, but the society itself must be Hindu in idea and outlook - so that the other groups will be Hindu Muslims, Hindu Christians, Hindu Sikhs."
These politics look set to conflict with the internationalism and free-trading ethos of the new entrepreneurs, whose success in the high-tech sector in the past decade has been stunning. The associated industries, especially software, are attracting both capital and emigre Indians back into the super-metropolises of Hyderabad, Bangalore and Mumbai (Bombay), which export both entrepreneurs and engineers to the US, especially to Silicon Valley in California, where Asians head more than one-third of the new company start-ups.
India's high-tech revolution has turned it into a player in the new economy; its elite and technical intelligentsia are hooked into the capital and intellectual centres of the world - mainly in the US. There is a huge amount to be done before this growth is translated into a really strong high-tech manufacturing, or even services, sector, and there is a mountain to climb before the rest of this desperately poor country benefits. But the last thing - one would think - that India needs is laws to make the cow more sacred.
In fact, at present the two do not conflict. Both revolutions seek to secure for India the status of a first-world power, befitting its population (around one billion) and its strategic position.
India has retained a functioning, if highly corrupt, democracy: but it no longer has - as Vijay and his fellow nationalists would see it - the cohesive ruling-cum-intellectual class that betrayed the nation because it saw it through spectacles made in Britain.
Dipanker Gupta, one of the best known of India's sociologists, admits: "The socialism of the first decades is perceived to have failed . . . Up to the Sixties, the intellectual class was united. India was a common project. That has gone; there are no overarching values.
"It is true that, in the IT sector, there is now for the first time a middle class which is independent of the state . . . but it's very small. And it is a middle class on the basis of consumption only. It has not developed a system of civil values." He points out: "My students used to talk about going abroad, and then ask what to do when they came back. But now they no longer talk about coming back. There's a loss of faith in the secular vision. There is enmity now, between Hindu and Muslim."
This enmity is encapsulated in an essay by the writer Pankaj Mishra, where a nouveau riche nationalist politician asks at a rally: "'How many nuclear bombs should we build?' A few feeble voices went up 'Twenty! Fifty! A thousand!' Mr Joshi nodded. He mentioned the battles in Kashmir. He said he had once told Pakistan: 'If you provoke us one more time, we will smash you to pieces!'"
It is this class of politician that has spearheaded the nation's united front against Pakistan. At issue are: first, the Pakistani attack on Kashmir (which the Indians regard as their territory) that took place just as the prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, made a personal trip to Lahore to try to mend relations between the two countries; and second, the increasing influence that militant Islamic groups have on that country's leadership, both civilian and military.
As tension in the region increases and the nuclear capability of the two nations grows, Indians are keen to see visits by western statesmen as indicative of support for the subcontinent's cause. Bill Clinton's trip in March was indeed a homage - with trips to the high-tech cities and lengthy talks with Vajpayee, who came to power after a long life of activism in the RSS in the cause of Hindu nationalism. Robin Cook, the British Foreign Secretary, visited India in April; the most important thing, for Indian listeners, was that he said that he would consider supporting India's bid to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
India retains a democratic practice, which Pakistan has never securely had. But that practice is now throwing up an impatient and newly powerful - and sometimes newly rich - leadership at national and state levels. This leadership has identified many enemies: the British for the colonisation, the Congress Brahmins for socialism and national betrayal, Pakistan for treachery and aggression. It was this cauldron that drew Clinton to the region earlier this year; and it was intractability that sent him away more or less empty-handed.
India's twin revolutions must clash sometime: for the moment, the self-confidence of India's ideology feeds the self-confidence of the country's technical skill. Both mean that the stand-off with Pakistan will not end soon, and that the Asian nuclear balance is as tremulous as was the east-west version at the time of the Cuban missile crisis.
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