Gurcharan Das recounts how he came by the name of his latest book, India Grows at Night . A Chinese friend who invests in India was complaining about the roads in rural Haryana. “How,” he asked, “did India ever become the world’s second fastest growing economy with infrastructure like this?” Das’ wry answer to that: “India grows at night while the Government sleeps.”

It was “too insulting” to put on the cover, says Das, explaining in the introduction that it’s a commonly voiced sentiment. Despite the State, and amazingly so, India has achieved this growth in the 20 years since liberalisation; the dignity it has afforded its people is a powerful effect. Just imagine how much better it would be if a strong, liberal State supported and eased things along — that’s the book’s premise.

It underlines that India has always thrived despite the State. Historically, it has been a strong society and a weak State, he argues, as dharma preceded the State and it was the duty of the head of State to protect dharma.

“My point is that India should grow during the day. So my story is the story of private success and public failure,” says Das, in Chennai recently for the launch of the book published by Penguin. His vision is for a State that rests on three pillars: A decisive, determined executive which can act when needed; this action should be bound by law; and accountability to the people. “It is not easy to combine these three because they often work against each other, as we have seen in Anna Hazare’s movement.

So why not a State that is hands-off, when the country is managing, one might ask. A State is necessary for economic success, which cannot be achieved without policies that support it, and to secure life and liberty.

While many institutions have decayed, there are still many, he says, that have done well for the people. “Take the electoral commission since T.N. Seshan. SEBI and RBI are good regulators. The first TRAI was a wonderful regulator. It made possible our telecom revolution, helped by Prime Minister Vajpayee, who played an important role in supporting it. Otherwise competition from the private players would have been killed,” explains Das.

But he is quick to clarify that by a strong State he’s not thinking of an autocratic government or even a benign one as in Singapore, which has high levels of governance but not a liberal society.

He refers to the examples of China and India. India’s history is one of competing kingdoms and political disunity, while China’s is that of empires. Even the four empires India had — Maurya, Gupta, Mughal and British — were weaker than the weakest Chinese empires. “In China the Emperor gave the law and then he interpreted the law. In India, dharma was superior to the king and the job of the king was to uphold dharma for the benefit of the people. The interpreter of dharma was not the king like in China, it was the Brahmin. So very early on, even before Maghada, the first kingdom which was born in 500-600 BC, you had created a liberal division of powers, which had weakened the State.”

So, a Chinese, he emphasises, is defined by the State. The oppression in India never came from the State as in China, but from society and its class divisions. Drawing an analogy, he says China is like a ‘melting pot’, a ‘hot soup’; and India is like a ‘salad’, in which you can see each identity clearly. “But there is a ‘salad-dressing’, which is the common culture that binds India together.”

Das places much hope in the new middle-class. It has pulled itself up by the bootstraps, not waited for NREGA jobs and, unlike the older middle-class, its mind is de-colonised, he says. While he doesn’t claim his book is about solutions, he does believe the answer lies in a bottom-up approach to governance and the need for a political party of aspiration — a secular, liberal one that is single-mindedly focused on reform. Another thing people could do is try and fight corruption in their own neighbourhood, “just one hour a week”.

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