Foreign Policy publishes article on a recent CGD event about India's future featuring historian Ramachandra Guha.
From the article:
Enter Ramachandra Guha. The sociologist, historian, and cricket aficionado sees modern India as the "world's most reckless political experiment." Even while expounding on the modern challenges of identity, separatism, economic inequality, and corruption, the author of the book India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy still finds plenty of occasions to praise the nation's founding fathers for unifying such an "unnatural nation" and "unlikely democracy." The key, he says, was decentralization.
Speaking on Friday at the Center for Global Development in Washington, Guha pointed out that newly independent India faced a formidable array of challenges to its integrity. In the era of Partition, the country's founders had to decide how to safeguard religious pluralism while preventing a Hindu theocracy (which Guha calls the "anti-Pakistan" approach). They had to confront a long-standing culture of exclusion that marginalized women and people from lower castes. And they had to make strategic decisions about whether to embrace democracy in stages (like the United States, which only abolished slavery nearly a century after the Revolutionary War) or all at once. (The Indians ultimately opted for the latter.)
Read it here.
