The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India - the Emerging 21st-Century Power

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On August 15, 2007, independent India turned sixty years old. What does the twenty-first century hold for India? And why should the answer to this question matter?

India is, in the words of the British historian E. P. Thompson, “the most important country for the future of the world.” I would not presume to make such a judgment myself, but in my book India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond, I saw Indians standing at the intersection of four of the most important debates facing the world at the end of the twentieth century:

• The bread vs. freedom debate: Can democracy “deliver the goods” to alleviate desperate poverty, or does its inbuilt inefficiencies only impede rapid growth? Is the instability of political contention (and of makeshift coalitions) a luxury a developing country cannot afford? As today's young concentrate on making their bread, should they consider political freedom a dispensable distraction?

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