Author: Sunil Khilnani
-
Ours is a society of swiftly inflating expectations, where old deference crumbles before youthful impatience.
-
After all, the faster history moves, the more likely is one to get left behind.
-
It’s a troubling irony: political imagination, judgement, and action – the capacities that first brought India it into existence – seem to have deserted both the air-conditioned hallways of power as well as the dusty streets of protest, just when India needs them
-
What has protected India from such outcomes is not any innate Indian virtue or cultural uniqueness. Rather, it is the outcome of a political invention, the intricate architecture of constitutional democracy
-
What has protected India from such outcomes is not any innate Indian virtue or cultural uniqueness. Rather, it is the outcome of a political invention, the intricate architecture of constitutional democracy established by India’s founders.
-
For even when nations pride themselves on their freedom from the past, it is often in fact their beginnings – their founding spirit and imagination – that remain, in very altered worlds, their greatest resource.
-
Pakistan at its foundation was a relatively familiar model of the nation-state, in conformity with the classical Western idea; India, though, was far more unusual, and to many external observers looked precarious and unlikely to succeed.
-
The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argues that in the post-11 September world the crucial polarity is no longer between East and West, but between what he terms the World of Order and the World of Disorder. The latter – the failed, rogue and messy states – are the breeding grounds for terrorist and criminal networks, while the World of Order, Friedman has suggested, is constructed around four pillars: the US, the EU-Russia, China and India. Yet will India be able to take and sustain a role as a pillar of the World of Order if it adopts a coarse and exclusivist national ideology, one that would splinter along religious lines India’s interconnected diversities and plunge it into internal and international conflict?
-
Large republics with diverse and conflicting interests can be a better home for liberty, a safer haven against tyranny, than homogenous and exclusive ones. Within them, factions and differences can check one another, moderating ideological fervour and softening power.
-
India, Nehru wrote, ‘was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously
-
But over the past generation the presumption that a single shared sense of India – a unifying idea and concept – can at once define the facts that need recounting and provide the collective subject for the Indian story has lost all credibility.
-
Research on ‘non-national’ identities has proliferated, and some historians have begun subtly to examine the processes through which national identities have been moulded out of the pressures and opportunities of power, often by active gerrymandering of the boundaries of individual and collective selves. If there is a single thrust to this intellectual assault on imperial and nationalist presuppositions, it has been to highlight the sheer artifice of all forms of political community on the subcontinent, whether religious or national.