Ideas about India's future

Here is a brief summary of Nandan Nilekhani talks about ideas for India's future but you should see his whole presentation. He divides his presentation, which is also a summary of his book " Imagining India: Ideas for the new century", into ideas that have been accepted, still under execution, unresolved and in conflict and those about the future.

It is instructive to see his presentation alongside a defense against the charge that Pakistan is now a "failed state" by Manan Ahmed.

But first Nandan's optimistic view of India.

According to him, there are certain big ideas that India has now generally accepted that: people are not a burden but a resource; entrepreneurs are not villains but a role models; English is not a language of colonizers but of aspiration and jobs; technology is not the enemy but a friend; globalization is to be embraced not contested; and the deepening of democracy even though it means shifting fr one party rule to 13 party rule is to be embraced.

Then there are ideas which have been accepted by the polity but have not fully managed to execute: in education a lack of universal access to primary schools; infrastructure which is still to fully connect the nation; cities need to become engines of growth; and a single market growing for a smooth seamless flow of goods across states is essential for internal globalization benefits.

But there are still ideas which are unresolved: Conflicting political ideologies which are leading to policy making gridlock; lack of labor reform where job protection is hampering job creation; and higher education where state control is barring private funding.

Then there are ideas for the future which India needs to learn from abroad and apply in its governance : E-governance about democracy,technology,efficiency and transparency; health care and how to avoid the diseases of prosperity while still battling diseases of poverty; managing pensions and entitlements; handling environmental issues and creating a new energy model.

India is well on its way to proving that democracy and growth are compatible. But our next door neighbour who started on this journedy at the same time, is rapidly becoming a " failed state". Or is it?

Manan Ahmed,a historian of Islam in South Asia at the University of Chicago,in a contrarian view, argues that the " decades-long tendency to reduce Pakistan’s complexity to either “failure” or “stability” reflects, above all, a glaring poverty of knowledge about the real lives of 175 million Pakistanis today. Since 2007 alone, they removed a dictator from military and civilian power without firing a single shot, held the first national election since 1997 – in which right-wing radical parties were soundly rejected – and launched a secular movement for justice.

None of this matters, we are told, because Pakistan is facing “an existential threat” from “violent extremists”, as a State Department spokesman said on Monday. US generals and media commentators are hinting that a military takeover may be the only way to arrest the imminent “failure” – to combat the “Talibanisation” of Pakistan and keep the dreaded nukes from “falling into the hands” of terrorist groups.

A comically exaggerated version of reality underpins such concerns. There are roughly 400 to 500 Pakistani Taliban fighters in the Buner region (the area deemed to threateningly close to Islamabad) and 15,000 to 20,000 operating in the region between Peshawar and the north-west borders of Pakistan. Meanwhile, the number of active Pakistani army personnel ranges around 500,000, supported by an annual budget of approximately $4 billion. In comparison, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan make an estimated yearly revenue of around $400 million from the heroin trade – only a fraction of which makes it to the Pakistani wing in the rural north-west of the country. As a threat to a large and diverse nation-state, 40 per cent of whose population lives in urban centers like Karachi (with its 18 million residents) the rural Taliban fighters are not terribly intimidating.

Pakistan is neither Somalia nor Sudan, nor even Iraq or Afghanistan. It is a thoroughly modern state with vast infrastructure, a fiercely critical and diverse media, an active, global economy and strong ties with regional powers such as China and Iran. It is not a “failed state” – it even has met its debt payments to the World Bank and IMF at the expense of providing electricity to its citizens. It has a deeply entrenched civil bureaucracy. The “failed state” rhetoric obscures these realities. It hides the fact that religious-based parties have never garnered more than 10 per cent of the seats in any election. According to its 1973 constitution Pakistan is an Islamic state, but it is home to multiple forms of religious expression, and the majority of Muslims in Pakistan embrace a model of Islam more syncretic than the Deobandi Salafism of the Taliban. The majority province of Punjab is ethnically, linguistically, politically and economically far more diverse than the northwestern valley of Swat – and it is home to a well-entrenched landed elite unlikely to cede authority to the Taliban. Sindh has its own landed elite – as well as a powerful urban political party, MQM – neither of whom show any inclination to welcome the Taliban.

Even if Pakistan is not going to capitulate to the Taliban, it does face grave dangers, and the “failed state” rhetoric – dangerous in its own right – forces our attention away from them. In Baluchistan, as a direct result of Musharraf’s heavy-handed military policies, a civil war has been brewing since 2005, and there is no military solution to that unrest. At the same time, anti-Americanism is rising across the country in reaction to the campaign of missile strikes from unmanned US drones, which have killed nearly 1000 civilians since August 2008. The drones have emboldened religious conservatives who decry “US imperialism” at work in Pakistan, and they are gaining strength with every tally of civilian casualties. The Tehrik Taliban-e Pakistan control in Swat is less a victory for that ragtag militia than a demonstration of the Army’s unwillingness to fully engage them.

The monotonous drone of “failure” implies that the fragile democracy currently in place is not worth preserving. It encourages the marginalisation of the civilian government and boosts the claims of both the military and the militants. Pakistan’s salvation has never been and will never be in the military’s hands. The country’s future lies with the millions of Pakistanis who are working to sustain democracy – and what must be defended is their resilience and strength, to prevent the self-fulfilling prophecies of failure."