The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [78]
China’s mandarin class has been able to rethink its country’s new role as a world power with skill and effectiveness. So far, India’s elites have not shown themselves the equals of their neighbors. The lower house of the Indian parliament finally ratified the treaty in August 2010, on the eve of a visit by President Obama, but the upper house has yet to approve it. Whichever way the nuclear deal goes, the difficulties of its passage in New Delhi highlight the central constraint on the exercise of Indian power in the years ahead. India is a strong society with a weak state. It cannot harness its national power for national purpose.
A Geographic Expression
You can tell that India is a strange land not by looking at snake charmers but by observing its election results: In what other country would sizzling economic growth make you unpopular? In 2004, the ruling BJP coalition went to the polls with the economic wind at its back—the country was growing 9 percent. But the BJP lost the election. A cottage industry of intellectuals, many of them socialist in orientation, quickly explained that the prosperity had been hollow, that growth hadn’t trickled down, and that the BJP had forgotten about the real India. But this explanation simply does not bear close examination. Poverty rates in India had fallen rapidly in the 1990s, in numbers large enough to be visible to all. And in any event, the puzzle continued after 2004. The Congress coalition (currently in power) has sustained average growth rates over 8 percent for six years, and yet it has fared poorly in many regional elections. Even with legitimate concerns over inequality and the distribution of wealth, there is a connection between robust growth and government popularity in almost every country in the world. Why not in India?
India is Thomas (Tip) O’Neill’s dreamland. “All politics is local,” the former Speaker of the House of Representatives famously said. In India, that principle can be carved in stone. India’s elections are not really national elections at all. They are rather simultaneous regional and local elections that have no common theme.
India’s diversity is four thousand years old and deeply rooted in culture, language, and tradition. This is a country with seventeen languages and 22,000 dialects that was for centuries a collection of hundreds of separate principalities, kingdoms, and states. When the British were leaving India, in 1947, the new government had to negotiate individual accession agreements with over five hundred rulers—bribing them, threatening them, and, in some cases, militarily coercing them into joining the Indian union. Since the decline of the Indian National Congress in the 1970s, no party in India has had a national footprint. Every government formed for the last two decades has been a coalition, comprising an accumulation of regional parties with little in common. Ruchir Sharma, who runs Morgan Stanley’s $35 billion emerging-markets portfolio, points out that a majority of the country’s twenty-eight states have voted for a dominant regional party at the expense of a so-called national party.
Uttar Pradesh in 2007 provides a perfect example. U.P., as it is called in India, is the country’s largest state. (Were it independent, its population would make it the sixth-largest country in the world.) During the 2007 campaign, the two national parties tried to run on what they saw as the great national issues. The BJP worked assiduously to revive Hindu nationalism; the Congress stressed its secularist credentials and boasted of the country’s growth rate. The two parties came in a distant third and fourth, behind local parties that stressed purely local issues—in this case, the empowerment of the lower castes. What worked in U.P. might not work in the south, or