If there is a great State in the world that should not exist, it is India. It is not contempt, on the contrary: they had everything in their favor to become a failed Рand dangerous РState and are called to be the key piece in the struggle between the West and China, where we all play the cal̩s and the future
I am very afraid that we continue to perceive India through outdated and bona fide stereotypes, which can be summed up in the great phrase of the traveller-in-law: they are poor but happy…
The happy and spiritual India that so seduced the West began to fade from 1991, when they began to reform an autarkic economy, which could be nice to tourists and hippies – and their pockets – but which condemned them to underdevelopment.
Unlike its nemesis, the People’s Republic of China, India has taken off by being faithful to democratic principles and elections as a way of dealing with the governability of a palette of ethnicities, languages ​​and specificities. I am not saying that they are the perfect democracy – some massacres prevent that – but since their independence, in 1947, they have never opted for military juntas or covert dictatorships, quite a miracle in Asia, a continent very prone to authoritarianism.
India has been faithful to some wise founding fathers, like the United States, among whom stood out Jawaharlal Nehru, an aristocrat educated in England who, by the way, in Barcelona in 1938 was about to enlist in the International Brigades.
Nehru and the Congress Party – 51 years in power – set external neutrality as a postulate, maintained until today, when Narendra Modi’s BJP dominates, an “identitarian” and Hindu party that made people fear the worst for their phobia of Muslims , 15% of the population (one of its founders, L.K. Advani, asked me in Delhi to send him a book on … the expulsion of Muslims from Spain).
Forget the India of flowers and violets. It is an economic superpower on the verge of surpassing Germany and a democracy – despite the regression in freedom of the press – vital to containing China without getting out of hand. This is what this 21st century is about.
