Today

India Today

by Frommer's authors & Anita Pratap

Pratap is a former CNN bureau chief for South Asia, freelance journalist, and columnist for Outlook, India's weekly newsmagazine

Whatever your understanding of India today, the exact opposite is probably equally true. Life has changed dramatically since India began to liberalize its economy in the 1990s, and yet it remains a land where several centuries exist simultaneously. If you visit one of its scientific centers, you could well believe you are at NASA, but walk to a village that still has no connection to a drivable road (and there are thousands of them), and you will find people living exactly as they did 2,000 years ago. More than 25% of the world's software engineers are Indian, but another 25% of the Indian population goes to bed hungry every night. Women like Pratibha Patil, the female president of India elected in July 2007, have risen to top positions of power and authority in both the political and corporate world, yet millions struggle without the most basic human rights. India has the world's highest number of malnourished children, yet obesity in urban children is a new and menacing problem. The country has armed itself with nuclear weapons, but has difficulty providing drinking water to millions of its citizens. It ranks low in the United Nations' Human Development Index, which measures quality of life, but in terms of purchasing parity, India is the third-biggest economy in the world after the United States and China. As more and more countries outsource their call centers to Indian companies, the BPO boom has created a large new class of young urbanites keen to flash their disposable incomes, and as a result the luxury market in India has exploded, with every international brand from Louis Vuitton to Greubel Forsey vying for their slice of this burgeoning market. Meanwhile, a real agrarian crisis continues to brew in rural India, with newspapers and 24/7 news channels (of which there are now dozens) reporting debt-related farmer suicides on an almost daily basis. In Maharashtra alone 1,448 cotton farmers committed suicide in 2006, because basic issues of debt, water shortage, food security, and social inequities remain unaddressed. No wonder India is confusing, confounding, incomprehensible. How can you make sense of this land? It's like emptying an ocean with a spoon.

All through the 1970s and even 1980s, Western diplomats and journalists predicted the "Balkanization" of India. It didn't happen, but in 1991 India's foreign exchange reserves plunged to a catastrophic $1 billion, barely sufficient to service 2 weeks of imports. India was forced to embark on its radical liberalization program. Since then, India's economy has grown at a rate rivaled only by neighbor China: 2006-07 saw India's $1,103-billion economy grow by a whopping 9.4%, the fastest in 18 years. India's reserves have reached a staggering $212.4 billion and the stock market has soared to unheard-of numbers, while the dollar exchange rate continues to dip. But this growth has also spurred inflation (said to be at 5.06%) and a rise in interest rates. Statistics show that the overall standard of living has improved drastically, but the truth is that the benefits of a booming economy have not reached a vast percentage of the population, and India still has the world's largest concentration of poor. Nearly 300 million people live without the basic necessities of life: water, food, roads, education, medical care, and jobs. These are the Indians living on the outer edges of the nation's consciousness, far away in remote tribal areas, barren wastelands, and dirty slums, totally outside the market economy.

With a billion voters, every national election here is the biggest spectacle of fair and peaceful democracy that humankind has ever witnessed. And yet increasingly democracy is often a masquerade for a modern version of feudalism. Clan loyalties propel electoral victories. The victor rules his or her province like a medieval tribal chieftain, often showing scant respect for merit or rule of law. Cronies are hand-picked for jobs, rivals are attacked or harassed, public funds are misused to promote personal agendas. Modern-day versions of Marie Antoinette abound in Indian democracy -- while the poor were dying of cold in January 2003 in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, its chief minister, Mayawati, was strutting around in diamonds and celebrating her birthday with a cake the size of a minibus. Later that year, having been indicted by the Supreme Court in a case of alleged corruption, Mayawati resigned only to return to power with a resounding victory. Proof that real choices are limited? Perhaps, but many low-caste people, whose cause Mayawati (herself of low-caste origin) supposedly champions, support her fiery attitude and are inspired that she too can celebrate like India's rich.

In fact, according to a seminal paper presented by Dheeraj Sinha in 2007, the mindset of India as a nation is changing -- gone (or fading) are the priestly Brahminical values of knowledge, adjustment, simplicity, and restraint, and "in" are the warrior-like Kshatriya values of success, winning, glory, and heroism. Whereas Indians traditionally took refuge in the idea of karma and fate (see "Hinduism"), the emerging mindset believes that karma is shaped by one's actions -- that it is possible to achieve a life that one desires rather than one that's destined.

