Democratic India at the Turn of the Millennium: Prosperity, Poverty, Power

Abstract

We are a free and sovereign people today and we have rid ourselves of the burden of the past. We look at the world with clear and friendly eyes and at the future with faith and confidence. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, broadcast from New Delhi, 15 August 1947 The hopeful words of any nation's founding fathers are likely to be read with some degree of irony decades later. If the words of the founding fathers at times rang hollow, they also, in fact, predicted many successes, not least India's proud claim to be the world's largest democracy (Plate 9.1). By the turn of the millennium, more than a dozen general elections and hundreds of state elections had produced a high degree of politicization extending to those long outside the political system. In 1997, at the conclusion of free India's first half-century, K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005), Dalit by birth, was sworn in as the country's president, a powerful symbol of the progress and aspirations of ‘untouchables’. The role of president, importantly, had already earlier on three occasions been assumed by a Muslim and, most poignantly, at the time of Indira Gandhi's assassination, by a Sikh. The Supreme Court's activism – for example, indicting top government and political leaders for bribery and corruption as well as favouring public-interest litigation – strengthened the effective exercise of civil liberties. India's press continued to be renowned for its independence and vitality. Economic liberalization had stimulated the growth of a prospering urban middle class and brought about for India a major role in the global software industry. ‘Bollywood’ films and a culture increasingly open to the larger world, together with India's traditional role as a site of tourism and a producer of the arts, wisdom, and handicrafts, delighted ever-increasing numbers of consumers worldwide. Yet the country continued to be weighed down by seemingly intractable poverty, in the countryside and in urban slums alike. The millennial years were also marked by substantial violence directed against Muslims as well as others, among them Christians, tribals, and Dalits. In 1992, the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque by Hindu militants was followed by an anti-Muslim pogrom that left at least a thousand people dead; an orchestrated campaign of even greater violence followed a decade later in Gujarat.