On 15 August this year, independent India reached the age of sixty.  So beyond the marvel of our survival as a democracy, what should we celebrate?

Should we celebrate the fact that in the sixtieth year of independence a woman President was sworn in by a Dalit Chief Justice while an outgoing Muslim President and a Sikh Prime Minister looked on?  Or should we mourn the fact that these sectional adjectives still have a place in our consciousness?

Should we rejoice in the 9 per cent economic growth, the waves that Indian capital is making in the world economy and the bestowal of what could be called candidate-membership in the G-8?  Or should we regret the millions who go to sleep hungry every night, the children denied their childhood and the women struggling in urban slums?

On this our shashtipurti , what is it that meets the high hopes that we had sixty years ago?

Ramu Guha, in his absorbing history of post-Independence India, sees our greatest achievement in the continued viability of a free polity in a country divided by language, religion, caste and class.  These divisions are the clue to our survival as a functioning democracy.  We have no natural majority that can impose its vision for India on everybody else, as the repeated failures of the Hindutva agenda show.

Yet other than language, where our polity found a middle way after the language agitation of 1965, the other sources of division in Indian society have not been overcome.  We have coped by developing a style of politics that creates space for regional, caste and religious identities.  Any group that feels aggrieved and sat upon by another, sooner or later forms a political party that enters the patronage games of coalition politics.  Dissent is accommodated with tokens where possible and power sharing where necessary. 

Nor is the constitutional process able to handle all dissent. Violence continues, between religious groups and between castes in rural areas.  Often politicians and police are complicit in this violence and remain unpunished.  Naxalism is rife in many tribal districts and the insurgencies in the North-East and Kashmir continue.

The roots of our problems lie in politics that emphasizes our differences and conflicts of interest rather than our shared needs.   Politics based on the recognition of the divisions in our society can ensure the continued survival of politics.  But does it offer us a shared vision of what we want to be?

There were times when these divisions were forgotten and a substantial part of the country shared in a common vision.  One can identify three moments when this happened and a possible fourth when it could have but did not.

The first was at the beginning when the Constituent Assembly was putting together the Constitution guided by Dr. Ambedkar, a man whose extraordinary contribution to modern India is not yet a full part of our folk memory.  This was the moment when the country shared the vision of a polity held together by civil liberty, federalism and a mild form of affirmative action.  The making of the Constitution of India, that is Bharat, was a vigorous political exercise and the sense of achievement and of hope was reflected in the high spirited celebrations on 26 January 1950 when the Constitution came into force.

The second moment of unified national purpose came in the mid-fifties after the country had overcome the traumas of partition and the struggle for power within the ruling Congress party was resolved with Pandit Nehru in full command. He, more than anyone else, captured the imagination of a generation of technologists, scientists and other professionals. His vision of self-reliant development, articulated in the Second Plan, became also an assertion of self-respect.  As young college students we saw ourselves in the persona that Nehru projected of a confident, modern, science-driven nationalist.

But this assertive era of self-reliance and vigorous non-alignment ran aground by the mid sixties with the Chinese war and the great droughts of 1965 and 1966.  Yet, the economic policies of this period, described by some researchers as “idiosyncratic”, are responsible for the breadth and depth of technical skills and manufacturing capabilities that underlies the boom that we see today, as is recognized by these very researchers.  

A third such moment came after the Bangladesh War and the emergence of Mrs. Indira Gandhi as the unchallenged leader. This was the moment when the slogan of Garibi Hatao added “equity” to the self-reliance mantra and a left-leaning intelligentia and the depressed masses came together behind Mrs. Gandhi.  But this moment was even shorter and ended with the oil crisis and the emergency, though it has left its legacy in a plethora of populist programmes.

A fourth aborted moment came when a reluctant Rajiv Gandhi won a huge mandate in 1984 and seemed to articulate a new vision of governance which sought to combine  a public responsibility for social welfare with a liberalized economic regime.  But Bofors, Mandal and the confused politics that followed put an end to that.  A moment when once again a compelling vision of our future could have helped us to transcend our divisions was lost.

The successful moments have been those that have mobilized the greater part of the educated classes behind a vision that reflected some core demands from the masses.  These are moments when India and Bharat came together.  And that is why the wave of reforms since 1991 does not qualify as a unifying moment because they still lack a base of mass support.

In this our sixtieth year we are on the cusp of another possible moment for forging a strong sense of national purpose.  This cannot come only from the pursuit of high growth.  It must involve a respect for constitutionalism, a tolerance of dissent and a cleaner politics that rekindles faith in democracy.  It needs inclusive growth (to use the Planning Commission’s current mantra) that delivers work, income and services to the poor. It also must be driven by a nationalism that takes pride in technological and scientific prowess.  Will we find a leader who can personify all of these dimensions of national purpose as Nehru once did for many of us?