It’s easy to quip the trite and true maxim that “India disappoints both optimists and pessimists.” But it is this exact type of mentality that suppresses the will of the youth, the flickering flame of hope to illuminate an India beyond the now. In this dimly lit dimension, imagination must fill the dark contours of one’s gaze as dreams and nightmares populate the horizon. This phrase is an easy way out into the unknown.

Confirming this middle path, the aftermath of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections shows India lapsing into old trends. Coalition has conquered commandment. Negotiation sweeps the feet of decisiveness as Modi wins an extraordinarily rare third term yet with a weaker mandate dependent on the will and waft of allies. His galavanting conquistador style of ruling must yield to the needs of tribal chieftains both within his party and without. And as Modi becomes constrained, so do the ropes of coalition governance wrap around the tiger of Hindutva and the bull of economic liberalization.

This is the part where Ruchir’s maxim comes into play. A middling hypothesis. A “Chalta hai” attitude. A “teach a lesson” win for the Indian people. A massaging of that smug, soft whiskey-breathed pessimism on India. ‘India never changes…’ My objection to this is two-fold:

Firstly, India cannot afford to just chum along. Its demographic dividend will soon become a deterioration. At one wing is a terrorist state in Pakistan whose sole reason for semblance and unity is to violently reject its Indianness, thereby centering its foreign policy around attacking India. On the other wing is the wildly successful country of the People’s Republic of China, which has a penchant for perpetually “surprising” India’s armed forces, who seem more interested in pensions rather than performance. The red dragon continues to fly circles around the elephant precisely because it bit the silver bullet of economic reform and embraced iron law and order. Chinese metal will easily pierce Indian bravado and pride disguised as mettle. These foreign threats and fumbling a demographic gift into a grouse can completely derail the India story.

Secondly, India’s opposition is not normal. The worst commentators on India consistently “both sides” India’s NDA and INDI Alliance as the twin custodians of India’s success. Whether one rules or the other, of course, India will continue to go up to the right! But politics has consequences. Do ask Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, and almost every other country in the world whose shiny line chart quickly shifted south due to economic and political choices by inept rulers. The Congress Party and its cohorts are doubling down on a trident whose tips are coated with venom: Jatitva, Regionalism, and Redistribution. All three can be catastrophic to India’s growth story, as the violent sectarian framework of Lebanon, ripping at the seems strife of Yugoslavia, and the monetary meltdown of Venezuela all combine in a rancid recipe for disaster. India’s opposition has morphed into an existential threat to India itself. Only economic growth can allow India to escape the devastating desperation encouraged by the Congress Party et al.

India must reform to truly lift off and compete.

However, the biggest obstacle to reform in India is Indians themselves. Simply put, reforms yield electoral backlash. Electoral backlash happens because sectors and institutions in need of reform are captured or dominated by certain identities (usually in the form of a caste or regional ethnicity). The backlash is more pronounced precisely because these strong identities mobilize violence, bloc voting, or protests designed to bait the government into crackdowns that will further the spin cycle of grievances and electoral consequences. Identity is abnormally strong in India due to its hyper-diversity combined with patronage-based democratic politics. A feedback loop then commences between societal autism and political cowardice.

A Society on Steroids

“Yatha Raja Tatha Praja” – As is the King, so are the subjects, is a famous Sanskrit proverb on governance. But democracy flips this monarchic phrase on its head: Yatha Praja Tatha Raja – As are the subjects, so is the King. American political scientist Myron Weiner has described India as a strong society-weak state country. The politicians are at the will of the society, a wily hydra-like beast unable to be broken or tamed. Sometimes, its heads snap at each other in a cannibalistic frenzy that can only be curtailed by the snapping curl of the state’s whip. India is not for beginners, especially when it comes to politics.

It is very easy to blame the cartoonishly corrupt politicians that India has had. But it is a much more controversial road to blame Indian society. And I do not mean in the typical Western take with a brown-nosed brown-face way that Indian society is not progressive or liberal enough. Neither am I proposing the terminally online take that India isn’t conservative enough. Beyond left and right, we must look within.

If India’s strong society was homogenous in a Han manner, we would naturally see a strong state. But India’s demographic diversity eclipses even its geographic diversity; we have a raucous, constantly quibbling society that transmutes into a decentralized patronage-based state. Integral to understanding this decentralized polity and rambunctious society is something I have humorously called “muh community izzat.” Perhaps in more serious terms, we should call it Izzatism.

