Spreading the dreams of that sublime midnight

This week, therefore, we mark not just the anniversary of a sublime midnight in 1947. We also bask in the future of an India that towers in the world: the vision, already palpable at freedom time, of a nation healing the fractures of class, caste, community and creed and undertaking, by democratic means, the project of its own development: the dream of India as a great nation in a good world.

It is a fitting time, then, to ask what it means to be a great nation. Throughout history, good nations have become great not just by growing quickly and governing well. They have also had something new to say about our universal condition: a vision of human destiny that is their civilisational fingerprint. Great nations hold precepts whose logic extends beyond their national frontiers. Ancient Rome stood for democratic participation. The French preached equality and religious freedom. The Americans are soldiers for individual liberty. As India emerges as a great nation, what will be its civilisational fingerprint?

We know already that India won’t aspire, as other nations have, to re-engineer the world through force. But India’s founding narrative still might sway the world. In a world rife with poverty and fractiousness, India’s founding tale holds an answer to how the earth’s wretched might trade their skirmishes for the shared pursuit of better lives. Against the foil of the Iraqs, Afghanistans, and Yugoslavias—nations whose sub-nations remain in cold war—1947 shows how a transcendent nation can bridge ancient chasms. At a time of widening regional integration, India teaches that political allegiance can begin with a statesman’s dream.

Fifty-seven years ago, independent India was born on a hopeful wager. To the founding generation, difference was the pre-eminent fact about Indian society. Thus, the twin projects of state-building and economic development were imagined as massive, soul-stirring adventures that would excite imaginations and enlist the enthusiasms of hundreds of interminably different communities. The wager was deeply pragmatic. The new republic governed one of the most diverse societies on earth. Thus, it had to create an attachment to Indian development that would harmonise, but never destroy, the cacophony of other attachments. Rather than select this or that meaning of Indianness, Nehru asked Indians to worship together at the temple of the factory, a universal symbol of uplift.

That vision is distinctively Indian, a solution crafted to the idiosyncrasies of a particular time and place. But in its serene faith in pluralism, India’s founding narrative has much to tell the world.

To rebuilding nations in waiting, like Iraq and the Balkan states, India speaks a lesson of how to channel the shared exhilaration of state-building to drown out the parochialisms of a bygone age.

To integrating regions, like the European Union, India speaks of how to invent an emotionally persuasive identity grounded in the embrace of narrower identities. India never chose between Indiannesses, and so it was pluralism and tolerance that became sinews of a new Indian identity.

To those wary of globalisation eroding rooted identities, India suggests the possibility of cultural exchange without homogenisation. Indeed, few countries have so rapidly centralised while retaining such vigorous sub-identities.

There is, in sum, an Indian founding narrative to rank with those of the world’s great nations. This week, as we mark the anniversary of Indian independence at home, let us hope that the example of Indian independence brings light to millions past our shores. The sublime midnight is also theirs.

A former reporter for The New York Times, the writer is a management consultant