Review of Open Lecture with Sunil Khilnani
The Paradox of India's New Prosperity
April 15, 2010, 12:30-2:00 p.m.
Speaker: Sunil Khilnani
Starr Foundation Professor and Director, South Asia Studies Program, Johns Hopkins University
Moderator: Henrik Müller, Deputy Editor-in-Chief, manager magazin
 Sunil Khilnani at ESMT |
Sunil Khilnani argued in his lecture that for years, standard Indian marketing strategy has been to make products desirable by projecting an aura of foreignness. In the lecture that was followed by an audience of more than 100 guests, he then showed the development of a new Indian self-confidence: “Consider this: as General Motors was sputtering into bankruptcy in its American homeland, its television ads in India didn’t even hint at its cars’ American provenance. Instead, those ads featured young men emerging out of a sunroof, waving an Indian flag as they sped over Mumbai’s J J flyover.” And he continued to say that marketing executives seem to grasp what some social commentators have been slow to realize. Indian-ness is becoming its own status marker. More crucially, India has become a place where its own people are satisfied to be.
This new self-belief and confidence prevails especially among the young. Within the next decade, the average age of India’s population will dip to under 30, and a remarkable four-fifths of these young Indians are optimistic about their future, and the future of their children, according to a recent survey by New Delhi’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. Against expectations, the most aspirational and optimistic youth are to be found not in the big metro cities, but in India’s small towns and villages—places that on the whole have benefited least from the country’s two decades of rising GDP.
Sunil Khilnani argues that it is hard not to be optimistic about a country that, just 60 years after its freedom from colonial rule, has managed to establish a stable democratic system, sustain an open and argumentative civil society, and advance the transformation of an oppressive social order—while achieving economic growth rates approaching, in recent years, 10 per cent. Yet, when one considers the kind of growth that India is experiencing, and its cumulative political implications, the sunny prospect does acquire a few shadows.
Some of the developments energizing India’s young imaginations are the very material for future social conflicts—conflicts that range from the control of, and access to, increasingly scarce environmental resources, to managing the effects of divergent rates of regional growth. Sunil Khilnani started his argument with India’s recent, uneven growth, and the ways in which GDP and other aggregate figures disguise as much as they reveal.
India’s growth, while bringing benefits to many, has also exacerbated already glaring rural–urban differentials. The employment rate in the countryside—where the vast majority of Indians continues to live—has barely risen in this prosperous decade. And so, as a direct result, internal migration continues at an increasing pace: from the countryside to both large and mid-sized cities. This movement is arguably necessary for capitalist industrialization and, indeed, internal mobility of labor is a better signifier of national health than mass out-movements to Dubai or Britain. But much of this desperate migration is unproductive. The industrial sector in the cities is not growing fast enough to absorb the incoming labor. Nor is the services sector able to make much use of the uneducated poor, who make up the majority of those who live in India’s cities. This is in part because of education reforms that have built fine new school buildings in thousand of villages, while paying little attention to the quality, let alone the existence of the local teacher.
If patterns of uneven growth continue, in coming decades the Indian Union will increasingly resemble one of those ‘exquisite corpses’ children like to draw—disparate bits, dreamt up by different imaginations and endowed with quite different abilities, whose principle of connection will be hard to discern or justify. It will become hard to see what common idea or project can then keep together such a monstrous being.
The current government has worked up a repertoire of instruments to address unequal growth—policies that include providing 100 days guaranteed minimum wage employment to the rural poor, as well as loan write-offs and other subsidies for farmers in drought lands. But the efforts remain defensive and, in fact, the very policies designed to mitigate some of the stark imbalances in employment opportunities seem themselves to be perpetuating and exacerbating inequalities.
A more inclusive India would give the country greater authority as it seeks a more prominent place in a fast-moving world. India as a brand, as something the marketers can play with, is not sufficient. India as a nation needs to project a still more positive sense of what it stands for in the world: an Indian self-definition that is able to blend together the country’s accumulated capital of democratic legitimacy with a real—and realized—commitment to bettering the lives of hundreds of millions of individuals.
Henrik Müller, Deputy Editor in Chief of manager magazine, who moderated the Q&A session wondered why modern India, as a rising superpower, has so far been neglected in the European public discourse, at least compared to China. The way Khilnani sees it, India is still largely romanticized as place of spiritualism and at the same time as a modern democracy seemingly less exciting than China which still struggles against its totalitarian past. According to Khilnani, it is precisely the Indian democracy, though, which will be tested with growing economic success. Asked to forecast the main problems India will be facing, he emphasized potential unrest among the poor rural population, corruption, inflation, environmental issues, the increasing political indifference particularly among the prosperous young Indians and hence the danger that the various ethnic and religious group will drift apart rather than stay together as one nation. Compassionate capitalism, support by NGOs, micro finance systems, Khilnani argues, all these are no substitute for a sound political system supported by the country’s elites.
About Sunil Khilnani
Sunil Khilnani is Starr Foundation Professor and Director of South Asia Studies at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC. Born in New Delhi and educated at Trinity Hall and King’s College, Cambridge, he was formerly Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College in London. He has been a fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge and has also held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson Center Washington DC, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. A leading expert on the historical roots of Indian society and politics, his research centers on the history of political intellectuals and the development of democracy outside the West. His publications include: Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (Yale: 1993; German translation, 1995); Civil Society: History and Possibilities (with Sudipta Kaviraj, Cambridge: 2001); and The Idea of India (Penguin: 3rd ed, 2003), translated into several languages, most recently Arabic.
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