Review by Patti Mohr

In Spite of the Gods:

The Rise of Modern India.

By Edward Luce.

Anchor Books New York 2006.

The title may suggest the book is about India’s rise, but that is not the case at all. It does mention India’s annual growth rate of between 6 to 8 percent, its booming information technology sector and its rising middle class. But, as a whole, the book seems to be to counter the now generally accepted view that India will become a great power in a 21st Century multipolar world.

Edward Luce, a Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times who spent years working in India as the paper’s South Asia bureau chief, certainly acknowledges India’s strengths and its potential. He even suggests that as a great economic and political power, India would help stabilize the world and teach it that democratic values can unify diverse, multiethnic groups.

But Luce’s main point is that optimists should beware. India faces many obstacles in its path to becoming a great power, and no one should take for granted that India has the will to overcome them. The challenges are many, and they include: tense relations with Pakistan, Hindu nationalism, substantial inequality, ineffectual bureaucracy, corruption and political factionalism arising from an all-pervasive caste system.

No path worth taking is ever straight and simple. And so it is with India’s economic and diplomatic rise in a globalized world. The picture Luce paints using descriptive narratives of his own experiences as a foreign correspondent is one of complexity: India is both rich and poor; it is modern and traditional; religious yet secular; diverse in culture yet united by democracy. It is all those things and more. It is the best of times. It is the worst of times.

Hindu Nationalism

Luce says his goal is to produce an “unsentimental” view of India. And, indeed, that is what he does. It is often an unflattering view. The worst descriptions are saved for the chapter on Hindu nationalism. It is a topic rarely included in news articles highlighting India’s economic strengths. But, as Luce shows, it is a serious concern both in and out of India.

The numbers alone show that Hindu nationalist groups carry significant weight. By way of background, Luce introduces us to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – a movement leading a large network of Hindu nationalist groups, claiming somewhere between two and six million members. Part of this network is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which ruled from 1998 to 2004. It is a party that regularly draws between 22 to 24 percent of the Indian vote, supports “Swadeshi” pursuit of economic self-reliance, and has as its purpose the goal of redrawing India’s national identity along Hindu lines.

Luce suggests that the BJP party’s strength may grow: Although the “era of Brahmin-dominated politics in India is dead,” Hindu nationalism may still survive and rule if right wing politicians learn to incorporate lower castes into their party’s fold.

The prospect of a strong and powerful Hindu nationalist party could hamper India’s democratic system if other religious and ethnic minorities are put in harm’s way. As Luce notes, relations among the various groups have not always been peaceful. At times, they have, in fact, been quite violent.

As recent as 2002, a vicious massacre took place in the Indian state of Gujarat. The striking thing about it—aside from the 3,000 murders of mostly Muslim men, women and children and the 200,000 residents made homeless—is that India had only convicted a handful of people for the killings at the time of the Luce’s writing.

Democratic Patronage

If nationalism is the threat, democracy is the answer. And India has shown the world that its democratic system can unify a country more diverse and disparate than perhaps any other on earth, Luce writes. Diversity has plagued the system, making collective action difficult and central planning impossible. (India accommodates 18 different languages and hundreds if not thousands of different religious, ethnicities and castes.) But, at the end of the day, it is democracy that has kept the country whole. “Far from endangering democracy, India’s pluralism makes democracy essential,” Luce writes. “The rest of the world could learn a lot from India, along the lines of tolerance, the management of diversity, and the rooting of democracy in a traditional society.”

Aside from that achievement, India’s democratic experiment is far from complete. Rather, India’s democratic system is messy, complicated and corrupt. Furthermore, it cannot be summed up or characterized easily. In contrast to a country like the United States, where political commentators can divide the country up into “blue states and red states,” Indian politics takes many shapes, shades and colors.

