Progress Without Change?

The India Development Story: Text of my Anil Dharker Annual Memorial Lecture

It is an absolute privilege being here on this platform and addressing such an august audience. What makes it doubly special is the fact that is in honour of Anil Dharker, one of India’s finest minds, and someone who was a champion of the idea of independent-minded enquiry. 

I want to talk today about Brand India and its future. Now, that phrase Brand India usually brings to mind India’s image in the outside world—how we are perceived by investors, journalists, the diaspora, or tourists. It is an idea that we are quite invested in. 

And often, that image can often provoke anxiety. Every time something goes wrong in India, we ask: what will this mean for Brand India? Have we slipped in the world’s estimation? Every time a major Western publication carries a negative article, there is outrage and a defiant assertion that their opinion does not matter, while revealing just how much it does.

The irony is that while Brand India is obsessed with its reflection in the world’s mirror, it rarely pauses to as what it looks like to itself.

For a brand is not merely what the world sees. Good or bad. Biased or Fair.

A brand, stripped of all marketing jargon, is simply a pattern of expectations. It is a system of meaning that coheres around a core idea. It is formed through actions, big and small, voluntary and involuntary. We don’t decide what our brand is—it is inferred from how we act over a period of time. Brands themselves have limited control over how they are received. For country brands, where the sources of brand meaning are so many, it is even more difficult to control the narrative.

So, what does India mean to us? What is the lived experience of India? What patterns of meaning emerge from its choices, its instincts, its actions? 

Take Gandhi as an example—not as a historical figure, but as a brand. We don’t remember him for a single act, but for a patterned way of being. His use of satyagraha, an extraordinary innovation, what Richard Lannoy called weakness made perfect, the Dandi March, a cinematic act of non-violence, the use of the fasts, a mode of self-denial, as a political instrument, his insistence on cleaning toilets, his unsettling experiments with truth, and his claim that his life was his message—these form a coherent idea. That of discovering extraordinary strength through the rigorous moral disciplining of the self. 

The question, of course, is—can a country as vast, diverse, and layered as India ever be described through a single brand idea? Surely, the experience of India for a Dalit woman weaver in Odisha is different from that of a stockbroker in Mumbai or a techie in Bengaluru. As it for a faceless unemployed you who finds a sense of identity and purpose as a gau rakshak in Gwalior and a Muslim family whose house has been bulldozed in UP. Any singular description of India will necessary be incomplete or distorted or both.

 

And yet, there still seems to be-  a flicker of something we can loosely call Indianness that seems to unite this very diversity. At the structural level, there seems to be a common way of dealing with our reality, with the way priorities are accorded and choices are made. 

So what is Brand India at its heart?

For years we have argued that the idea of India lies in its ability to live with contradictions, to find a way that accommodates rather than resolves differences. Where coexistence of innumerable realities has become a way of life.

Today, that feels a little hollow. For we seem to have found a capacity to emphasise differences and to consciously and deliberately deepen divides in order to extract political gain. Social media is full of many axes of division, outrage and hate- whether the issue is political, religious or even involves the choice of your favourite cricketers. This is no longer the Argumentative Indian but the Perpetually Outraged one.

So what then can define Brand India today?

To my mind, what lies at the heart of Brand India is our desire for progress without change.

Or to put it more precisely the search for outward advancement without fundamental internal transformation.

The sensation of motion without dislocation.

India deals with the new in a very particular way. The new in India is not allowed to enter unhindered. Modernity in India has always been a form of negotiated tradition. The new never replaces the old; the old expands to accommodate it.

The arranged marriage becomes the arranged love marriage. Or even the love arranged marriage, where the couple falls in love, and then parents take over and arrange everything thereafter.

Or take an electric ‘akhand’ diya that keeps up the ritual while sacrificing its most important element. As long as the bulb looks like a wick, everyone is happy.

Bhajans are sung to the tune of Hindi films songs that might to the purist seem wholly inappropriate, but we bash on regardless- Mata ke dil mein kya hai sung to the tune of ChoIi Ke Peechhe kya hai. 

Interestingly, in some parts of India we came across the phenomenon of Bhai friends- quasi boyfriends who serve as defanged lifestyle accessories -friends without benefits!

The Indian way is to hollow out both tradition and modernity. If the electric diya empties ritual of its meaning, the Arranged Love Marriage takes a modern institution and makes it part of tradition. 

 

Hybrid solutions abound- ideas that mash up the old and the new with an underlying intent- contriving to maintain a sense of continuity. To deny the idea of rupture and dislocation.

This ability gives the culture great stability. We want a new lifestyle, but not a new way of life. We are able to guard against external influences which can be overwhelming, while not rejecting them. That is why we can never talk of modernising India without simultaneously talking of Indianising modernity.

