Editorial: The Importance Of Being Indian

Despite its warts, India’s democracy has fired global imagination for over six decades. It is not the politest thing to do, but it has to be done. We need to drop Brics, or at least not take it too seriously, and step out on our own. Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa may look a little like us, but deep down this resemblance is superficial. Brics is a catch-up club that turns to richer, fatter countries for inspiration, but India, in many ways, is inspiration itself. 
    
When India dared to birth democracy, many thought it was premature and that it would soon be history. Sixty-six action-filled years later, India’s democracy is now a little too old to die young. What is more, the world watches every move we make; in fact, cannot have enough of us. This is not because India is efficient and affluent – far from it. Rather, it is the way India goes wrong that fires global imagination. 
    
In any other country of comparative vintage and want, ethnicity, once introduced, would have run wild. Indian politicians too have repeatedly played this dirty trick, but our democracy has limited its appeal. The ultra corrupt may be ultra rich but because of India’s judiciary and the press they often wake up in jail to swill bad tea. Even army officers might face court martial if they mess with the rules. Political bosses, and their cronies, are forever bending and twisting the law, but for all their power and pelf, they can never quite ignore it. 
    
Indian politicians err time and again, but their overbites serve as object lessons because procedures hold. This not only pulls us out of periodic crises with a just-backfrom-the-dentist feel, but also tells the world, the advanced West included, how easily democracy can be lost. If India had been another underperforming tin-pot dictatorship, it would not have been the thought experiment it is today. 
    
Take a look at the following: 
Corruption, assaults and political conspiracies happen worldwide, but when they strike India they excite the mind like nothing else. For example, South Africa is 
a serious centre of gang rapes, or “jack rolling” in the local lingo, but that does not cause an international stir. Yet the news of the December rape and murder in Delhi ricocheted within minutes across the world. 
    
This was not because the protests were passionate, or because the police should have gone to a finishing school. What was being observed was whether our Constitution would hold. Eventually it did; false cases were withdrawn and, boorish cops notwithstanding, no bullets were fired. 
    
Ethnic intolerance again is an international affliction. When Putin tells Russian minorities to put up or shut up he gets a standing ovation at home and hardly any press abroad. In Burma, Rohingya Muslims foxhole themselves in fear, but that does not make big news. With India it is different. If the western world was horrified with the 2002 Gujarat killings, it was because our free press and civil society, also gifts of democracy, brought things out in the open. 
    
Corruption in China is monumental. It periodically fells bridges and schools, killing hundreds. Brazil has a homicide rate three times higher than India’s and political violence in Russia is just too bad to be true. The world may condemn all of this, and it does. However, it is only when India goes wrong that tongues wag the mind just about everywhere. 
    
That India can make this happen again and again is what makes us special. Had we been too perfect, we would be Scandinavia, and nothing unique. On the other hand, had we been too violent, we would have been just another Honduras, or maybe Zimbabwe. But because our stubborn democracy has held to its frame, our leadership blunders light up the sky. This is our real USP! 
    
India’s imperfections make for its significance. In terms of economic underdevelopment and dodgy politicians, we have a fair amount in common with many troubled nations, some of whom are our neighbours. But even in the darkest of times, we hardly expect military coups and mass arrests, as they do. To their credit, millions of Chinese bloggers also noticed that Delhi’s anti-rape agitations did not turn Vijay Chowk into a Tiananmen Square. 
    
Advanced democracies too owe us a debt of gratitude. For years India has acted as a not-forprofit laboratory so that they might remember the fundamentals of citizenship that made them rich and kept them that way. It is now payback time and they should tell us how exactly they set up universal health and education that served their citizens so well. 
    
When democracies reach out to each other this way, the world becomes a better place and friendships stay secure. This is something that neither G-20 nor Brics meets can do as it is in the nature of the economic beast to cross wires and compete. For starters, South Africa is as unhappy with Brazilian chickens flying in as it is with China’s promiscuity with other African countries. The distant hope of a Brics Development Bank or of currency swaps will not blow these fears out of the water. 
    
Indian politicians could also do us a favour by occasionally learning from their mistakes. The importance of being Indian would then become obvious to all.