America began, in a curious sense, as a failed search for India. When Christopher Columbus sailed west in 1492, he was looking for a route to Asia and the Indies. He found the Americas instead. History has a taste for irony. More than five centuries later, and 250 years after the American Declaration of Independence, India can profitably look west and ask what it might learn from the country that emerged from that accidental encounter.
Agreed, India cannot replicate America’s geography, its historical timing, its abundance of land and natural resources, or the extraordinary advantage of emerging from the two world wars with its industrial base intact. Nor should India imitate America’s society. India is an old civilisation organised into a modern republic. America is a modern republic that had to construct a national identity from successive waves of migration.
The interesting lessons lie elsewhere. Three American habits deserve particular attention.
Power belongs closer to the problem
Visitors to the US are often preoccupied with Washington. Americans themselves experience much of government much closer to home. The country has an extraordinarily dense ecology of local government. The 2022 Census of Governments counted more than 90,000 governmental units, including counties, municipalities, townships, school districts, and other special-purpose bodies. Their powers vary considerably from state to state, and American local government is hardly a uniform model of autonomy. Yet the governing instinct is important: many public problems are assigned to institutions close enough to see them.
Cities govern cities. School districts govern schools. Special districts may manage water, transport, parks or other specific public functions. Localities can experiment, compete, and, occasionally, fail without requiring the entire republic to move in unison.
India has constitutional decentralisation, but its political culture remains strikingly centralising. State governments try to do what cities should do. This will become increasingly costly. India is urbanising at enormous scale, yet its cities are ignored and in disarray.
Make scale respectable
America’s second advantage is psychological, but its consequences are material: it legitimises scale. American entrepreneurs routinely speak of serving hundreds of millions of customers. Universities aspire to shape entire fields of knowledge. Philanthropists attempt to eradicate diseases. Scientists and engineers propose going to the Moon and then to Mars. Companies are built with the explicit intention of reorganising industries. Some of this produces excess, waste, and hubris. But ambition is a productive social resource.
India has no shortage of individual ambition. What it often lacks is institutional ambition. Our best people frequently dream at a scale larger than the organisations in which they work. The result is familiar: the talented individual either learns to shrink the ambition, leaves the institution, or leaves the country. America has been unusually successful at doing the opposite. It has created institutions that enlarge the ambitions of the people who enter them.
Turn diversity into a national identity
America’s third achievement is sociological. It constructed a national identity capable, however imperfectly and often painfully, of absorbing successive groups of people who did not share ancestry, ethnicity or religion. This process was never gentle. American history includes slavery, segregation, exclusionary immigration laws, nativism, and recurring racial conflict. Assimilation involved pressure as well as opportunity. Yet the larger achievement remains significant. Over generations, identities that once appeared incompatible with being American became versions of being American. The national identity expanded.
India faces a different task. Its diversity is indigenous, ancient, and territorial. Indians do not need to be assimilated into a culture invented in the 20th century. The Republic must create solidarity among communities with deep histories of their own. A nation cannot sustain itself indefinitely as a negotiation among competing groups seeking shares of state patronage. Citizens need a larger story or a grand national narrative to which they can contribute.
India’s civilisational depth should be an advantage in constructing that story. The task is to articulate an Indian identity capacious enough to accommodate extraordinary internal diversity while confident enough to demand common civic obligations.
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The deeper lesson is institutional
America at 250 is not a flawless model. It is a country under considerable strain. Its politics is polarised, its immigration debate is bitter, and some of the very institutions that produced its rise are being contested. India should therefore resist both reflexive admiration and reflexive rejection.
The useful question is narrower: which American institutional habits have proved productive over time? Put power closer to the problem. Give ambition social legitimacy. Build a national identity strong enough to absorb diversity.
America was discovered, from a European point of view, during a search for India. Now, 250 years after America became independent, India may find that looking carefully at America can still help it find something valuable: not a model to copy, but a clearer view of the institutional choices required for its own rise.
Suresh Prabhu (@sureshpprabhu) is a former Union Cabinet Minister and Shobhit Mathur (@shobweet) is the co-founder and vice-chancellor of Rishihood University. Views are personal.