India as "Great Nation:" revising the project of democracy

"India is an idea whose time has come," declared Indian Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh recently. The lofty statement, tailor-made for diplomatic
conference rooms, suggests that India has emerged as a mature democracy and
major nation state on the global stage. It also snarls with a hidden barb for
Pakistan - India's erstwhile rival that has fallen on hard times.
   Most crucially, it trumpets the status of a US protégé.  Since the fall of the
Soviet Union in the late 1980s, India  has progressively moved into the US
orbit. With 9/11, the strategic objectives of India, Israel, and the United States
have steadily merged, leading to the emergence of a de facto triumvirate. In
diplomatic rhetoric, US-India relations are called the alliance of the two
democracies - suggesting a kind of equivalence between the two societies'
institutional framework. In a recent  speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center,
Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao attributed India's political traditions to
a US fountainhead.
   "It was therefore no accident that the Constitution that India adopted in 1950
was also inspired in great measure by the ideals of freedom, equality and
justice that formed the bedrock of  the United States Constitution," she
declared. And like the script for a Hollywood/Bollywood romantic comedy,
union of the two states was deferred by various machinations and
misunderstandings. "Yet, for several decades after our independence, relations
between our two democracies failed to realize their potential because of
estrangements derived from the atmosphere of the Cold War and its
manifestations in our region," said Ms. Rao.
   This bit of political amnesia is characteristic of India's modern statecraft.
Fantastically, these words wipe out the long struggle against British
colonialism that gave birth to both India and Pakistan. The statement recasts
the Indian state as a replication of the American successor to British empire,
blithely ignoring the bloodbaths that accompanied the struggle to boot the
British out of the subcontinent.
   This brings us to the question, what kind of idea is India? Or rather, whose
idea is it? From this perspective, Ms. Rao's obsequiousness is quite revelatory.
Post-Cold War India and its transformation has been a test case of US
democracy - the 200-year old ideology with all its masks, pretensions, and
theatricalities. As India follows the gym routine of the prevailing Mr. Universe
- picture here a balding, rheumatoid-stricken Uncle Sam with
Schwarzenegger-esque muscles, posing in a Speedo - we are given a
fascinating window into the warts and victories of the American democratic
project.
   There is a sacred bond at the heart of the American project - the tie uniting
capitalism and democracy is as intrinsic as that uniting hydrogen and oxygen
in H2O. The dream of universal suffrage serves to mask one incontrovertible
fact - the modern state is designed to protect the wealthy and guarantee the
flow of resources to a gold-plated elite class. As Adam Smith noted in The
Wealth of Nations, "Civil government, so far it is instituted for the security of