Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [164]
Rather, what is singular about India is that it is the world's largest democracy, despite an extraordinary degree of ethnic and religious diversity exceeding even that of the United States. Since its birth as a republic, India has juggled a dizzying array of discrete microcultures, religions, languages, castes, sects, and ethnic and tribal groups. India is home to sixteen official languages, more than twenty-two languages that are spoken by at least one million people, and more than a thousand dialects. India's 2004 national elections featured 230 parties. Although the vast majority of Indians are Hindu (over 827 million), the practice of Hinduism varies widely; indeed, there are thousands of different Hindu castes and subcastes throughout the country. India is also home to 150 million Muslims, the second-largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia. In addition, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Parsis, and Jains all represent significant minorities in India.42
The fact that India exists at all—especially as a democracy—is a triumph of tolerance. Both Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, two of modern India's founding fathers, were leading voices of tolerance in the twentieth century, passionately opposing fundamentalism of any kind. Under their leadership, India from independence strove to balance its religious diversity through pluralistic laws that provide different regulations for members of different religions. India's “personal law,” for example, permits polygamy among Muslims but requires monogamy among Hindus. In the last fifty years, India has also made great strides in overcoming the extreme intolerance long directed at so-called untouchables and other “backward” classes.
As the thesis of this book would predict, India's success in holding together and harnessing the talents of an extraordinarily diverse population has paid off handsomely. Indeed, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has argued that the secret to India's greatness over the centuries lies precisely in its remarkable “heterogeneity” and “openness.” For Sen, India's greatest rulers were the emperors Ashoka and Akbar—the former a Buddhist and the latter a Muslim, but both champions of secular tolerance. Almost 2,200 years ago, Ashoka wrote, “For he who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others…in reality inflicts, by such conduct, the severest of injury on his own sect.” Thus, tolerance and pluralism had roots in India, Sen argues, long before the European Enlightenment.43
Nevertheless, the state of tolerance in India today is not as happy as this history might suggest. In 1998, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept into power, calling for the establishment of India as a Hindu state. Frequently referring to Muslims as “invaders” and “outsiders,” BJP politicians promised to destroy mosques across the country and replace them with Hindu temples. In states where the BJP won electoral majorities, it used its new power to restrict Hindu-Muslim marriages, suppress Christian missionaries, and rewrite history textbooks to reflect the view of India as a Hindu state.
In 2002, India saw its worst outbreak of religious violence in recent decades. More than two thousand Muslims were massacred in cold blood in the northern state of Gujarat. The violence was sparked by an attack by Muslim militants on a train containing Hindu pilgrims from Ayodhah, where, more than a decade earlier, saffron-robed Hindus had destroyed a venerated mosque and looted and burned the surrounding area in a surge of anti-Muslim riots. The Muslim attack on the train killed at least fifty-eight people.
In retaliation, Hindu civilians and police engaged in a four-day killing spree, looting shops, burning homes, and gang-raping Muslim girls and women. The violence