As Luce describes his interviews with religious, political and business leaders throughout the country, it becomes clear that he must have struggled with this never-ending complexity while working as foreign correspondent. Clearly, it is easy to get lost in the details of Indian politics and society. And, at times, the book’s many, unrelated anecdotes make it seem that Luce loses his point while uncovering the tapestry that is India. But some themes do emerge through the intricate details. These themes revolve around India’s challenges.

For one, politics has become very fragmented as lower-caste parties learn to take part in the system. For decades, India was ruled by a single party—the Congress Party. Today politics are much more fragmented with 24 parties influencing decisions. The problem with the new system is that each lower-caste party represents—and rewards—only its own niche of supporters to the detriment of society as a whole.

This fragmentation leads to the second problem with India’s form of democracy: It is corrupt. It is a political patronage system of elected officials who provide favors to their own caste members. People are only loyal to their own caste. The problem of corruption is not only in the political system, it is a longstanding issue in the civil service that has thwarted effective governance.

Luce does a fine job of explaining the causes of corruption within India’s civil service. We see that these problems cannot be easily solved or reformed because they are so engrained in society. Corruption is not simply a governance issue, it is a societal problem. Bribes have become a natural part of the culture. The same could probably be said about many developing countries that lack transparent and accountable governing systems.

The cost of this political patronage and bureaucratic corruption is high. Essential services like education and health care, which would benefit the society as a whole, are neglected. Luce presents these problems along with others—the spread of AIDS, high illiteracy rates, low status of women, child labor, deficient infrastructure, and environmental degradation—in his last chapter and puts forward bullet-point-like solutions.

Many of his solutions seem thrown together and slightly shallow. He suggests, for instance, that India should expand its tourism industry, increase its manufacturing sector, and improve relations with its neighbors (most notably Pakistan but also with China, Bangladesh, and Nepal). These seem to take away from his larger point that India must complete its project of constitutional liberalism.

Assessing India’s Prospects

At times, Luce is too much of a generalist. His experiences and anecdotes seem to divert him from coming to a conclusion about India’s emerging role in the world. This appears to be the case with Luce’s reviews of Bollywood and his rather thorough analysis of a story about Krishna and Arjuna. These essays seem to wander. This effect of his reliance on anecdotes is that it creates a mishmash of ideas about India. Luce may have cast his net too wide, catching many minnows but few big fish.

Nonetheless, Luce is effective in raising significant issues that need solving if India is to become the great nation that many U.S. leaders hope it will become. India has many advantages working in its favor, including demography, an expanding IT sector that rewards merit, an independent judiciary, and its political freedoms of expression and press. Its economic growth path seems solid, largely because India competes on quality rather than just on price (like the China model uses).

Luce warns, however, that the greatest obstacle to India’s accession as a great power is complacency among its privileged class. He says India suffers from “a premature spirit of triumphalism, believing it is destined to achieve greatness in the twenty-first century without having to do very much to assist the process.” Luckily, it seems complacency can be solved.

Modernity and Tradition

It is interesting that since the book was first published in 2006, either Luce or his publisher dropped the word ‘Strange’ from the subtitle for the paperback. Perhaps the author had second thoughts about calling India’s rise “strange,” or maybe he tired of explaining word choice. (The British author’s use of the word in regards to India’s successes may have sounded too pejorative to his readers.) Whatever the case, the beginning phrase of “in spite of the gods” seems to effectively cover his point that India has developed as a modern democratic state despite the many obstacles.

India has proven its doubters wrong. As it embraces globalization, it is reshaping the idea of what modernity is. In India’s definition, a modern world carries on its traditions. As Luce says, India is “simply adding modernity to what it already has.”

The final anecdote reveals more the author’s take on India than any other. It’s about his encounter with a highly intelligent and curious ten year-old boy who succeeds in keeping the author awake with questions during an overnight train to Delhi. At the end of the journey, the author finds himself in a fit of laughter, which won’t subside. He is overcome by a sense of “humorous optimism” and concedes that India has a way of confounding. It is a reminder that as Luce’s FT colleague once said when he handed Luce the South Asia beat, “Remember, in India things are never as good or as bad as they seem.”