This represents a huge shift, and is both the result and driver of the economic engine that is powering India. But there is one growth industry guaranteed to stymie, if not wreck, genuine progress: the feud between Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists. At the heart of the latter ideology -- most acutely represented by the RSS and Bajrang Dal -- is the belief that today's Muslims should be punished for historical wrongs perpetrated by medieval Muslim conquerors. It's a belief that is fired by modern-day resentments (such as the concern that Muslims have, proportionally, the highest birth rate in India) and fears that madrasas are creating hotbeds of Muslim fundamentalism. The worst Hindu-Muslim rioting and looting happened in the western state of Gujarat in 2002, but bomb blasts still occur almost annually (most recently in Hyderabad) and are proof that sectarian trouble is simply on slow-brew.

Nationalism also takes its toll in the Kashmir dispute that bedevils relations between the nuclear-capable neighbors India and Pakistan. The two countries have fought two of their three wars over Kashmir, engaged in another low-level conflict in 1998, and came to the brink of another in 2002. Driven by popular enthusiasm and political initiatives on either side, there has been a thawing in India-Pakistan relations since then, and the peace process has enjoyed a visible momentum with issues such as visa issuance significantly improved. That said, there is still a lack of progress in resolving many bilateral problems, and any further improvements are unlikely given the recent spike in terrorist incidences and with Pakistan now battling its own internal crises.

The problems of nationalism are exacerbated by politicians who try to pit Hindus, who constitute 80% of the population, against the 150-million Muslim minority before elections in order to garner votes -- this happened again in 2006 and 2007 in the UP elections, when the BJP released a highly inflammatory CD featuring Muslims slaughtering cows and kidnapping Hindu women.

Yet the last general election, held in 2004, proved that the masses cannot be won over for long through this diabolical strategy of dividing communities, and in some subconscious way there seems to be a recognition that if divisive politics win, India will lose. Deviating from the script, the Indian masses proved the media barons, opinion-makers, psephologists (political scientists who study and even predict elections), exit-pollsters, and astrologers all wrong and voted the Congress party back into power. The 2004 electoral upset for the BJP-led government was also in many ways a vote against the highly personalized campaign against Sonia Gandhi's foreign origins. Ms. Gandhi responded by declining the post of Prime Minister, citing the potential divide it would cause, and asking former Finance Minister Manmohan Singh -- highly respected for the role he played in the liberalization of India's economy in the '90s -- to take the helm. It was a smart move, although many feel that Singh is in fact just a puppet (and Ms. Gandhi still pulls the strings) and look forward to registering their protest in the next general election, in 2009.

Bill Clinton once said: "India remains a battleground for every single conflict the world has to win." Certainly India copes with huge problems -- massive corruption, joblessness, judicial bottlenecks with few convictions and delays of up to 20 years for delivering justice, AIDS, acute water shortages, poverty, disease, environmental degradation, unbearable overcrowding in metropolitan cities, crises of governance, sectarian violence, and terrorism. India adds one Australia to itself every year -- 18 million people. The rural poor (who form the majority) see children as an economic resource, the only security net for old age, and high child-mortality rates necessitate the need for more than one, or two. Apart from India's huge natural growth rate, an estimated two million poor Bangladeshis slip into India every year in search of work.

But this is a country of remarkable stamina. As Manmohan Singh recently put it, "Our real strength has always been our willingness to live and let live." Home to scores of languages, cuisines, landscapes, and cultures, India is a giant. But she will move at her own pace. She is not an Asian tiger. She is more like a stately Indian elephant. No one can whip or crack her into a run. If you try, the stubborn elephant will dig in her heels and refuse to budge. No power on earth can then force her to move. But equally so, she cannot be stopped once she's on the move. And with the slow but fundamental shift from silent acceptance of karma to the belief that one can -- and should -- give shape to destiny, she is most certainly on the move. There is no point arguing whether this is good or bad. It is good and bad. And it is many things in between.

After all, this is India.