By Ashok Nilakantan Ayers
If aliens landed in India tomorrow, they would conclude they had arrived in two countries occupying the same piece of real estate. In one India, a vegetable vendor accepts payment through a QR code, a farmer checks monsoon forecasts on his smartphone, a surgeon in Chennai remotely advises a patient in Arunachal Pradesh, and a software engineer writes artificial intelligence code for California before breakfast.
In the other India, the same engineer postpones his wedding because Mercury is in retrograde, his parents reject a prospective bride because she belongs to the wrong caste, the family priest determines the auspicious hour for signing a property agreement worth ₹10 crore, and relatives quietly ask whether the bride’s family has “made suitable arrangements.”
India has landed a spacecraft near the Moon’s south pole. It is still trying to land reason in parts of its own society. This is not hypocrisy. It is India’s unique business model—running the world’s most ambitious start-up while preserving one of civilization’s oldest operating systems.
The Miracle That Actually Happened. Credit where it is due. Few countries have reinvented themselves as dramatically as India since the economic reforms of 1991.The Licence Raj, once capable of requiring permission to manufacture almost anything, slowly gave way to markets. Foreign investment arrived. Indian companies ventured overseas. Millions escaped poverty. Airports replaced bus terminals masquerading as aviation hubs. Highways appeared where potholes once enjoyed protected status.
The digital revolution has been breathtaking. Aadhaar gave more than a billion people a digital identity. Jan Dhan brought hundreds of millions into the banking system. UPI achieved what many Western banking systems still struggle to do—making instant payments so effortless that buying a five-rupee cup of tea involves more technology than NASA deployed during Apollo.
India vaccinates hundreds of millions in months. Its pharmaceutical companies supply medicines to much of the developing world. Its engineers build software for Wall Street. Its start-ups dream in billions. Its GDP races ahead while much of the developed world worries about recession. Investors love the numbers. Sociologists remain less enthusiastic.
GDP Grows Faster than Mindsets Economists often assume prosperity modernises society. India has conducted a fascinating experiment proving that the relationship is rather more complicated. The country has enthusiastically embraced digital payments while retaining analogue prejudices. A man who trades cryptocurrency may refuse to share a meal with someone from another community.
Parents proudly send daughters to engineering colleges while quietly budgeting for dowry negotiations. Families celebrate women becoming airline captains yet expect them to seek permission before accepting a promotion.
Artificial intelligence has arrived. Natural intelligence is still negotiating with inherited customs. History Is Never History. Most nations remember history. India conducts regular conversations with it. Three centuries of Mughal rule. Nearly two centuries of British colonialism. Partition. Religious violence. Colonial extraction. These remain living political currencies.
No election is complete without someone reminding voters what happened several hundred years ago. History has become less a teacher than an election strategist. Britain left in 1947. The argument continues uninterrupted. The Mughals departed long before that. They remain astonishingly busy in modern political speeches. One begins to suspect that India’s past enjoys better job security than its future.
The Republic of Selective Modernity. India does not reject modernity. It customises it. Take marriage. Dating apps use sophisticated algorithms. Parents still reserve veto power. The wedding invitation arrives through WhatsApp. The horoscope arrives first. The honeymoon destination is chosen after comparing online reviews. The wedding date depends upon planetary alignment. Silicon Valley would call this hybrid technology. Anthropologists call it India.
The Government Keeps Building. Society Keeps Negotiating. Successive governments, irrespective of political colour, have launched programmes that would impress any development economist. Financial inclusion. Universal identity. Mass sanitation. Digital governance. Health insurance. Girls’ education. Housing. Rural employment. Skill development. Manufacturing incentives. Renewable energy. Semiconductor ambitions. Expressways. Bullet trains. Metro rail.
Every budget announces another leap into the future. Society often responds by asking whether the bride belongs to the correct caste. The Indian state resembles an energetic marathon runner dragging behind it a reluctant extended family insisting on carrying ancestral furniture.
The Curious Case of the Missing Social Reform. India’s Constitution is among the world’s most progressive. Untouchability is illegal. Dowry is illegal. Child marriage is illegal. Discrimination is illegal. Honour killings are murder. The law could scarcely be clearer.
Society occasionally behaves as though it misplaced the instruction manual. Governments pass legislation. Culture demands negotiation. No Parliament can legislate kindness. No ministry can budget for tolerance. No bureaucrat can issue a notification abolishing prejudice by the end of the financial year. Changing tax rates is easy. Changing dinner-table conversations is considerably harder.
The Gender Contradiction. India simultaneously produces female fighter pilots and female foeticide. Women lead banks, multinational corporations, scientific laboratories and space missions. Yet families in parts of the country still celebrate the birth of sons with greater enthusiasm than daughters.
Campaigns launched by the Modi government like Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao have improved awareness, school enrolment and public discussion. But government advertisements cannot compete overnight with centuries of inherited assumptions. Patriarchy, unlike inflation, does not respond quickly to policy intervention.
Nationalism: Pride or Therapy? India deserves confidence. Its economy is expanding. Its diplomatic influence has grown. Its military capability is strengthening. Its technology sector competes globally. Its entrepreneurs are admired worldwide.
Yet confidence occasionally slips into insecurity disguised as patriotism. The louder a civilisation repeatedly announces its greatness, the more observers wonder whom it is trying to convince. True confidence rarely requires a microphone.
India is often described as an emerging superpower. Perhaps it already is. Economically. Technologically. Geopolitically. The unanswered question is whether it wishes to become a social superpower as well. Economic reforms have largely succeeded because they changed systems. Social reforms remain incomplete because they require changing habits. One is achieved through legislation. The other demands introspection. The true contest in India is not between Left and Right, socialism and capitalism, or even secularism and nationalism. It is between the twenty-first century and the twelfth.
Every election, every social media controversy, every communal flashpoint, every honour killing, every dowry death, every interfaith marriage debated as though it were a constitutional crisis, is another skirmish in that larger battle.
India’s economy has already boarded the bullet train. Parts of its society are still waiting for the bullock cart. The tragedy is not that India has failed. The wonder is that it has succeeded so spectacularly despite carrying so much historical, cultural and emotional baggage.
If it can persuade its social institutions to travel at even half the speed of its entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists, the world’s fastest-growing major economy may finally become what it has always promised to be—not merely a rich nation, but a truly modern civilisation.
Until then, India will remain what it has always been: a country that files tax returns on a smartphone, consults artificial intelligence for business strategy, launches satellites into deep space—and still occasionally asks the family astrologer whether Tuesday is an auspicious day to begin the future. (IPA Service)