Izzat is the Urdu word for respect or pride (other Indian languages have similar concepts). Izzatism is the phenomenon by which reform in Indian polity & governance is thwarted by violent or electoral threats from communities that feel their izzat or pride is being attacked by such reforms. As mentioned previously, India’s hyper-diversity & patronage system of governance provides more chances of such backlash. Izzat-based claims are frequently cover for economic extraction or dominance; nonetheless, the idea of izzat can turbo-charge & intensify mobilization against reforms in a way unseen in other states or societies.

When interfacing with the state, izzat is placed at the forefront. Policies, reforms, and even patronage of other groups must smoothly pass through the sieve of izzat, or else a community will enact its wrath on the state, whether with the blade or at the ballot. All normal government functions and development must first do battle with community pride. Now, imagine how that affects Indian state capacity and progress. You don’t have to imagine – just look at its progress since independence.

The Roadblock to Reforms

Significant reform has only truly arrived in India at the gunpoint of the IMF in 1991, with the foolish bravery of Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the early 2000s, and today with Narendra Modi, who has narrowly won a majority after a second term of liberalization and fiscal discipline. Only by his sheer force of personality (and plenty of goodwill generated by prior welfare) did Modi make it through. Electoral backlash has whipped all three reformist Prime Ministers in the face, knocking two of them out of parliament.

Reforms are tough for democratic states in general, but Indian society means executing reforms is playing on hard mode.

This is partially due to the aforementioned Izzatism. When reforms are attempted, a group that has a stranglehold on a market, land, or some other economic asset will violently react. Issues like the farm laws, Agniveer, land reforms, and other policies have been met with significant pushback as the hand of resistance was cloaked with the molten glove of identity. Eventually, though, the hand gets burnt in the long run, and markets and institutions break down due to inefficiency. The atrophy of Lal Bahadur Shastri’s motto, “Jai Jawaan, Jai Kisaan,” is clearly visible today as the agricultural sector and the army’s resistance to reforms have led to suboptimal outcomes with India’s agricultural sector being a mess and its army performance untrusted by India’s government due to the consistent phenomenon of being “surprised” in conflicts.

Of course, many point to India’s addiction to freebies. But here, I would say that this was parachuted onto India by its early elites rather than its society. India has a rich, millennia-old tradition of commerce and world-renowned merchants, yet modern India has shunned artha for activism against it.

The revolution of Direct Benefit Transfer has been two steps forward, one step back for Indian economics. India’s leviathan digitization has transformed the nature of Indian welfare, scything through the goonda middleman scraping the cream off of every government dole and gracing 1970s Amitabh Bachchan movies. DBT has indeed massively aided the lives of poor Indians. And while freebies are frequently the target of ire, they are the most salient difference-maker for Indians today. That being said, they, of course, are not the final solution. That only lies in industrialization and manufacturing away from India’s far too fetishized agricultural sector.

The more acute and immediate issue is the snowballing of freebies. Freebies have been a norm for all of India’s history, but it is with the entry of Arvind Kejriwal, a figure that some liken to an Indian Zelensky due to his fairly obvious links with the US State Department, that we see a normalization of even greater freebies. The Congress Party has taken this idea in stride, as has the BJP playing catch up to avoid election losses, with calls for violent redistribution echoing across the Congress Party’s fairly successful election campaign. Modi took the high and courageous road of announcing no new major freebies from the Centre in this election season and was answered with a drastically reduced mandate. Lesson learned.

The Obesity of Diversity*

Everyone loves Indian diversity. Abroad, it wins platitudes of unity in diversity, tolerance, secularism, pluralism, and various other feel-good words that paper over the grotesque condition of much of the country so easily revealable with a casual stroll in an average alley or nowadays a white supremacist’s timeline on Twitter. Within India, there is definitely a valid view that it contributes to India’s uniqueness and preservation of traditions.

Today, those traditions are eroding away like ancient ruins, once painted streaks of red and gold but now devoid of worship and sanctity. The crucibles of Indian traditions, jatis or caste, are now essentially ethnic identities divorced from religious rites. Jati is frequently paired with Varna, but today, we add a third partner to the relationship in Category. General Category, Other Backwards Class, Scheduled Caste, and Scheduled Tribe are becoming much more salient than Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, and Dalit. Bureaucratization and racialization of caste have created a vicious seesaw competition between groups. Jati-Varna-Category is the real triple lens through which to view caste identity in India.

India’s hyper-diversity combined with patronage-based democratic politics creates a crabs-in-a-bucket mentality regarding inter-caste relations. Welfare, quotas, and even the simple pride of having a candidate of one’s caste are the starting points of almost all elections. Each Indian group peers at each other with beedy eyes, uncaring of any advancement save that which is one tier, step, or even inch ahead of their neighbor. There is no there, only here. Going beyond is an imagination; being behind is a reality. The Indian cannot move forward if he is constantly looking over his shoulder.

