Good article, with a few things I disagree with.
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Originally Posted by Botnst
As the saying goes, everything and its opposite is true in India.
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That's a good saying.
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Three hundred million Indians live on less than $1 a day—a quarter of the world's utterly poor—yet since 1985, more than 400m (out of a total population of 1bn) have risen out of relative poverty—to $5 a day—and another 300m will follow over the next two decades if the economy continues to grow at over 7 per cent a year.
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Basically the equivalent population of the US live on less than $1, and the equivalent population of the US will rise out of poverty in two decades.
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For a country that was born of partition, has had a history of separatism, and that encompasses such linguistic, ethnic, social, religious and geographic variety, it is strange that even critics talk of India as if its legal unity was sufficient guarantor of its actual unity. Statistics that combine the city of Chennai, in the stable southern state of Tamil Nadu, with a village in newly constituted Jharkhand state, in eastern India, are likely to deceive as much as those that try to encompass both Denmark and Kosovo.
"India" could have been many other things—an even larger, undivided India, but also a much smaller one, or just a cluster of ancestral formations. Only the British empire and then the resolve of the leaders of the independence struggle ensured that the ancient yet amorphous idea became a single nation state. Sixty years later, there is a functional Indian state that is a rising world power despite its huge variations—but there is also a dysfunctional Indian state that cannot realise the social purpose that the idea of national citizenship is meant to provide.
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Seems like the author is English/living in England, because if he lived in America, he could see how diverse people can still be a united country.
This explosion of the middle class (and rich class too) is very new. I think the caste system cannot survive progress, especially as men outnumber women. It's going to take more than a couple of years of progress to change though.