India Shining?


Photos by Rakesh Sahai.

What does Louisiana’s Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, have in common with the Democratic U.S. Surgeon General-designate Sanjay Gupta? They’re both Americans of Indian descent. Going by the title of a witty and insightful book by Vinay Lal, a professor of history at UCLA and an expert on Indian civilization who graduated from Chicago University and earned a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, they might be called The Other Indians, distinct in many ways not just from native Americans but also from India’s 1 billion people. Subtitled “A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America,” Lal’s book was recently published by HarperCollins (India). He talks to AsiaScoop editor Ajay Singh about the Indian community in the U.S. and geopolitical events in South Asia.

How do you think Barack Obama’s presidency will shape U.S. relations with India, and how would that relationship be different from the one under George W. Bush?

Though there maybe some jubilation in India, as there was elsewhere in the world, about Obama’s triumph, there is also a feeling that the Obama presidency may not be as much in India’s interest as the Bush presidency. There maybe ethical and political reasons for preferring Obama, but the political establishment in India is certainly divided and probably leans towards the idea of a Republican presidency. The reasons for this are manifold but the principal one is that even though there are people who are delighted over the prospect that Obama would get tougher on Pakistan, as he himself has said he would, they nonetheless fear that any escalation in Pakistan and Afghanistan would have repercussions on India. That’s the main consideration. Among other considerations is Obama’s promise to keep more jobs in America. If he keeps true to his promise, that has repercussions on outsourcing in India.

Much has been said in recent years about India as an emerging superpower. What kind of superpower status do you think India aspires to and what kind of superpower do you think it has the potential to become?

My view is a heretical view because I don’t think any country should aspire to a superpower status. A country that has a superpower status ought to have its strengths considerably diminished – and that holds true for the U.S. as well. We need a world with more equal nation-states; we don’t need a world with one or two or even three superpowers. I think India’s a long distance from being a superpower at this particular juncture. You can have a lot of talk, as there has been in India, some of which the rest of the world has accepted, about ‘India shining,’ – the fact that India has sent a space mission to the moon, that it has vast potential and that top corporate firms are relocating their businesses to India.

That’s part of the triumphant narrative of India in which a substantive middle class is rising virtually out of oblivion. But at the same time there is a remarkable amount of evidence that suggests the country is also in serious distress. Indian agriculture, for example, is in great distress. More than 100,000 farmers have committed suicide in the last 10 years. Recently, one of the government’s own organizations released a report that said 80 percent of the country’s population lives on an absolute pittance – a dollar a day roughly. So what kind of superpower status are we talking about here? There’s an enormous disjunction between the haves and the have-nots. At this point, assessments about superpower status are far too premature. Besides, being a superpower is not necessarily desirable. The desirable thing is to have some kind of dignity and distributive justice for citizens.

Do you think India’s potential to be a superpower is largely a media creation?

The media is part of it, but the desire to become a superpower is also part of the aspirations of the middle class, which is rising virtually out of oblivion – there was no substantive middle class in India 20 years ago. This middle class is seeing the kind of status that people of Indian origin enjoy in the U.S. and Britain, for example, and that creates an aspiration to see India acquire the standing that they think an ancient civilization deserves. India is after all one of the great continuing civilizations – in fact, besides China, it’s really the only one. The idea is that if you’re a civilization that can produce great artifacts of life – great literature, ethics, personalities – then why can we not also be a country that commands a certain economic, political, military respect. So part of the attempt in India is to exercise its muscle power – but the context here is that India is neighbored by China, and at this point in time comparisons with China are inevitable.

China has made a very conscious decision to pursue a superpower status. But India doesn’t know what it wants to be.

There’s always been that ambivalence in India, and part of it has to do with the legacy of Indian traditions, which, however materialistic, have also urged people to think about the fact that the ultimate human condition is not about material progress but about other things – the dignity of human life and human relationships. Put less abstractly, I think China has had to barter its soul to achieve what it wants to achieve. In India, there is still some degree of resistance to that. It maybe crumbling slowly among the middle class, but there are too many competing legacies – of Gandhi, of Indian saints, the resistance to British colonial rule. People are saying, ‘why ought we to achieve superpower status – what is so enormously desirable or interesting about that?’ In China, people have gone overboard and I think they will come to realize the folly of their ways.

Indians in the U.S. are not particularly known for assimilating in the nation’s mainstream. What do you think are the merits and demerits of this?

I’m not in favor of assimilation. By which I mean not that a group should make an effort to stand out and play identity politics, but there should be no onus on any ethnic group to assimilate with the dominant mainstream. You may have to do that to derive certain political advantages, but it’s incorrect to say that there should be a moral onus to integrate, which is how immigration used to be viewed through the older model of the melting pot, refined and redefined as the salad bowl. I don’t think that’s a very interesting – or political – way of looking at how migrants interact with others. The older immigration-based studies of American history looked at how people fit into the nation’s center – a centripetal view. But the more recent Diaspora studies look outward – the centrifugal view – in which people radiate outward and connect with other groups, in this case, both Indian and non-Indian Diasporas.

