Superfast ultimate nation: Modern India

Adam Roberts spent five years travelling from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, Bengal to Gujarat and encountered power brokers, multi-billionaires farmers, tech innovators, prime ministers, travelling salesmen, pilgrims from the world’s largest democracy and he asked them how India can become a truly great economic power, more influential abroad and stable at home.

Through his book he examines the problem and promises of fast-growing India to reveal how it will one day reach its full potential and become a truly powerful nation.

By early 1990s, India began opening up its socialist-style economy, so that India could be a rising Asian superpower. India’s ability to realise its grand aspirations will depend on how well policy makers can tackle four big challenges, for a country in the past which threw out IBM and Coca Cola in the 70s, and where India’ superfast trains can achieve only 50 miles an hour. Accelerated economic growth, cleaning up politics and improving governance, managing relations with Pakistan, China and the US and maintain social peace in diverse, multi-faith society.

According to Roberts Economically India lags behind China, with far more underweight babies and fewer forklifts. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hopes to catch up through manufacturing but face stiff opposition from growing automation and tough global trade conditions.

However, India will still get richer and lift more people out of poverty even if it cannot quite sustain the long-term high rate of growth and job creation, which China managed in the late twentieth century.

Indian voters politically are more demanding from their leaders than in the past. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s 2014 election victory gave politicians a clear message” If you fail to deliver on promises of jobs, rising incomes and cleaner politics then voter will reject you too.”

China has made economic and political inroads in Sri Lanka and Nepal, which India considers their natural influence. Robert says “ India will also, gradually, begin to match greater diplomatic and military prowess to its rising economic clout.”

Since Independence in 1947, India’s ruler have embraced secular state in a land of diverse and coexisting faiths. But Modi’s fierce determination to remain in office, will push him to resort to use religious division to unite Hindu voters behind him, if economy did not deliver promised returns. With Modi and his allies resorting to a more exclusionary nationalism a “Hindu Nation” in which the religious sentiments of the majority are enshrined in the state policy.

Roberts visited Gujarat to reconstruct what really happened during the 2002 Gujarat riots when several people were killed in an outpouring of violence while Modi was the chief minister.

Superfast Primetime Ultimate Nation’s vivid storytelling and its study of fast-changing country in transition, optimistic about its prospects, reveals an insight of its full potential can be realised to become a truly powerful nation.

Superfast Primetime Ultimate Nation: The Relentless Invention of Modern India by Adam Roberts, Profile £16.99, Public Affairs $28, 338 pages.