The founding vision of secularism remains unrealised, partly because the banyan democracy suffers certain endemic weaknesses. Despite a remarkably forward-looking constitution that manages to deliver good measures of legal justice, the scale of present-day corruption is dangerously high. The spread of market forces is not the only culprit, for (as in every democracy) the business of winning elections constantly tempts parties and governments to totter on the brink of criminality, to do cash-for-power deals behind the scenes. Within and outside government, bribes and kickbacks and other shady dealings have always been coated with sugary names, like ‘trust’ and ‘working together’, or (in daily life) asking for ‘chai’. But despite the fact that current wrongdoing nowhere near tops Chinese levels, the bitter truth is that corruption is harmful because it nurtures deep disaffection among India’s citizens.

India’s reluctant contributions to the emerging geometry of global institutions are equally problematic. The country is arguably still chained to the legacy of Nehru’s legendary personal dominance of foreign policy. It is well known that during his time as prime minister he always retained the external affairs portfolio, which he treated as his private property. Democracy stopped at India’s borders. Within Congress, the lack of intra-party democracy reinforced the trend, so that when the time came for Nehru to leave centrestage, there emerged a long-term identity crisis of India in world affairs. Following the collapse of the Soviet empire during the years 1989-1991, it seemed that India’s political class and its citizens were confused about how the most successful Asian democracy should behave in a dangerously unipolar world dominated by the United States. Although old-fashioned talk of anti-imperialism no longer made sense, it was unclear whether the banyan democracy should still try to stick to its founding Five Principles (Panch Sheel) of world order. Tough questions still remain unanswered. Are these principles self-contradictory and strangely silent about democratic virtues like civil liberty? Can they therefore be misused, for instance to engage in nuclear brinkmanship, or (as in the present) to justify selling military helicopters to tin pot tyrannies like ‘sovereign’ Burma? Or does India have a responsibility to work for democracy everywhere, to intervene with hard or soft power to protect innocent people suffering rape, homelessness, genocidal murder? Or (the fickle and unrealistic flip side of the doctrine of sovereignty) should India strive to be a global superpower? Perhaps even by doing deals with the US and its fraught ‘war on terror’?

... contd.