I have known Kiran Karnik since he led NASSCOM and I worked at Microsoft, and over a career spanning ISRO, media, technology and public policy he has learned to read a country by connecting the dots in sharp and counterintuitive ways. When he joined me on Network Capital to discuss his new book, his fifth in about a decade, I expected a conversation about growth, AI and governance. It ended up being about the heart and soul of India as it takes steps towards becoming a (hopefully) kind and pluralistic superpower.
In his lifetime India has “telescoped not just decades but centuries”. Growth has climbed from the old rate of two and a half to 3% a year to above 7% after the reforms of 1991 and the early 2000s. Macroeconomic stability, rising education and the global reach of Indian music, films, yoga and cuisines all count in India’s favour. Despite the progress, India remains a very poor country, with poverty and illiteracy still large in absolute numbers. His deeper concerns about the last decade and a half lie in the social sphere. What India needs now, he said, is social stability, a country that works together like a team.
Insecurity at the centre
In 1947, British-ruled provinces and princely states run by maharajas merged into a single country. India had long been one civilisation governed in pieces, and the freedom fighters believed that the lack of unity had let invaders in. Thus, the case for a centralized form of governance made sense to them.
The Constitution resisted that pull. Kiran credits its framers with the foresight to give real space to the states, and he recalls theamendments in the 1980s that pushed power further down to municipal corporations and panchayats. Practice drifted back towards the centre. Long spells of one-party rule in Delhi, often matched by the same party in the states, built a party hierarchy in which the national leader had a lot more power than any chief minister.
A country that changes “practically every 100 kilometres”, in its agriculture, climate, language, food and dress, pays a price for governing through a homogenous template. Applying what worked in one place to the whole country is “neither sensible nor wise”, in Kiran’s words. He sees the present government as more centralised still, run on a command-and-control model like a Jack Welch-era company where the CEO decided everything. He argues that a modern leader should work like the conductor of an orchestra, drawing together musicians who each master their own instrument. China, for all its central power, gives regions and cities wide authority, and American states even run their own voting systems.
India has the systems in place but perhaps it needs to pay more attention to put them to practice.
Insecurity in the self
The same fear operates inside individuals. I asked Kiran why, in an age of global connection, people cling ever harder to caste, religion or region. Kiran’s answer was that people are “fearful of losing identity altogether”, so they grab something to hold. That can mean building a healthy community. It can also mean joining a narrow group or a cult, some harmless and some extreme, because it offers meaning, passion and belonging.
Work once supplied much of that belonging. Kiran links the rise of identity politics to its erosion, as more people move from gig to gig and collaborate with teams thousands of miles away through a screen.
AI threatens to deepen the problem. Kiran expects a short-term loss of many jobs, which expansion and lower prices will only partly offset. He sees three pressures ahead, in the need for retraining on a vast scale, a period in which total jobs fall, and the steady spread of gig work from delivery riders to senior experts. When he asks students whether they would like a permanent vacation, they hesitate. “You need purpose, and purpose often comes from jobs,” he said.
Material insecurity sharpens all of this. Most Indian workers have no health cover, pension or gratuity. Kiran defends a safety net through government provision, from free food for 800 million people to cash transfers to women, while questioning some of the numbers and objecting when money goes on mixers and television sets in place of schools and clinics. For the age of AI he calls for a new social contract, in the spirit of a universal basic income, guaranteeing health, education and housing to as many citizens as possible. His remedy for the psychological side is to help people hold several identities at once. Those overlapping identities give a person wholeness and a link to others, while a single identity hardens into “me and my group” against “the other”. He wants identities that stay “loose and fluid”. The alternative, in his view, is estrangement and loneliness, which he sees in the depression, drug use and high suicide rates of parts of the West, including the Scandinavian countries so often held up as models.
Insecurity in the showroom
Kiran’s account of Tata’s Nano shows insecurity at work in the market. The car was an engineering feat, built to a target price of 100,000 rupees that forced hard choices on weight, materials and efficiency. It came in a little above that price, which Kiran considers a respectable result. Others blame its failure on a weak ecosystem, poor maintenance or bad timing. His own reading is that the marketing sold it as a cheap, affordable car to a country in the aspirational surge that followed liberalisation. A family moving up from a scooter wanted a car for its utility and, just as much, for the status of owning one. “Nobody who wants status wants a cheap product,” he said.
The strength of a mixture
If insecurity pushes towards one centre, one identity and one way of showing worth, Kiran’s alternative is a country that stays plural. He borrows a distinction from chemistry. The American melting pot imagined a compound, in which people from everywhere went in and a single product called an American came out at the end of the line. That never really happened, which he considers fortunate for the US. Multiculturalism works like a mixture, where every part keeps its identity. As a young man in the early years of independence, Kiran himself believed India had to forge a “true Indian” to survive. He now argues there is no single Indian culture, only many, and that standardising them leads towards “one country, one language, one religion”, theocracy and dogma.
Plurality also pays in innovation, and Kiran points to diverse states like California, which created their diversity through immigration and became hotbeds of innovation. India already has diversity in abundance. People used to difference are unsurprised when others think differently, and that freedom is what innovation needs.
Dissent as a correction mechanism
A plural society also needs room for criticism. He distrusts grand solutions. “There are no magic wands,” he told me. What matters is a process that corrects itself as it goes, which he likens to a servo system. Most systems fail because they reach an answer, implement it and get stuck with it. In a society, the servo is open debate. Kiran believes people should speak out, fairly and without personal attacks, because the fear of speaking up feeds on itself. An atmosphere of hesitation grows when people stay silent.
The need for correction will only grow, because the ground keeps shifting. Kiran traced how the Indian family moved from the joint household to the nuclear one, then back to a joint family in a new form, with grandparents moving in to help and the younger generation in charge. Now couples are having one child or none, more people live alone, and he fears a drift towards a “me, myself” world. In ten or twenty years he expects radical shifts, perhaps even people living with robots as partners. No single template can anticipate changes like these, and only a society that keeps testing its ideas can adapt to them.
That is why the book poses questions without offering a playbook. Kiran sketches dystopian and hopeful scenarios and leaves readers to make up their own minds. His parting request was that readers argue with him, tell him where he is wrong and tell their friends the same. “Debate, discuss, dissent, dialogue,” he said, within bounds and without throwing stones, because the right to disagree “is a must, and we need it very badly around the world.” A country secure enough to hear that, and to correct itself in response, is the one that will see the dawn Kiran still expects.