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September 1, 2007

India: Where Everything and Its Opposite is True

Prospect has a thorough profile of India and its contradictions, where one-third of the country is illiterate, yet seven of the country's technical institutes hover at the top of global surveys and the graduates of these institutes are highly prized by employers worldwide. Outside of the United States and Russia, India has more dollar billionaires than any other country, yet 300 million Indians live on less than $1 a day.

Indeed, India is a country where "everything and its opposite is true":

. . . .For a country that was born of partition, has had a history of separatism, and that encompasses such linguistic, ethnic, social, religious and geographic variety, it is strange that even critics talk of India as if its legal unity was sufficient guarantor of its actual unity. Statistics that combine the city of Chennai, in the stable southern state of Tamil Nadu, with a village in newly constituted Jharkhand state, in eastern India, are likely to deceive as much as those that try to encompass both Denmark and Kosovo.

"India" could have been many other things—an even larger, undivided India, but also a much smaller one, or just a cluster of ancestral formations. Only the British empire and then the resolve of the leaders of the independence struggle ensured that the ancient yet amorphous idea became a single nation state. Sixty years later, there is a functional Indian state that is a rising world power despite its huge variations—but there is also a dysfunctional Indian state that cannot realise the social purpose that the idea of national citizenship is meant to provide. . . .

Read the entire article here. [Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the pointer.]

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