Summary of Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century
Winner of Indiaplaza Golden Quill Award, 2009 - Readers' Choice Award (Non-fiction).
Since the early 1990s, India has witnessed great social, political and cultural change. As the world’s largest democracy, its most diverse nation and one of its fastest growing economies, India is now, sixty years after Independence, universally regarded as an emerging superpower. In this sweeping and comprehensive book, one the country’s finest and most dynamic minds examines the central ideas that have shaped modern India, and offers an original perspective on our past, present and future.
Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, who has been a key player in India’s growth story and was chosen by Time magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world, points out that the country’s future rests on more than simply economic growth; it also depends on reform and innovation in all sectors of public life. Looking closely at our recent history, he examines the ideas and attitudes that have evolved with the times and contributed to our progress, as also those that keep us shackled to old, unproductive and fundamentally undemocratic ways. He discusses how, despite good intentions and astonishing idealism, our early socialist policies stifled growth and weakened our democracy; how, contrary to received wisdom, India’s large and overwhelmingly young population has now become our greatest strength; how information technology is revolutionizing not just business but also governance in the everyday life of a vast majority of Indians; and how rapid urbanization is transforming both our society and our politics.
He also gets to the heart of charged debates about caste politics, labour reform, infrastructure, higher education, the English language in India and the role of the state in a globalized world where the wealth of big corporations exceeds that of some nations. And as he does this, he asks the key questions of the future: how will India as a global power avoid the mistakes of earlier development models? Will further access to the open market continue to stimulate such extraordinary growth? And how will this growth affect – and be shaped by – the country’s young people?
India is in the middle of a huge transformational process, Nilekani argues, and only a safety net of ideas—from genuinely inclusive democracy to social security, from public health to sustainable energy—can transcend political agendas and safeguard the country’s future.
I SPEND A good amount of my time in planes, and the view of our
largest cities from a height of 3000 metres is an exhilarating
experience. From the sky and at night, the shimmering, dense
constellation of lights that is Bombay or Bangalore appears as a
landscape of immense economic promise. On the ground, however,
our cities are a very different story.
What I often find striking as I move across urban India is how
diverse the country’s geography is outside our urban centres, and yet
how eerily similar our largest cities look—in their infrastructure,
their crumbling edges and their appalling, disheartening urban
problems. For Indians the images that dominate our idea of the city
are those of disaster, and of neglect. We recall the torrential rains
that caused many residents of India’s financial capital, Bombay, to
wade through waist-deep water; or we describe Bangalore’s halffinished
flyovers, Delhi’s riots for water and of course the inescapable
chaos of traffic snarls, broken-down pavements and disintegrating
public systems that define our urban, everyday life.
We can trace back much of the crisis in urban India to our ideas
of the city immediately after independence. These perceptions ensured
that in the early constitutional battles for control, India’s cities lost
decisively. Since then, our cities have largely been exiled from the
Indian imagination—our idea of India is of a country rooted in its
dusty heartland, village settlements and farms. But India’s growth
has gradually brought our cities into the spotlight, and what it
shows up is a scarred landscape in dire need of reform.
for the British ‘a settled place for the heart in this perplexing
conquered land’.7 Other seasonal capitals were Darjeeling for Bengal,
Nainital for the United Provinces, Mahabaleshwar for Bombay and
Ooty for Madras. There were as many as sixty-five such hill stations
to which the British beat a regular retreat from the burning sands of
the plains, where they could luxuriate in English-style cottages and
weather. Gandhi, in his characteristic style, criticized this habit as
‘Rule from the 500 hundredth storey.’8
By settling in and loosening their ties in a city setting, the British
led Indians to associate India’s urban identity with the colonial one.
Gandhi went as far as to say, ‘I regard the growth of cities as an evil
thing . . . certainly unfortunate for India.’ India’s leaders were eager
to shake off the dust of these colonial cities; for them they were
inextricably linked with a past they longed to forget.
