It shouldn’t make a difference, but sometimes when you see what’s happening in our neighbourhood, you admire the Indian system and its successes even more. God knows, we are not perfect. We face far bigger challenges than any other country in the subcontinent. And yet, in the decades since Independence, we have coped with nearly every threat and flourished as a nation.
Consider what is happening in Nepal. We keep being told that one of India’s problems is that we are unwilling to see ourselves as a Hindu nation. Or that democracy is too messy and we need a dictator. Or, as the Left used to claim — in the days when we paid more attention to India’s communists — we were too keen on capitalism. If India had let Marxists take over, we would be a happier, more equitable society, we were told.
Look at Nepal now. For many years, it had no real democracy. It was run by a Rana and then by a monarch. None of them managed to govern effectively. The Rana was overthrown. The King had to first curtail his powers and eventually the monarchy itself was ended. So much for dictatorship and absolute rulers versus democracy.
Murder and mayhem
It’s the same with religion. All the people who keep telling us that India should be a Hindu Rashtra need to take a long, hard look at Nepal. The population is overwhelmingly Hindu (around 80 per cent) and yet it has made no difference to that nation’s stability.
It’s the same all around: look at Pakistan where the population is overwhelmingly Muslim (over 96 per cent). And yet, rather than bring order and cohesion to the country, religion has led to violence, fundamentalism, and chaos.
Not that communism has worked any better. The old Nepalese state was so weak that when a Maoist movement began, the cops ran away and abandoned their police stations. India tried to help by raising an armed constabulary for Nepal. The only difference this made was that when the cops ran away, they first dropped their weapons before scurrying off.
Eventually, the ‘revolutionary’ Maoists took power and have proved to be even worse than everything that had come before. The charges of corruption levelled by the demonstrators on the streets during the current unrest are about a government headed by a Maoist who admired our Naxalites and worshipped Chinese communism. It is former so-called revolutionaries like him who are being abused and assaulted by the mobs on the streets.
So much for the dictatorship of the proletariat; it’s even worse than the dictatorship of the King.
I mention all this not to deride Nepal — especially as its own people have already done such a good job of that during the recent violence — but to point out that all the knee-jerk prescriptions that are offered for India have been tried elsewhere in the region and have only led to murder and mayhem.
You only need to look at today’s Bangladesh to see how easy it is for a nation to spiral out of control. In 1971, when the campaign for an independent Bangladesh grabbed international attention, the Bengalis of East Pakistan painted the Punjabis of West Pakistan as evil oppressors who wanted to snuff out the Bengali identity of the country’s eastern wing. The world supported them. Indians shed blood to win them their Independence.
The Bangladeshis got everything they wanted. They had religious cohesion (at least 91 per cent of the population is Muslim) and a distinct cultural identity (about 98 per cent of Bangladeshis speak Bengali.) And yet, within a few years, they threw it all away. They murdered the symbol of their freedom struggle, embraced army rule for years and now lurch unsteadily from crisis to crisis, pausing only to try and prosecute their former leader, to torment the Hindu minority, and to cuddle up to the Pakistanis they once regarded as their oppressors.
I could go on and talk about the terrorists in Pakistan or the civil war that nearly devoured Sri Lanka. But I think you get the point.
Also read: Nepal’s unrest is a wake-up call for India’s trade
‘Democratic experiment’ to global example
None of these countries faced anything like the problems India has confronted since 1947. When our country was created, it was fashionable to call it ‘a democratic experiment’. Few people believed that a nation with so many different languages, a substantial Muslim minority that had been the subject of so many separatist overtures, and no democratic tradition after centuries of colonial rule could possibly survive. Thanks to our founding fathers and the people who make our system work (civil servants, judges, the media, the determinedly non-political army and yes, even our much-maligned politicians) we have defied the sceptics and steered the world’s largest democracy from being an ‘experiment’ to becoming a global example.
All the reasons that people offer for our success are bogus. It isn’t because the British left us a professional army: part of that army went to Pakistan where it overthrew the democratic system, hanged politicians, and sponsored global terrorism. It isn’t because Hinduism is such a peaceful religion which engenders democracy: look at Nepal. It isn’t because of any one political party: by now we have been ruled by parties of many different persuasions.
It isn’t because Indians all immediately accepted the idea of a diverse country. Tamil separatism posed a grave risk to Indian unity early in our nation’s life; Sikh separatism became a problem in the 1980s; and it has taken us decades to integrate the Northeast with the national mainstream.
It isn’t because all our religious minorities have been kept happy. Many Indian Muslims are coping with severe alienation. And though Sikh separatism is now our largest export to Canada, the call for Khalistan still angers most Indians.
It is a constant struggle to handle the legitimate aspirations of many lower caste groups. And a North-South divide still remains a potential nightmare for the Indian state.
But despite these problems and the challenges, India works. The country has rarely been as politically polarised as it is today. But no matter how much we disagree, we still agree on the need to make the Indian system function so that more and more of our citizens benefit.
And we may hate the ruling party or utterly loathe the Opposition, but we never forget that we are all Indians. This country made us what we are today. And we will take it to greater heights.
Yes, I know. It can sound corny. But that’s patriotism. You never know how much you value India and our democratic institutions till you see what’s going on around you.
Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist, and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)