The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [71]
Will the state respond? Built during the British Raj, massively expanded in India’s socialist era, it is filled with bureaucrats who are in love with their petty powers and privileges. They are joined by politicians who enjoy the power of patronage. Still others are wedded to ideas of Third World socialism and solidarity. In these views they are joined by many intellectuals and journalists, who are all well schooled in the latest radical ideas—circa 1968, when they were in college. As India changes, these old elites are being threatened and redoubling their efforts. Many in India’s ruling class are uncomfortable in the modern, open, commercial society they see growing around them.
In the end, government matters. Even India’s great success, its private companies, could not flourish without a well-regulated stock market and a financial system that has transparency, adjudication, and enforcement—all government functions. The booming telecommunications industry was created by intelligent government deregulation and reregulation. The Indian Institutes of Technology were created by the state. The private sector cannot solve India’s AIDS crisis or its rural education shortfalls or its environmental problems. Most Indians, particularly the poor, have only miserable interactions with their government. They find it inefficient or corrupt, and often both. That might be why anti-incumbent sentiment has been the strongest force in Indian elections over the last three decades: Indians keep throwing the bums out, in the hope that government will get better. (One notable exception was the 2009 general election, which returned Manmohan Singh and the Congress Party to power—a vote of confidence in that government’s policies.) And voters have a point. If India’s governance does not improve, the country will never fully achieve its potential.
This is perhaps the central paradox of India today. Its society is open, eager, and confident, ready to take on the world. But its state—its ruling class—is hesitant, cautious, and suspicious of the changing realities around it. Nowhere is this tension more obvious than in the realm of foreign policy, the increasingly large and important task of determining how India should fit into the new world.
Blind and Toothless
After winning its independence, India was eager to play a large role on the world stage. This ambition was inherited from Britain, which ran a great deal of its empire from New Delhi. It was from India that Britain administered Iraq in the decades after the First World War. It was Indian soldiers who carried out Britain’s imperial crusades in the Middle East and elsewhere. The India Office was a critical center of world power, the most important extension of the British Empire, and Indians watched and learned the great-power game from the superpower of the age.
India’s first prime minister, Nehru, was comfortable in that tradition. He had been educated like an English gentleman, at Harrow and Cambridge, traveled and read widely, and written extensively about world affairs. His grasp of history was extraordinary. During one of many spells in the prisons of British India, this time from 1930 to 1933, he wrote a series of letters to his daughter that outlined the entire sweep of human history, from 6000 b.c. to the present day, detailing the rise and fall of empires, explaining wars and revolutions, and profiling kings and democrats—all without any access to a library. In 1934, the letters were collected and released as a book, Glimpses of World History, to international acclaim. The New York Times described it as “one of the most remarkable books ever published.”
Not surprisingly, Nehru became