A Tale of Two Indias

Two pieces on India point up the place's contradictions in an unusually sharp way.

The Washington Post highlights the positive, continuing an excellent series highlighting the changes that India's modernization is bringing. Economic growth is opening up new career options and life choices for India's new middle class and helping to relieve centuries-old patterns of discrimination:

...new jobs are especially empowering to India's middle- and working-class women. By becoming economically independent, they are delaying marriage, a trend that is slowly changing the male-dominated power dynamic in South Asia.

Pankaj Mishra, writing at the Guardian, looks instead at a string of terrorist attacks, several active insurgencies, and a teeming, desperately poor underclass of Muslims:

The Indian elite's obsession with the "foreign hand" obscures the fact that the roots of some of the violence lie in the previous two decades of traumatic political and economic change, particularly the rise of Hindu nationalism, and the related growth of ruthlessness towards those left behind by India's expanding economy.

In 2006 a commission appointed by the government revealed that Muslims in India are worse educated and less likely to find employment than low-caste Hindus. Muslim isolation and despair is compounded by what B Raman, a hawkish security analyst, was moved after the most recent attacks to describe as the "inherent unfairness of the Indian criminal justice system".

...

It is now clear that a tiny but militantly disaffected minority of Indian Muslims has begun to heed the international pied pipers of jihad. Furthermore, there is no effective defence against their malevolence.

Which picture is accurate? Is India a shining example of a stable, modernizing democracy, or a hotbed of Muslim anger? The easy answer is to say they're both true and move on. But something more interesting seems to be going on.

Why is India able to stay stable, and keep growing, in the face of repeated terrorist attacks? How has this massive, diverse country avoided succumbing to strike out at its neighbors, or institute a harsh security crackdown, or just fall apart at the seems?

Maybe the growth and dynamism have something to do with India's ability to cope. New avenues of possibility are opening up for millions in the cities. Economic and cultural opportunities have made for a confident government and middle class. Meanwhile, Indian democracy - which is usually described as "unruly" or worse - is not pretty to watch, but is flexible enough to handle threats that would probably topple most other government systems into anarchy or dictatorship.

The threat, and reality, of terrorism and factionalism have been enough to spoil economies and societies in Pakistan, most of the Middle East, and vast swathes of Africa. India keeps plugging along though, and probably will for the foreseeable future. More than established democracies in the West, India may hold lessons for emerging democracies and markets in the rest of world.