In this war, ideologues take advantage of frenzy to differentiate groups away from the median Indian identity. This is where we have to go deeper into the Indian psyche.

While India is centralizing physically through infrastructure, mentally with technology, economically with reforms, and culturally with Hindutva, it also has forces that try to pull it apart on identity lines. This largely stems from the stigma and shame of the Indian identity itself. Globally, India is still regarded as a poor and backward society. The internet broadcasts the worst and most macabre of Indian society daily. For this reason, many Indians attach more to X identity rather than the Indian identity. Liberals differentiate themselves via class by aligning with global liberalism or Scott Alexander’s Blue Tribe concept. Caste parochialists laud their always victorious and legendary history, explaining away all present deficiencies as the conspiracy of those other castes. Regionalists massage their mythic exceptionalism, thinking that outsiders will surely know they are of Y ethnicity and not Indian. Religious hardliners feverishly explain away their Indian identity as untrue, joining in at all the bile sprayed at Indians in a fashion that’d make Uncle Tom blush. Apostasy from the Indian identity is upward status mobility. Of course, one step outside of the subcontinent will remind them that all they’ll ever be is an Indian.

And there is no consequence of this apostasy or of any form of treason to the overall Indian mass. Why would there be? So separate is Indian society that some would even say it is scarcely a coherent society itself, as Ambedkar alluded to in his rathole metaphor. How can there be an idea of betrayal when there is such a lack of consciousness of kind in Indian society? While some may point to India’s inherent and storied spirit of debate and pluralism, the scathing and slavish demeanor of the apostate or betrayer naturally evokes a sense of disgust for the cosmopolitan and nationalistic Indian. This behavior is plainly unnatural.

*Was inspired by the term “cultural obesity” used by my friend Priyank

India’s 21st Century Urbanization

How do we solve this morass of stagnancy? The solution is already underway.

Between 1000 BCE and 400 BCE, India massively urbanized. New ideas about the individual and Indian were birthed as aristocrats debated in the courts of kings, with some shedding their clothes, shaving their colored beards, and shelving their golden finery to be clad in fiery robes. India’s cities birthed new conceptions of self, science, philosophy, and, indeed, Dharma itself. From the heartbeat of these new metropolises came a new Indian culture.

History is rhyming as a nascent urbanization emerges. A massive migration, mixing, and centralization is occurring across India. Identities, sub-identities, and sub-sub-identities all must face this tsunami of change. How they evolve is anyone’s guess, but India’s destiny is to orient itself towards its cities. A looming delimitation of India’s parliamentary seats means that urban areas will receive larger square footage of the floor.

The idiosyncrasies and ires of India’s hinterlands, the iconic village that Mahatma Gandhi so loved and BR Ambedkar so hated, will now be bending to the chaos and mission of Indian urbanity.

Rural distress was a major contributor to Modi’s reduced mandate this term. In the pursuit of urbanization, these areas should not be forgotten. While it is definitely true that the government needs to address the concerns of India’s outback, the inside story of its future lies in its cities. The fields will be satisfied by freebies, but Indian development lies in the steel and concrete of its cities. The inertia of Indian society is shattered by the rapid sprawl of urbanity.

But how exactly can urbanization save India from its obesity of diversity? Urbanization is important because as Indians urbanize, parochial identities give way to more cosmopolitan ones. This is not to say that caste or ethnic identities will be annihilated any time soon by Indian cities, nor should they be. But their salience and importance will indeed diminish. Voting patterns of urban areas also point to less sticky caste voting or at least of those more friendly towards economic development and reform rather than million-meter band-aids known as freebies. Additionally and pivotally, the youth of and flocking to urban India are of a different mind. There is a brimming sense of optimism and ambition for India’s next generation of changemakers. They’ve seen India’s dysfunctions and compared it to the world abroad, asking themselves, “Why can’t India be like that?”

Joining urbanization and perhaps a savior of India’s rural lands is industrialization. Currently, around 45% of India’s workforce is engaged in agriculture, while an estimated 20-25% are engaged in manufacturing. The transition away from farming is directly correlated with this pursuit of manufacturing. India’s near demonic opposition strongly depends on the caste parochialism and anti-development mentalities of rural localities to succeed. With urbanization and industrialization, the strength of the Congress Party and other opposition parties will diminish.

Industrialization will be the incantation of steel. Only through the sorcery of the city can India move past the witchcraft of ruralism. The ethic of agriculture must be sacrificed at the altar of industry. The cult of the village must be supplanted by the creed of the polis. The metronomic mantra of manufacturing, a systematic chanting of silicone and steel, will finally deliver India to its destiny far beyond both its optimists and pessimists.

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“The remoulding of the national life is the need of the day.”

-Sri Aurobindo