When Bill Clinton praised India's cultural diversity

Mint

6 hours ago

The mortal danger, of losing our democracy, was far from apparent in May 1994, when Prime Minister Narasimha Rao paid his first and only state visit to the United States of America. Although it came a bare seven years after Rajiv Gandhi's visit in 1987, it far surpassed the former in importance for it took place in a world transformed by the end of the Cold War and an India transformed by its new-found economic freedom. In the US, the Democrats had returned to power after being in the wilderness for twelve years. Victory in the Cold War had released US foreign policy from its straitjacket, and revived some of the expansive generosity it had shown towards Germany, and the developing countries, in the first decades after the end of the Second World War.
The India that Narasimha Rao represented was also radically different from the one that had existed seven years earlier, for its economy was no longer hemmed in by import bans and sky-high tariffs. The integration of its large home market with that of the rest of the world was well under way, and was being watched avidly by American investors.
At the White House press conference that followed Rao's one-on-one meeting with Bill Clinton on May 19, the President paid India a tribute that few of those who heard it have forgotten. He began his statement to the assembled media by listing the subjects he had discussed with Rao from a few slips of paper in his hands—clearly aides-memoire from his aides. Then, with the briefest of pauses, he added, 'Along with the US, India is one of the world's great experiments in multi-cultural democracy. His people have fought for more than four decades now to keep democracy alive under the most amazing challenges.' These remarks were not scripted for he did not look down at the notes that he had been consulting earlier even once. More than what he said, it was the tone in which he said it, and the slight emphasis he put on the word 'amazing', that revealed the depth of his admiration for India's achievement.
Clinton's praise in 1994 was sincere. As a Rhodes scholar and student of philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University, he had perceived what few others had till then: that in sharp contrast to nation building in Europe and North America, India had succeeded in turning itself into a modern nation-state without taking recourse to war. After the end of the colonial era in the 1960s, 130 new countries had joined the United Nations. All but a few had started out as democracies. Only five had been able to sustain and stabilize it. India was by far the largest and most complex among them. So, as the leader of the world's richest and most powerful democracy, Clinton's praise for India's success was not therefore simply a diplomatic courtesy, but was born out of a genuine desire to understand how India had done it.
What made the Indian experience unique was the starting point from which it had begun. The European nation-state had been born out of protracted conflict... most devastating of all, the Thirty Years' War in continental Europe from 1618 to 1648, which cost eight million lives through battle, disease and famine. The horrific destruction of that war led to the Treaty of Westphalia, which was Europe's first concerted effort to create the foundations of peace and proscribe war.
This was easier said than done. In the three centuries that followed its signature, the nascent nation-states of Europe had to defend their borders from attack while simultaneously suppressing upsurges of sub-regional loyalties within them. By gradual degrees they learned to minimize external threats by creating well-marked and heavily defended 'hard' frontiers with their neighbours; the internal one, from sub-nationalism, was met by fostering the growth of a single, homogeneous cultural narrative.
The rise of industrial capitalism reinforced both these tendencies by bringing a third element into this mix of motives: this was the competition to industrialize. This created the rationale for a further hardening of the boundaries between nation-states... .
Thus, by degrees the nation-state became an instrument for the creation and preservation of economic autarchy. Economic autarchy further deepened cultural, political and economic divisions that nation building had already created between the people of neighbouring countries. The penultimate step in nation building was cultural homogenization. This was achieved by enforcing a common language and a single, sanitized version of history. In communities where this too did not work, nation-states played their last card. That was 'ethnic cleansing'....
By the early twentieth century, forced homogenization and ethnic cleansing had become the defining features of the European nation-state. Its bestiality reached its nadir in the Holocaust in which Hitler's Nazis starved, worked or gassed to death six million Jews shipped into Germany and Poland from all over Europe, and took human civilization to the lowest point in its 5,000-year history of unremitting violence.…
In sharp contrast to European nation building, the Indian state is founded upon a ready acceptance of India's ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural diversity. India has more than 2,000 ethnic groups, and twenty-nine principal languages, of which thirteen are spoken by more than ten million people, and another sixteen that are spoken by more than a million. Twelve of the thirteen major languages belong to powerful ethno-linguistic groups that have lived in independent kingdoms for several centuries at a time over the past two millennia.
Taken in its entirety, India has the most complex and at the same time most flexible system of devolution and power sharing that the world has ever known. The measure of its success is not that there has been no ethnic conflict in India, but that there has been so little, and that accommodation has been reached in all cases but one, with little violence.
Excerpted with permission from Speaking Tiger Books.
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