A history of the ‘Good Indian’

Throughout the second half of the 19th century, there were attempts to oust the British from different parts of the country. These were disparate events. Some were motivated by the desire for self-rule, and others were no more than attempts by regional powers to regain their turf. But around the turn of the century, most of those coalesced into the idea that one day, a free, new nation encompassing the whole landmass would emerge.

And with it, an easily understood view of patriotism too emerged. Good Indians must support independence, fully and immediately. The means varied. Gandhiji’s non-violent efforts have received the greatest acclaim, but those who fought violently for freedom too were seen as heroes of the same struggle. Bhagat Singh and Bose lived comfortably in the imagination of the good Indian, alongside the Bapu.

And then came 1947, and the old definition of ‘good’ Indian-ness was no longer useful. The new nation needed to look ahead to its destiny and make choices about how to seek that tryst. Nehru filled this space with his large presence and the outline of a new proposition. The State would build the industrial ‘temples of India’, making the nation self-sufficient in meeting needs and matching the world in matters beyond that. Good Indians, naturally, were to support this endeavour; the best minds should serve in public institutions, while others applaud them and await the fruits of their efforts.

Markets could not be trusted, in this view. And the private sector survived to the extent it could on a steady diet of admonition about excesses. Society was to be recast in the image of a modern nation, and many mores and customs would be replaced by institutions of the State.

This asymmetric view of development took firm hold. But whatever merit and nuance it had in the beginning, those were gone by the time Indira Gandhi took over, with her son Sanjay, in particular, bulldozing them. Now Indira was India, which made it clear to everyone else how they could be good Indians. Support Indira.

But as the years of promises to develop India dragged on, the good Indian began to ask, “Why am I still poor? Why are many of the promises of your development not being realised?” And most importantly, “Why should I await the slow fulfilment of my rights, and live with low expectations from the State while you go about building this mirage? Give me my due, and then go about your nation-building.”

The honest answer would have been to recognise what the State had become and was becoming. Instead, it responded by trying to co-opt groups of people to its side of this exchange and make more and more things part of the State. Key portions of the market were nationalised and steered, and public expenditure on welfare steadily expanded to create and sustain a large patronage network.

It helped immensely that vestiges of loyalty to the State-led imagination of India still remained as a shield, and the good Indian explained away the failure of the State by suggesting that it was not unwilling to do the right things, but merely unable. And to ‘help’ the State do the right things, the people must partner the government in its chosen path to development. The ‘NGO’ moment had arrived.

Convinced that governments lacked the capacity to deliver on their many promises, these organisations deigned to assist the State. The new good Indians conducted surveys, collected data, educated citizens about entitlements, helped them enroll in welfare schemes, and so on. But their alignment with the State meant that new points of view rarely emerged, and when they did, they were quickly shot down. In this, the language of morality proved useful, much as it once had to the State itself earlier.

The culmination of civil society’s influence was in the first government of the UPA, when stalwarts from this group were appointed to the National Advisory Council, which many political observers regarded as a super-cabinet, making laws for the nation. Society, reduced to civil society, had been swallowed by the State.

But having strayed deep into the realm of the market through nationalisation and giant PSUs, the State found itself unable to deliver rapid economic growth. And the assignment of public funds to its patronage network had also wasted enormous resources. All of this collapsed in a heap. The government’s response was packaged as ‘liberalisation’, but it was nothing of the sort. People who don’t believe in liberty can’t liberalise anything. Instead, having failed in its own role, the State now sought credit for entrepreneurship -- which it had shackled for decades.

The space newly created for private enterprise had one unintended effect. The State’s self-declared pre-eminence had depended greatly on the poverty of the people. But as incomes grew, especially in urban areas, new interest groups began to emerge. Their members were relatively well off, and disdained socialism and illusory promises. They focused not on welfare but on civic issues and solutions to the challenges posed by exploding urbanisation. Industry and society, which hadn’t really shared the same podium much until then, now found common cause -- each in its own way would nudge the State to give up its dominance.

In the cities, the State is more accessible, and people don’t need middlemen to engage with the government. The Constitution’s promise of decentralisation, carried out in the 1990s, also puts greater emphasis on geography than history. Television and consumer product companies constantly glorify the individual. Added to this, the emerging acceptance of gender rights, lifestyle choices, and sub-regional identities led to a chaotic mix, and with it, one more re-imagination of the good Indian.

All of these fused together in the great civil uprising of 2010-11, when a political class that had long been secure in a dominant State faced an unexpected demand -- that it should be democratic. An ageing soldier-turned-crusader against corruption and an army of young, mostly urban, aspirational dreamers demanded swaraj, and government by the people, not merely for them and of them.

That battle was not won then, but the ground shifted. The foundations of the old order had been ripped apart, and in its place new ideas of State, market and society now compete.

The last decade has been rife with that tussle. Routinely on TV ‘news’ channels, we see proclamations of what it means to be Indian. The not-so-subtle subtext to that is that others are somehow less Indian, or certainly not good ones. It is a shrill moment, but it is worth recalling the many twists and turns through which we have reached it, and to remember that however dominant each phase seemed in its time, inevitably the vastness of the nation acted as a peloton to reel it in. We have endured as a democratic nation through such renewal.

(The writer is an entrepreneur, activist and public thinker)