" ... India ... is undergoing an industrial revolution and abounds in human ingenuity. Here a literature and a written language have existed for two thousand five hundred years and some of the earliest discoveries in algebra, geometry, and astronomy were made. But each year India adds 18 million people to its population, the equivalent of two New Delhis, or more than one and a half Calcuttas. In the mid-1990s India had 900 million people. Optimists think India's population will level off at 1.7 billion before the end of the next century; pessimists think 2 billion."' As rising populations demand more services, but scarce resources provide fewer opportunities for government to increase its income, fiscal strain, debt, inflation, and corruption will rise. These trends undermine the effectiveness and legitimacy of the state which loses its ability to ... maintain social order,' writes University of California sociologist Jack Goldstone. Delhi, like Karachi, is an ominous example of these trends. At current rates, Delhi's population of 9 million will grow to 13.5 million by the end of the century [2000]. Shantytowns have overrun many of the city's graceful gardens and avenues. Obtaining water, cooking gas, or electricity is impossible without a bribe. Delhi's air is the most polluted of any city in the world. Breathing it is as dangerous as smoking twenty cigarettes a day. Traffic policemen wear surgical masks. This pollution will worsen dramatically as hundreds of thousands of fuel-spouting automobiles are added to the roads of India each year. Given that between 1989 and mid-1991 alone, 2,025 Indians were, in Washington Post correspondent Steve Coll's words, 'hacked, stabbed, burned, and shot to death in urban brawls' between Hindus and Moslems, it is apparent how surging populations, environmental degradation, and ethnic conflict appear to be related.
"India is a world of both cellular phones and primitive public sanitation. Not only is poverty destabilizing, but so is fast economic growth. The poor in India's cities are increasingly migrants from the villiages, often fleeing land scarcity and erosion, uprooted from many of their traditions. Though they have insufficient food in their bellies, they often have transistor radios and are surrounded by Western billboard advertisements. Like the inhabitants of the Chinese and Egyptian shantytowns that I had seen, with television antennas rising above their mudhuts, these poor migrants know temptation. They are less fatalistic, perhaps more prone to revolt than before. And their numbers are growing as fast as those of the middle class.
"The new rich represent something just as frightening, according to Time magazine correspondent Ned Desmond:
'India's [Hindu] middle class was no longer an elite, Westernized group, as it was at partition, but a highly acquisitive, anxious class whose members only vaguely comprehended the point of secularism while very sharply feeling a grievance against any group with a supposed special status - especially Muslims.'"Perhaps this is why Bombay, India's richest city, has seen the worst intercommunal violence. In a seminal article about India entitled 'Modern Hate: How ancient Animosites Get Invented,' Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph point out that the Hindu hooligans who, in December 1992 tore down a sixteenth-century mosque in the northeastern Indian town of Ayodha 'were wearing city clothes, shirts and trousers, not the kurta and dhotis of villagers or urban poor. They looked like clerks, boys from urban lower-middle-class families. They are the educated unemployed, not the poor and illiterate ... They are victims of moderization, seeking to victimize others - like 'pampered' Muslims,' since 'their [the Hindus'] expectations have run well ahead of available opportunities.'
"In such circumstances, communications technology fosters hate more than unity. Instead of a diverse and localized Hinduism, Indian television has promoted a standardized Hinduism, from which an anti-Islamic power bloc has emerged, much like the manipulation of ancient hatred by electronic media and videocassettes in Serbia after the Cold War. Cultural strife, as in the hotel nightclub in Samarkand, can be very modern.
"The victim of these developments has been the Indian state. Atul Kohli, a Princeton Universty professor, writes in Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability:
'This state is omnipresent, but feeble; it is highly centralized ... yet it seems powerless. It has the responsibility to foster the 'life-chances' of its many diverse social groups, but ... appears capable neither of dealing with the concerns of diverse interest groups nor of directing planned development. Its dominant institutions are in disarray, and the search for new legitimacy formulas goes on ... Whenever a community's [or a state's] social and political fiber begins breaking down in this manner, the criminal elements in the society are never far away.'"Of course, this sounds alot like Russia and a little like the U.S., which, far as it is from the social chaos of India, is also subject to these trends.
"As India's political parties are less able to deliver social spoils, they rely upon gangs to buy off, and intimidate, voters. As Hindu and Moslem groups, in addition to various Hindu castes, struggle for power outside the normal machinery of the state, they further invite the criminalization of politics, so India has become increasingly semianarchic. In Bihar, in the northeast, Kohli tells us that there are no longer elections without violence committed by 'private caste armies' against other castes, whose votes the caste armies consider detrimental to their economic interests. 'In addition, ordinary criminals, the dacoits, have entered the fray, further confusing the picture of who is killing whom and why.' With the police impotent, 'people's courts' have emerged, dispensing kangaroo justice that has ended with robbers dragged into forests to have their heads cut off. Needless to say, in Bihar agricultural production has consistently lagged behind population growth.
"The Indian central government - like Pakistan's - is weakening. Rather than one bold line dividing the subcontinent into two main parts, the future will likely see many fainter lines and smaller enclaves. Again the dictum: whatever can be managed locally, will be."