India’s example can enrich U.S. democracy - (The Columbia Daily Tribune, 01/09/2002)

-- By Dasu Krishnamoorty

Published Sunday, September 1, 2002

How marvelous or morbid is the world outside depends on what Walter Lippman called the pictures in our heads. It is the media that bring us these pictures. The media can bring into American homes pictures of a billion people in South Asia known as Indians, as distinct from Native Americans. They constitute the largest democracy on this planet.

What is India? In reply, this is what The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says: "The more time you spend in India the more you realise that this teeming, multiethnic, multi-religious, multilingual country is one of the world’s great wonders - a miracle with a message. And the message is that democracy matters."

Despite four wars - three with Pakistan and another with China - famines and ethnic strife, India, with an electorate of nearly 620 million, never skipped a national election. There are 18 major languages and six major religions. Yet India manages to preserve its unity in diversity.

Indian statistical data reveal marvel after marvel. India is the fourth-largest economy in the world, with a GDP of $2,375 billion. Read what the Economist says: "The average GDP growth rate of 5.4 per cent over the last five years has been among the fastest." This growth rate is more impressive than that of many developed countries. The fourth quarter of 2001 saw its GDP grow at a scorching 6.4 percent.

Today, there is hardly anything India cannot indigenously build: satellites, launching vehicles, submarines, combat aircraft etc. But its greatest achievement is its transformation from a food-importing economy to a food-exporting economy.

Contrary to what many outsiders think, India is not a country of Maharajahs, elephants and snakes alone. The Maharajahs are today part of the hoi polloi. You see the elephants only in the zoos or temples. You find the snakes in its tropical forests or in the basket of the snake charmer greeting US tourists as they step outside their hotel.

It is a country of contradictions and paradoxes, a mix of the modern and the ancient. There are scores of superspecialty medical centres that beckon Americans for treatment because they are affordable. A bypass surgery costs hardly $3,000. You also have the 5,000-year-old indigenous health system called Ayurveda, a big hit with both European and American health buffs.

There is illiteracy. But see how overinformed are the Indians. The country has 5,000 dailies, 16,000 periodicals and more than 6,000 fortnight lies in all Indian languages. Bringing news, sports and entertainment are the state-owned Doordarshan and a hundred private and foreign TV channels. More than a broadcasting organisation, the state-run All India Radio is part of India’s cultural history.

Indians make 800 films every year, more than Hollywood. The country is the world’s largest milk producer, producing 5 million tons more than America’s 75 million tons. If you visit India, you can join the 11 million passengers who ride daily in its 11,000 trains covering a track of 1 million kilometers.

There is poverty. But five Indians figure in this year’s Forbes list of billionaires. The nearly 250 million-strong Indian middle class is a magnet that attracts foreign investors. No other country in the subcontinent has a foreign exchange reserve of $60 billion. Despite the meltdown elsewhere, the rupee - India’s currency - continues to be stable, stock markets are normal and credit ratings are healthy.

Of greater interest and service to US society is the 1.7 million Indian community living in this country of opportunities. They are rich and highly educated and law-abiding. Not many Americans know that the median household income of Indian-Americans is 60 percent higher than the US national average. Every fourth Indian living in the United States has a doctoral degree.

India is also the largest supplier of software personnel to the Silicon Valley. Indians own 25 percent of the software companies in the United States. The collective market value of these companies is $235 billion. The brain chip for every Nokia cellphone is designed in Bangalore. Indian-Americans constitute almost a third of the NASA work force.

American campuses welcome graduates from India’s great Institutes of Technology while Wall Street absorbs nearly every graduate from Indian Institutes of Management, or IIMs. The Ahmedabad IIM is the toughest management school to get into, ahead even of Harvard Business School and Columbia University.

Popular among American cognoscenti are filmmakers such as Manoj Night Shyamalan, writers such as Ved Mehta, Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy and great music maestros such as sitarist Ravi Shankar, violinist L. Subramaniam and percussionist Zakir Husain. Well known in American IT circles are entrepreneurs such as Sabir Bhatia and Gururaj Deshpande.

India is not all flowers and no thorns. It has scores of unresolved problems. Among them are poverty, illiteracy, obscurantism, religious discord and terrorism. But to quote Friedman again, "Solution lies in democracy, stupid!" Its consistent economic growth is the result of its vibrant democracy even at the grass-roots level.

The Gujarat riots do not affect the constitutionally recognised secular character of the republic. India’s new president is the third Muslim to be elected head of state by what largely is a Hindu electorate. The heroes of all Indian films are mostly Muslims enjoying patronage of millions of Hindu viewers. Several Muslims, Sikhs and Christians captained India’s cricket, hockey and football teams. Muslims dominate India’s classical music. The list can go on.

It is time the American media bring pictures, both positive and negative, of India to their audiences. Interaction between the world’s two largest democracies will add to the wealth of American discourse. After all, a billion people are newsworthy. Aren’t they?