The Hindu News Update Service

The Hindu News Update Service


Ramchandra Guha

India defies all Western predictions: says Guha's new book

Mumbai, May. 21 (PTI): Terming India as an "unnatural nation born in infertile times", author Ramachandra Guha attributes the country's cohesiveness and progress to "the strength of the constitution and ability to defy western predictions".
"This world's largest democracy took birth amidst a myriad issues -- partition, language, ethnic diversities... but it has survived belying all predictions", he said releasing here his gargantuan compilation "India after Gandhi" to mark the country's 60th anniversary.
British historian, John Strachey had said "there was no Indian nation or country in the past: nor would there be one in the future" and Guha says - "his remarks were intended as historical judgment".
Winston Churchill had decried India's ability for self-governance and Robert Dahl among the doomsayers had said "that India can sustain democratic institutions seems on the face of it highly improbable".
"Like their foreign counterparts, some Indian observers too had come to believe that this place (India) was far too diverse to persist as a nation, and much too poor to endure democracy".
"And Yet", says Guha, "60 years on and we are here in a 'phifty-phifty' democracy, competing on a global platform with the developed nations".
"Moral vision, political skill, and legal acumen: these were brought together in the framing of the constitution" he says, adding "this is finally what has kept the nation together... secularity and equality seem to have worked".
Writing in the 1970's, journalist and old-India hand James Cameron had claimed "prominent women in Indian public life all came from the upper class, English-speaking backgrounds... there was not and never will be a working-class woman with a function in Indian politics".
Says Guha "Within decades there is an answer, or perhaps one should say a refutation... a lady born in a Dalit home has become Chief Minister..." referring to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati.
"India after Gandhi" penned almost on lines of historian Neelankanthan may be somewhat alien to today's 'chip-q1/q4' generation dealing as it does with leadership and mergers and acquisitions of the political arena.
But the underlying philosophies of what shaped the nation's economy are well-delineated and could serve as a new text-book for "the essentially under-40's generation".
"The economic integration of India is a consequence of its political integration. They act in a mutually reinforcing loop. The greater the movement of goods and capital and people across India, the greater the sense that this is after all, one country", the book says.
"In the first decades of independence, it was the public sector that did most to further this sense of unity... more recently it has been the private sector which has, if with less intent, furthered the process of national integration".
Explaining "why India survives" pedantically, Guha says "apart from elements of politics and economics, cultural factors have also contributed to national unity... pre-eminent here is the Hindi film".
Quoting lyricist Javed Akhtar, Guha says "there is one more state in this country. and that is Hindi cinema...as a separate state of India, Hindi cinema acts as a receptacle for all that is most creative in other states".