Next government must wake up to reality: India has fallen further behind China

So the hurly-burly is done. Who has lost the battle and who has won is an answer that will stew in the voting machines for the next 48 hours as they are lined up for counting ballots. The results will bring to an end an enervating six-week election campaign that is the last word in electoral self-indulgence.

Agreed, the logistics of India’s polls under the prescribed code are daunting, but one really has to ask whether New Delhi has walked and talked itself into an elaborate, expansive (and expensive) process it can ill afford in terms of time and money. Indonesia, which has a population of 270 million spread over more than a thousand inhabited islands, managed it recently in one day. India can’t manage it in a week?


Even a week is a long time in politics, as a British prime minister once said, and he was talking in the 60s about a country that is fairly laid back. In today’s context six weeks is an eternity, as demonstrated by rapid developments in global politics – including a meltdown in trust and ties between the US and China – in the weeks India got down to its electoral navel gazing.

For a country that wants to supplant if not surpass China in the global sweepstakes, New Delhi has been quite oblivious to the spat and its fallout that has suddenly opened up vast opportunities for India. Manufacturers are scrambling to find alternate supply chains and President Donald Trump is urging Americans to buy anything but Chinese, but India is closed for business. Sated and asleep with an overdose of electioneering, thank you.

Regardless of which dispensation comes in to govern in New Delhi later this week, India needs to stop living a big lie that it is somehow doing well and is destined for greatness or great power status without the hard yards, without being alert, nimble and fleet-footed. The modest and incremental progress it has made since Independence is underscored by an infuriating inertia that has seen the country fall steadily behind China from the time they were about on par in 1980.

Blaming Nehru? Ten years of Congress-led UPA bookended by six plus five years of BJP-led NDA has put India even further behind China, which now has the heft and nerve to go toe-to-toe, eyeball-to-eyeball against the United States.

So internationally, the first call the new (or returning) dispensation needs to make is how it will respond to the break down in trust and ties between a distant, debonair, demanding and sometimes benevolent benefactor, and a belligerent north-eastern neighbour whose growth is not marked by grace.

Whether elephants make love or war, the grass always suffers is a hackneyed expression. But India has to figure out how it can prosper and progress in either situation instead of obsessing with a parlous, puissant Pakistan that is best left to self-destruct. This – navigating the US-China breakdown and securing its energy supplies amid the flux in the Middle East – is a test case of how quickly New Delhi can react to developing international situations, overcoming its reputation for lethargy and torpor that will be even worse if there is a fractured mandate and a hung Parliament.

At home too, the incoming government – be it the same dispensation with a fresh mandate or a new one – has to overcome the delusion that India has somehow leapfrogged to developed or middle-income status simply because it has a billion mobile phones. Economically and environmentally, things have gotten worse for all but a small elite that can decamp at convenience.

You don’t need to look up the list of the world’s most polluted cities or the world’s unhappiest countries to realise that we are being fed snake oil of smug self-satisfaction all the time. No amount of fudged numbers and dodgy statistics can conceal what is visible to the naked eye, except in a few areas and sectors. Going up a few notches in the ease of doing business index cannot hide the harsh truth that we are an unhealthy, unhappy country.

Culturally, the past five years have been debilitating and detrimental to India’s national fabric hewn from diversity and a syncretic tradition. The polluting of our cities, towns and water bodies has been matched by the poisoning of our national discourse by toxic politicians, some of them dressed in the robes of sadhvis and maulvis, priests and pastors. The time may well have come to end exploitation of religion in public life and contain faith in the private domain.

The overdose of jingoism promoted by the outgoing dispensation misses the fact that the difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does. No country is correct all the time and criticising a wrong course does not make one unpatriotic.

India is not a country at peace with itself, much less with others. No country that is so fundamentally insecure and unwelcoming – even among and for its own people – can aspire to greatness or great power status. This is a country that needs healing from the wounds that have been reopened from the scars that have always existed. The term of the previous government began with the pledge of “smart” cities. The term of the incoming government, or even a returning dispensation, should begin by promising something more important – a kind country.