So it was that immediately after independence, the government
marginalized the Indian city. ‘The cities became constitutional
orphans,’ Dr Sivaramakrishnan says. ‘Independent India’s new
government essentially recognized two tiers—the centre and the
state.’ Taxes were also split among these two, with the centre
collecting income and excise taxes, while the state collected sales
tax, stamp duty on properties and excise on alcohol. The city
governments were cut off. In fact while the Constitution made
provisions for rural, local institutions, the entire document mentioned
urban local governments exactly twice, and neither time to their
advantage—the urban bodies went under the state list and were
stripped of their independence.9
This may not have seemed such a bad idea at the time. With
independence, India’s most prominent city politicians had attended
the clarion call of forming new governments at the state and centre,
and the municipal halls were emptied of their most capable hands.
But political calculations in a democratic, independent India stacked
the deck even further against the metropolis. Ashutosh Varshney has
pointed out that democracy, when introduced into a country before
an industrial revolution takes hold, dramatically tilts power to rural
areas. This tilt was decisive in India post-independence. With 80 per
cent Indians living in villages, the move to a rural, ‘sons of the soil’
rhetoric among politicians was fast. Across India, the narrative grew
of the rural country being the far more ‘authentic’ part, and price
controls on agricultural goods (attempts to control inflation and
food prices) led to cities being depicted as ‘a vampire that drinks the
blood of the countryside’.
But the real stake in the heart for city politics was still to come.
The idea of the city as ‘the result of conflict’ is particularly true in
India. In the emotionally fraught battle that occurred in the 1950s
over dividing states along linguistic boundaries, India’s cities got
caught in the crossfire. No state could really lay claim on the
provincial cities, which were community and linguistic melting pots.
This was especially true of Bombay—the city that was India’s prize
jewel, the richest in the country. Who would possess it was the
resounding question when the Bombay state was carved up into
Maharashtra and Gujarat. It was the Gujaratis who dominated trade
and commerce in the city even though it lay deep within
Maharashtrian territory. The States Reorganisation Commission
suggested that Bombay remain the capital of a bilingual state. But
the politicians supporting the ‘Bombay for Maharashtra’ cause
objected, saying that, ‘Everywhere the principle of language has been
recognized, except in this one case.’In an effort to rescue the city
from the linguistic battles, Nehru suggested that Bombay should
become a separate, bilingual area directly administered by the
central government, an idea supported by some Bombay politicians
such as S.K. Patil.
It was support they would soon regret. To put it mildly, the
Maharashtrians did not welcome the idea. Mobs surged across the
city’s streets, shouting, ‘Bombay is ours’ and ‘Death to Nehru!’ They
smashed statues of Mahatma Gandhi—his identity as a Gujarati, in
this period of mayhem, superseding that of national leader—and
attacked Gujaratis across the state. The rioters tossed rocks and
electric bulbs filled with acid—the latter a protest weapon of choice
since the 1940s Calcutta riots—blockaded roads and railway lines
and looted shops. And when a European photographer stopped to
take a picture of Nehru’s vandalized posters, the crowds cheered:
‘Take it, take it, and show the world what we think of Nehru.’12
The government was forced to back down, and any suggestion
that the city would be carved out from the state was abandoned.
The battle over Bombay permanently changed and challenged the
city’s dominance, and marked the beginning of its retreat within a
politics held spellbound by India’s villages.
Nandan Nilekani is the co-chairman of Infosys Technologies Limited. Born in
Bangalore, he received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and co-founded Infosys shortly after, in
1981. In January 2006 he became one of the youngest entrepreneurs to join the
World Economic Forum Foundation Board, and Time magazine listed him as one of
the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2007 he was named Forbes
Businessman of the Year for Asia.
Nilekani is the president of the National Council of Applied Economic Research
and a member of the National Knowledge Commission and the review committee of
the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission. He is also part of the
National Advisory Group on e-Governance, and was the chairman of the Government
of India's IT Task Force for Power.
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