India After Gandhi

 A decade and a half after Winston Churchill issued these warnings, the British left India. A time of
barbarism and privation did ensue, the blame for which remains a matter of much dispute. But then
some sort of order was restored. No Germans were necessary to keep the peace. Hindu ascendancy,
such as it was, was maintained not by force of arms but through regular elections based on universal
adult franchise.
Yet, throughout the sixty years since India became independent, there has been speculation about
how long it would stay united, or maintain the institutions and processes of democracy. With every
death of a prime minister has been predicted the replacement of democracy by military rule; after
every failure of the monsoon there has been anticipated country wide famine; in every new
secessionist movement has been seen the disappearance of India as a single entity.
Among these doomsayers there have been many Western writers who, after 1947, were as likely
to be American as British. Notably, India’s existence has been a puzzle not just to casual observers or
commonsensical journalists; it has also been an anomaly for academic political science, according to
whose axioms cultural heterogeneity and poverty do not make a nation, still less a democratic one.
That India ‘could sustain democratic institutions seems, on the face of it, highly improbable’, wrote
the distinguished political scientist Robert Dahl, adding: ‘It lacks all the favourable conditions.’ ‘India
has a well-established reputation for violating social scientific generalizations’, wrote another
American scholar, adding: ‘Nonetheless, the findings of this article furnish grounds for skepticism
regarding the viability of democracy in India.

The pages of this book are peppered with forecasts of India’s imminent dissolution, or of its
descent into anarchy or authoritarian rule. Here, let me quote only a prediction by a sympathetic
visitor, the British journalist Don Taylor. Writing in 1969, by which time India had stayed united for
two decades and gone through four general elections, Taylor yet thought that
the key question remains: can India remain in one piece – or will it fragment? . . . When one
looks at this vast country and its 524 million people, the 15 major languages in use, the
conflicting religions, the many races, it seems incredible that one nation could ever emerge.
It is difficult to even encompass this country in the mind – the great Himalaya, the wide
Indo-Gangetic plain burnt by the sun and savaged by the fierce monsoon rains, the green flooded
delta of the east, the great cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It does not, often, seem like
one country. And yet there is a resilience about India which seems an assurance of survival.
There is something which can only be described as an Indian spirit.
I believe it no exaggeration to say that the fate of Asia hangs on its survival.
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The heart hoped that India would survive, but the head worried that it wouldn’t. The place was too
complicated, too confusing – a nation, one might say, that was unnatural.
In truth, ever since the country was formed there have also been many Indians who have seen the
survival of India as being on the line, some (the patriots) speaking or writing in fear, others (the
secessionists or revolutionaries) with anticipation. Like their foreign counterparts, they have come to
believe that this place is far too diverse to persist as a nation, and much too poor to endure as a
democracy.