How India beat the odds

At midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, a new, independent India was born on a subcontinent racked with violence, ripped apart by a bloody partition. It came into being as flames blazed across the land, as corpse-laden trains crossed the frontier to and from the just-created nation of Pakistan, and as weary Sikh, Hindu and Muslim refugees abandoned everything they had ever had in one part of the region to seek the hope of a new life in the other. Circumstances less propitious for a fledgling nation could scarcely have been imagined.

Yet six decades later, the India that emerged from the wreckage of the British Raj is the world's largest democracy, poised after years of rapid economic growth to take its place as one of the giants of the 21st century. An India whose very survival seemed in doubt during the conflagration of 1947 now offers striking lessons in democracy-building.

The odds against constructing a working democracy in India were great indeed. No other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages -- 35 languages spoken by more than a million people each -- the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices and the range of levels of economic development that India does.

In 1947, with as many as 1 million dead on both sides of the border, 13 million displaced, billions of rupees worth of property damaged and the wounds of sectarian violence still bleeding -- not to mention the challenges of administering a country newly freed from colonial rule, integrating the "princely states" into the new Indian union and reorganizing the divided armed forces -- India's leaders could have been forgiven if they had demanded dictatorial powers. Indeed, in many developing countries, nationalist leaders were to make precisely that argument, saying that only autocratic rule could weld a post-colonial shambles together into a modern state and claiming that the divisions that would be fanned by a raucous, multiethnic democracy would only impede development.

India went the other way: It made a strength out of its major weakness. To the American motto, "e pluribus unum," India countered, "e pluribus pluribum"! Instead of suppressing its diversity in the name of national unity, India acknowledged its pluralism in the way it arranged its own affairs: All groups, faiths, tastes and ideologies were to participate in the new system and contend for their place in the sun.