India is showing how a developing country can transform itself — from the bottom up. Politically, it is democratic, pluralistic, inclusive. Its democracy is chaotic and imperfect, but it functions and it is moving forward. What counts is the vote, first and foremost. Accountability... that’ll come later, at some point when democracy has produced enough social and economic equality. But that vote is empowering, it creates upward mobility and a huge constituency of the poor and underprivileged for democracy that gives it staying power.  

The executing machinery of this democracy is often faulty, but understands the constraints within which it operates. The election commission knows how to access and include people from the remotest corners of the country and overcome the boundaries of tradition — a case study that Afghanistan could use. The judiciary is overburdened and inefficient but also activist when necessary — Pakistan has seen that. The press is free and self-serving but enough times the watchdog it needs to be; the parliament is obstructionist but vital. Rather than spill blood, Indians have learned to use electoral politics and affirmative action to negotiate their way up and out of the centuries-old repressive caste system that left craters of inequality.  

It left India’s elite, the Brahmins, excluded from the political and administrative system, so they turned to entrepreneurship from their professional degrees — mostly engineering. That’s how information technology arrived in India, like the new avatar of Vishnu, bestowing upon India its transformative powers of a virtually workable existence. Sure, all developed countries have software, cellular and satellite technology. But resource-poor India used it differently. Software services were used as the engine of exports. Cellphones weren’t just about communication but also about affordability.  And affordable, home-built satellites which brought in western programming, transported ordinary Indians into the drawing rooms of the world and forever changed the aspirations of generations of young Indians. They all want to emulate the success of those Brahmin engineers, and education — which gives them freedom from poverty — has become their priority.   

... contd.