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The Indian Century is a term used to describe the growing power of India in the 21st century. It has become a more prominent feature amongst the speeches of the key government leaders, commercial and media commentators of India in the last year.
The concept of the Indian century is based on the capacity of India becoming the biggest economy of the 21st century. It has been claimed that various trends will make 21st an Asian Century. However, this is based on the assumption that China will become the largest economy in the world based on the current economic growth trends, whilst Indian will become the third largest economy by 2020 on purchasing power parity and on international exchange rates by 2050. However, its worth noting that if China is the largest economy, then the term "Chinese century" (and not Asian) should be used, in order to be consistent.
The main argument for the possibility of an Indian century is based on the demographics of India - with the largest under 25 population of any country in the world (in a future global trend towards a much older population that is less dynamic in the labour market). This demographics could give India a bigger economic advantage than its neighbour, China. The result could be a higher rate of economic growth than China and this could eventually translate itself into India becoming the largest economy within the 21st century.
There are other comparative advantages of India that may enable it to perform better than China and overtake it as the leading economy in the world in the 21st century, the main one, democracy versus dictatorship; India's democracy acts as a channel of popular decision-making - with the freedom of 1.1 billion people to reject the ruling party and throw it out of office during elections. Professor Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize-winning economist, in a version of this thesis argued that famines were stopped by the power of democracy as a political system. On the other hand, it has been argued that China's dictatorship (or one party rule without national multi-party elections) may derail the economic growth trends through a failure by the system to acknowledge possible popular pressure points within the system. This scenario is based on the possible successful occurrence of Tiananmen protests or a prolonged stalemate within China between popular democratic movements and an unelected elite group at the centre or fissure points within China's less developed provinces with a rural neglected population agitating against resources being concentrated in the hands of the few in urban areas.
India has had a long political tradition of managing cultural diversity of its population, with a powerful weighting of regional linguistic and ethnic groups, and an accommodation of the beliefs of different religious groups in the concept of 'secularism' enshrined in its constitution. Post-Independence India has managed this cultural diversity through celebrating it and maintaining and balancing the legitimacy of different groups. This has given the Indian system a capacity to successfully manage and resolve tensions, when the diversity is under strain. The Indian system is more elastic than the Chinese system that has lesser experience and a more ideological approach to managing and resolving such tensions. This may become a barrier to China's economic growth, if the tensions lead to major demands for secession based on linguistic and ethnic diversity.
Philosophically, India possesses an open system, which has developed itself over several millennia. Buddhism was exported to the east, north and south (only very slightly to the west). India's main religion - Hinduism - is very pluralistic and multifarious in its mode of reference points and activities. It has several versions of non-harm ingrained to its philosophical traditions - including the one espoused by Mahatma Gandhi in his Jain religious concept of ahimsa (non-violence). It has modern religions such as Sikhism with their democratic and egalitarian concepts, which were synthesised from eastern religions and western religions (such as Islam). Equally, India has absorbed Western philosophical traditions such as Islam and Christianity. Furthermore, India has a tradition of giving persecuted religious groups home such as the Zoroastrians or Parsees (who migrated from Iran) as well as Jewish people and many sects of Islam as well as Tibetan Buddhists. It is the birthplace of many synthetic religions, which fuse other traditions together - such as Emperor Asoka or Emperor Akbar or Maharajah Ranjit Singh or Mahatma Gandhi. The philosophical breadth of India enables it to draw on a very powerful ability to accommodate rather than fight ideological difference and create an environment of mutual respect.
India will become the most populous country in the world according to current population growth trends - with higher fertility rates - and on this criteria alone, it could be India's century. The population as a driver in economic development has been recognised by the idea of the purchasing power of the Indian middle class. It is also possible to extend this to the notion of India as a market of 1.1 billion purchasers - with a critical question posed as how to enable the whole of this population to become purchasers through enhancing the economic capacities of all of them (including in the rural areas or shanty towns surrounding major Indian cities).
Finally, India can be controversially regarded as a larger area - as an Indian sub-continent or South Asia - based on a pre-Independence geographical definition known as British India. Economic or infrastructure as well as cultural integration of this may result in this region of Asia and the world to become the centre for global economic activity. This idea has been referred to as Akhand Bharat but with its specific emphasis on religious uniformity - which is closely linked to creating single-ideology India (more totalitarianist than pluralist in character).
The political and unifying value of the concept of the Indian century is obvious: it acts to motivate and bring together the global Indian family for a purpose of the pursuit of the idea. It has a nationalist function. This can be regarded as positive nationalism - as India is a low income country with a great deal of poverty and its 1.1 billion population can act as force to achieve economic growth and wipe out poverty and solve major infrastructure and social problems. It could also be seen as a way to devalue the worth of other nations and peoples.
Arguably, the true Indian century is based on the political power of the India's immense population (through democracy), the power of Indians as consumers (as the purses of the so-called Indian market class continue to enlarge); the power of the Indian diaspora members through their success in the country of adoption as equal citizens and high achievers and their investment in their homeland; India's foreign policy technocrats and economic policy experts, who strive to manage the process of India's global emergence with passion and by taking sensible decisions in the historical crossroads to invent workable roadmaps to peace and prosperity. Over a billion people mobilised by democracy with a youthful outlook and the determination to end poverty, who are armed with the tools of technocracy and open to global cooperation and investment in India could create an Indian century.
Contrarily, India's poor, illiterate, shanty-town dwellers, socially oppressed women, India's ill and victims of child mortality, India's enslaved in lives of despair are all working to make the Indian century inevitable. Even a marginally successful Indian century will be an achievement for the world and for history - 1 billion less people facing life and death choices--sometimes daily, sometimes monthly and, for the lucky ranks of impoverished, sometimes only several times a year. It is an idea comparable to the idea of communism by Karl Marx and capitalism by Adam Smith - the ideas of the old British and European century.
See also
External links
- Speech by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
- "The Great Reverse - Part I" by Clyde Prestowitz
- Speech by Indian Prime Minister Mnamohan Singh
- [http://www.gs.com/insight/research/report/99.pdf Global Paper 99 BRICs Report by Goldman Sachs
- Foreign Policy Centre World set for 'an Indian Century'
- UBS on India's youth advantage
- Bush and India's religious diversity
- Defence of Religious Diversity by Former PM Vajpayee
- India's diversity website general
- Diversity and pluralism in India
- Congress document illustrating extent and breadth of economic and social development for over a billion people
- The Myth of the New India