Read Online On the Grand Trunk Road by Steve Coll - Free Book Online

Punjab—not to mention dozens of other South Asian separatist communities—aspire to break free from, though no doubt they would replicate many of its features if they did. It is what Sri Lankan revolutionaries wish to overthrow, what Indian Hindu revivalists wish to reinvent, what Pakistani Muslim radicals wish to replace with an Islamic theocracy. Indeed, what matters most about the state in South Asia these days is that it is under assault and looking none too stalwart—badly indebted, over-extended, systematically abused, demonstrably unjust and inequitable, threatening at times to fall down of its own weight.
     
    As the mild-mannered, bookish cousin of the domineering Bolshevik state, the Nehruvian state has been deeply unnerved by its relative’s sudden and spectacular death—and just when cousin Bolshevik appeared to be striding along with such vim and vigor. Yet the death of bolshevism has had a salutary effect on the subcontinent. Stimulated by fears of mortality and revolution, the Nehruvian state’s various keepers have undertaken late-in-life fitness regimens, slimming down and toughening up in reluctant recognition that self-discipline may be necessary to avoid their cousin’s cataclysmic end. Whether or to what degree the region’s elites can succeed with this reform, economically and politically, is an overarching question about South Asia’s future.
     

    How the South Asian state formed, swelled, creaked, split, recovered, and fought to protect itself from challengers in the four decades after 1947 is a story too long and complex to be recounted fully here. In the present debate over what to do about its decrepit condition, however, one important theme concerns historiography. There are two basic schools of thought about the state’s rise and decline. One holds that the Nehruvian ideal was sound, inspired, humane, and appropriate for its time, and therefore any adjustment ought to be a matter of tinkering and adaptation to changed circumstances. This is what most members of the South Asian elites believe. The opposing view, calibrated in different ways by various dissenters, is that the state was fundamentally flawed and unjust in the first place, and that saving it will require radical, even revolutionary measures.
     
    Jawaharlal Nehru would be appalled to hear this discussion. An upper-caste lawyer whose ancestors emigrated from Kashmir and settled in the Gangetic heartland along the Grand Trunk Road, Nehru helped for three decades to lead the independence-seeking Indian National Congress, predecessor of the Congress Party. He then served continuously as prime minister of independent India for seventeen years, longer than any other national leader in modern South Asian history. The state that bears his name—best thought of as an ideological model, rather than a particular government at a particular time—took form during the 1950s and early 1960s, the coldest years of the cold war. Like Egypt’s Nasser, Nehru saw himself as a historic cold war statesman treading a neutralist, balancing “middle way” between communism and capitalism. In international affairs, his neutrality was less consequential than he believed. But in domestic affairs his outlook shaped the lives of many millions.
     
    His model is a prescription for constitutional democracy, social advancement, and economic growth for poor, exploited, preindustrial societies. Its principles include federalism, socialism, parliamentary democracy, ethnic and linguistic pluralism, and rapid industrialization to be led by a strong central government. In arguing that extensive government planning was essential to take a backward society like India’s rapidly into the industrial twentieth century, Nehru borrowed from Stalin. He even appropriated Stalin’s impressive-sounding idea of government-led five-year plans, the first of which Nehru announced for India in 1951. Unlike Stalin, Nehru did not seek to achieve industrialization and