GMF - The German Marshall Fund of the United States - Strengthening Transatlantic Cooperation

What makes India not only culturally, but politically so fascinating? With 1.1 billion inhabitants, India is not only the most populous democracy worldwide, but a continent of antipodes: 35 main languages with their own grammar and sometimes characters next to uncountable dialects, nearly no set of beliefs which does not exist, more than 100 ethnic groups are contained within the nation of India. The Indian democracy looks back on a tradition of centuries, in which the power of the argument was worth more than the argument of power. Despite the suppression of democratic tradition and exploitation during the centuries-long period of British colonial rule, this culture of the "argumentative India" (Amartya Sen) was so engrained, that India was able to revert to it after gaining its autonomy in 1947. The voting out of Indira Gandhi during the elections for congress in 1977, after she had enforced censorship of the press and the arrest of senior opposition leaders via emergency acts, proves how deeply democracy is rooted on the basis of a non-Western tradition.

Despite the religious tension and occasional violent outbreaks between the Hindi-majority and the Muslim-minority, India has a remarkably succesful history of integration: There are 135 m Muslims living in India, the most in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan. The president as well as India's richest man, the software-entrepeneur Azim Premji, and a number of sport- and filmstars are Muslim. People are proud of the Muslim minority. Even at first signs of home-made Muslim extremism, it is widely acknowledged that there is no connection to international terrorism and Al Kaida.

For nearly 45 years a socialist economy which was completely closed to world markets and foreign investment, a close relationship to China and the claim to represent the "Third World" in terms of foreign politics, formed the country's picture. Exactly that led to the complete bankruptcy of the Indian state in 1991. Furthermore the Sovjet Union broke apart - two deep cuts, whose conjunction proved to be a stroke of luck for India.

The new prime minister of the Congress Party, Narasimha Rao, and the economist Manmohan Sing as new finance minister induced revolutionary economic reforms: the Indian market was opened up to foreign capital, sectors of the state-owned economy were privatised, the convertability of the rupee installed. The economic reforms, that last until today, were not implemented in a hard crash-course, like at the same time in Russia, but gently rather. Otherwise political survival in a democracy would have been at risk on the domestic front. Today, the Indian economy is achieving growth rates of nearly 8 percent and is further catching up. China's growth comes primarily frome the manufacturing industry, whereas India's lies in the service industry, which is more intensive in regard to education but generates a higher added value. Plus, the large scale restructuring of the state-owned banking-system and privatisation of important state-owned industries still lies ahead of China.

With the events of 1991 India's foreign policy changed as well. The anti-Western impulses of the former Indian foreign policy were dropped for the benefit of a policy, that orientates it anew in every direction. It's relationship to neighbours and former rivals Pakistan and China have normalised. In regard to both the decades-lasting quarrels with China on their common border and the dispute with Pakistan on the Indian provinces Kashmir and Jammu, serious negotiations have been started. In July 2005 India reached an agreement with the US that allowed it to develop nuclear weapons.

India understands its worldwide political responsibility for a constructive contribution to a new global order in the 21^st century. India as an economical partner is of growing relevance to the EU - India as the only non-Western democracy in the foreign political game of the mighty maybe even more so in the long run.