India’s questions are also the world’s questions

The vote for India Vandita Mishra Indian Express: Wednesday, June 14, 2006

India prides itself on having made democracy distinctively Indian. Can it now isolate and package its features for export?

At a time when the currency of international power is being redefined, why must India not leverage a unique resource—not its rising economic power, but its proven ability to nourish internal diversity and pluralism through the structures of liberal constitutional democracy? India must now realise that its ‘‘democratic capital’’ built up over five-and-a-half decades also has enormous instrumental value in a world in which the battle of ideas and images just became more fierce.

What bolsters India’s claim to global eminence of this kind, this argument goes on, is not just the manner in which it has won its moral and political legitimacy in the past, but also the ways in which it negotiates its future. As India hosts debates on growth and social justice and gender equality, and most of all, as it wrestles with the continuing challenge of providing a safe house to its minorities, particularly its Muslims, within the framework of a liberal democracy, the world cannot afford to take its eyes off India. Because, suddenly India’s questions are also the world’s questions. In ‘The Idea of India’, Sunil Khilnani wrote ‘‘The future of western political theory will be decided outside the West. And in deciding that future, the experience of India will loom large’’. There appears to be a growing acknowledgement of the force of that observation in seminar rooms in Washington.

So, can we speak of an ‘‘Indian model’’ for the world? If so, does it hold out exportable lessons in democracy, a l’Americaine? Or must India make use of the ‘‘democracy dividend’’ by some alternative method, given that US democracy-promotion is mired in Iraq, its legitimacy so deeply in question? The search for answers must first tackle some other questions. To begin with, what exactly does it mean, call it ‘democracy promotion’ or ‘democracy assistance’, or the ‘building of democratic states’ from outside?

On paper, all democracy-promotion is non-partisan. But the lines between the use of foreign resources to ‘‘aid democracy’’ and to engineer political change have long been disputed on the ground... But the question, more fundamentally for India, is this: Is there a standard checklist of democracy? After all, till not so long ago, India itself seemed to be a democracy in defiance of the reigning checklist which prescribed these preconditions — economic prosperity, limited inequality, a strong middle class, high levels of literacy, a productive market economy and a vigorous civil society. Democracy came to India in a unique mix of circumstances and improvisations. India prides itself on having made democracy distinctively Indian. Can it now isolate and package its features for export?

In India, the renewed violence in Vadodara underlined democracy’s work not yet done in large pockets of continuing fear and insecurity. As reports in this paper have described, Muslims are also being systematically discriminated against in the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in the districts of Gujarat...At the bottom, perhaps, lies this question: Is democracy a method, a training, an enclosed certitude? Or is democracy, in India as in the US, a politically-contested and ever-vulnerable claim, constantly seeking to democratize itself?

The writer, a senior assistant editor with The Indian Express, is currently a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow, National Endowment for Democracy, Washington. The views expressed are her own. vandita.mishra@expressindia.com