The failure of political imagination is what is most distressing about today's India. It is a failure of both the left and the right, at the local as well as the global arena, and it is a failing all the more ironic because it comes hidden behind the celebration of Indian democracy. Perhaps the tragedy actually begins there…
…At one time, politics was one of the most open of India's clubs—more accessible than the bureaucracy, the educational system, or even the market. Politics allowed new groups and new imaginations to enact their aspirations in a hopeful landscape. This same political domain had a tremendous ability to absorb disorder, confident that disorder was the beginning of a new equilibrium. In fact, the cycle from disorder to new order added to the democratic imagination, which was how a Laldenga of the Mizo underground could surface as a chief minister through a democratic electoral process.
Indeed, the politics of those initial years turned the American journalist Selig Harrison and his book India, the Most Dangerous Decades (1960) into laughing stocks. Harrison had failed to realise that the new entrants and their demands did not constitute noise, or even unwelcome music. Rather, they were voices demanding representation in the festival of politics. Instead of a Cartesian exercise, a binary of either-ors, Indian politics as represented then by the Congress party was a mosaic of adjustable pieces. Besides, in the early days, identity was not a problem in India. One could live in a forest of individualities and still believe in the garden of citizenship. There was also an overall consensus about nation, state, unity, socialism, rights, and even non-alignment.
Back then, Indians would take pride in defence minister Krishna Menon's performance at the United Nations and the cosmopolitan confidence he exuded. We also knew he was the founder of the Penguin series. One remembers Menon telling an American, "Don't tell me about my English. I learnt it, you just picked it up." The celebration was short-lived, however, and soon enough the wrapping of confidence broke. This happened for several reasons.