Your book offers many interesting insights about the rise of the Indian Diaspora in U.S. politics, business and in literature and the arts. In what important ways do you think these notable ‘other Indians’ differ from their subcontinental brethren?

One thing that ought to be said is that the Indians who came to the U.S. do not represent the entirety of India. The majority of them came from a relatively better class background: post-1965, they consisted largely of students and professionals. But that’s not true of the early migrations. In fact, between 1924 and 1965 Indians were effectively shut out of the U.S. – after 1945, only 100 Indians per year were allowed in. So you cannot view them as being representative of India in the same way as migrants from other countries.

You find larger support for Hindu nationalism in the U.S. than you do in India. The Hindus here are proportionately much more zealous in advocating the cause of Hindu nationalism than Hindus back home. One of the most phenomenal stories of Indian politics is the rise of the lower class through very unlikely electoral alliances between upper-caste and lower-caste parties in states like Uttar Pradesh. You do not see anything like that in the Indian population in the U.S., where there is more segregation than there is sometimes back in India. Another difference is that the majority of Indians in India are politically active. Among Indians in the U.S., there is relatively little political involvement. Maybe the Obama presidency will change that – or has already changed that, given how various young, ethnic groups voted in the recent election.

The rise of Hindu nationalism in India in the 1990s owes much to the support, both moral and monetary, of non-resident Indians in the U.S. Do you think the worst consequences of this phenomenon are already over, given that Hindu nationalists have failed to capture outright power in India?

A lot will depend on how things will play out in South Asia as a whole over the next two or three years. For one thing, Obama has pledged to escalate the war in Afghanistan. I think that’s complete folly. Leave aside the historical circumstance – that Afghanistan has been a quagmire for every foreign contingent that has gone there for the last 200 years. You also have to consider Pakistan. In the recent attacks in Mumbai, there is evidence of Pakistan’s complicity, which points to a silent coup by Pakistan’s army against their prime minister. When things of this kind happen, Hindu nationalists in India play upon it. They are waiting to see how this endgame comes about, and the endgame will determine to some degree whether they will be able to gain political capital. Of course, they are projecting, as Bush did in the U.S., that any assault on our territory has to be met with force.

What were the Mumbai attacks about?

Mumbai 2008 clearly had geopolitical ramifications. It wasn’t just about the injustices committed against Muslims in India, it had to do with the global status of the ‘war on terror,’ the disputes within Islam and the ascendency of terrorism movements across the world. What did Pakistan lose by being complicit in the attacks? Only some moral ground, but it never had much moral ground to begin with. You don’t have to be too cynical to agree with that. The Pakistan army, which has always jockeyed for power with the civilian establishment, wanted to reassert itself – and it has. Now Pakistan’s drumbeat is that the rest of the world is hounding us and we need to put all our options on the table. That’s why Pakistan has said it’s willing to engage in conflict, if necessary, with India.

The other day, G. Parthasarthy, the former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan, said that if Pakistan sponsored another attack against India, all bets would be off, meaning that nuclear war could be a distinct possibility.

Well, what are India’s options? It can attack the terrorist camps in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. But these camps are likely to be have been emptied out by then. Anything India does, by the way, is in consultation with the U.S. That itself is a very clear sign of the fact that India is not in a position to be a superpower. It doesn’t have the prerogative of shock and awe that a superpower has.

Do you think the old cliché about South Asia being a potential nuclear flashpoint has become more alarming than ever?

There’s always some mystification in such clichés. Part of it has to do with nuclear weapons, and partly it has to do with the way in which people have talked about South Asia for a long time. A very famous political scientist, Selig Harrison, wrote a book nearly 50 years ago, titled “India: The Most Dangerous Decades.” What dangerous decades was he talking about? The next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years? There’s also the cliché that India is going to fall apart. The British advanced it for a long time. Much of this talk isn’t persuasive. On the other hand, you can’t minimize the fact that South Asia has two nuclear-armed states and the arsenals could fall into the wrong hands. There are people who are willing to barter nuclear arms and crazy enough to take the risks.


About the Author

Ajay Singh is a writer, former tea planter and chicken farmer who began his career in journalism at the New Delhi bureau of the Asian Wall Street Journal in 1988. Since then, he has worked as a reporter for the Associated Press, Time Inc.’s Hong Kong-based newsweekly Asiaweek, and India’s leading newsweekly India Today. Singh is also the author of “Give ’Em Hell, Hari,” a postcolonial East-West comedy that was Waterstone Book of the Month in Britain in March 1996 and on the bestseller lists in Hong Kong, Ireland and Scotland.

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