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British media wrestle with Indian reality

LONDON: Sixty years old? Or 60 years young? A super power of the future? Or in danger of falling by the wayside as the reality of the “other” India catches up?

British commentators on Wednesday wrestled with these questions as they tried to get their heads round the progress India has made since the end of the raj. While they were in no doubt that Pakistan had failed on almost all counts and had little to celebrate about on its 60th birthday, India proved trickier to categorise neatly as either a half-full or half-empty glass.

The Times found itself caught up between Confucius who, it recalled, described 60 years as the “age of wisdom” when all things could be seen clearly, and Picasso who believed that at 60 one could start to be truly young  212; “except that by then it was too late.” So, how did India measure up to these two contradictory definitions? The answer was: a bit of both. The country was certainly “determined to demonstrate that it is never too late to be young.”

“The nation has a dancing step, an élan that eluded independent India until well into the middle age,” the newspaper said in an editorial headed “After Midnight.”

But India was still carrying too much baggage from the past that was likely to hinder further progress. There was a “backlog of failures, a combination of too much government — all that red tape — and too little government.” Democracy, it said, was thriving in India but accountability was quite “another matter.”

The Guardian was even more forthright pointing out that India might be on the verge of becoming a great power “but at what cost?”

And the “cost” included giving up its self-styled claim to be a “moral superpower” when it embraced nuclear weapons in 1998, and then diluting its independent foreign policy by getting “chummy with America, cutting deals on nuclear policy and trade.” As for its dizzy economic growth it had left millions of poor cold. “In a bid for success and superpower status, India has thrown away some noble ideals without yet finding a replacement,” the newspaper argued.

In a scathing report from its India correspondent , The Daily Telegraph pointed to the gap between the hype over India’s economic performance and the depressing reality on the ground by retailing the poignant story of a girl w hose insistence on going to school so enraged her poverty-ridden mother that she beat her to death. What was the point of India’s great economic “miracle”? it asked.

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