At the same time, one must note that this is essentially a defensive posture developed by a culture to resist change or more accurately to make adoption of change extremely selective and contingent upon its ability to become a version of the past.

This means that structural change is very difficult in India. A new India looks vastly different but, in many ways, it feels the same.

Now, there is no denying that a lot has changed in India. Indeed, at one level, the India of today is unrecognisable from the one I grew up in. The roads, the gleaming airports, the malls, UPI and the ease of financial transactions, the ability to consume at will are all signs of a new India.

Even socially, the new self-confidence we see in women, the throbbing energy of small-town India, the blossoming of creative energy among the young, all point to significant change. There is desire for self improvement, an aspiration to do a lot of more and many more avenues are open for the young. The mobile has been a tool of empowerment; a personalised weapon that reminds us every minute that we are individuals and that we share a unique and two-way relationship with the outside world.

So how fair is it to argue that India wants progress without change?

It is true that the airport is dazzling, but step outside and chaos can still rule. T1 in Mumbai, is a good example. The roads are new as are the potholes that spring up on the heels of the inauguration. The cities are dwarfed by skyscrapers which in turn are inundated by floods the moment it rains even a little. I live in Gurgaon, the so-called Millennial City where rain that would be considered a light drizzle in Mumbai gets our cars floating. Every winter, the air turns poisonous, but nothing changes.

And less said about our institutions the better. Their decline has been steady for decades, but in recent years the process has accelerated. The very instruments meant to deliver modern governance have been absorbed into the logic of society. The police act more as brokers of local disputes than representatives of law. The Parliament is dysfunctional, having been reduced a theatre of insincerity. Courts increasingly resemble panchayats, dispensing advice in the name of community sentiment rather than jurisprudence. The media, once an observer-critic, now act as demented stormtroopers for the powerful. Even the Election Commission, once the safeguarder of democracy, now faces a real crisis of credibility.

The bureaucracy, too, exemplifies this inversion. On paper, the great instrument of modern governance. In practice, an adjunct of society.  Its rigidity paradoxically produces fluidity. So many exist rules that the only way forward is through discretion, which comes at a price. Because nothing is ever automatic, everything must be re-secured, producing an air of perpetual contingency and distrust.

It is as if the medicine has been infected by the disease. Every mechanism deployed to regulate society has become its instrument.

Alongside this erosion, politics itself has become deeply personalised. Policy initiatives are framed not as systemic reforms but as ‘gifts’: a gas cylinder, a loan waiver, a tap connection, new trains, welfare schemes. These are presented as the benevolence of leaders, not entitlements of citizenship. Even in a local sense, the nephew of an ex-corporator can wield enough clout so as to make immune to any law.

At independence, we placed a sophisticated political framework over an entrenched social order. In the early decades, the post-Independence elite held sway over politics, bureaucracy, media, and culture. Progressive ideals like secularism, equality, and institutional respect were not universally practised or even believed in, but they set the default terms of public respectability. Views that ran counter to them were delegitimised and stayed largely private or local. 

 

As democracy became more representative and electoral competition intensified, that monopoly over the national narrative began to crack. The instincts of the broader social base—rooted in social order- caste, religion, and language—moved from the margins to the centre. These identities were not new, but they now entered public life in their own voice, unvarnished and unapologetic. Hypocrisies were abandoned as were standards.

 

Digital technologies took this further. By turning every individual into a broadcaster, social media removed the last gatekeepers. It rewarded the primal over the measured, and in doing so, legitimised it. What was once whispered in coded terms is now shouted aloud—often to applause—because people discover that their views however extreme they might be are not only shared but celebrated.

 

Beyond the structural issues, there seem to be deeper cultural mechanisms at work.

 

We excel at inherited order- caste, family tradition- where relationships are defined by birth and position. Here our responsibility is to follow order which we do rather well.

But we struggle with constructed order-traffic rules, queues, contracts- where legitimacy comes from impersonal agreement rather than inherited hierarchy.

 

When we are asked to stand in a line or negotiate a roundabout, our instinct is not to comply to subvert. Not because we are lawless, but because we don’t recognise impersonal order as legitimate. We understand reciprocity, not rules. We need hierarchy to make sense of the world and neither traffic nor queues represent hierarchy that we understand. 

 

Our relationship with rules also follows a distinct pattern. Instead of seeing them as guidelines to be respected, we often see them as a challenge to be overcome. They are an affront to our individuality, a kind of forced belonging to a system that otherwise does not see us. So we sidestep the rules, break them casually, or, if we have the power, rig the system itself. 

 

And we fiercely protect the status that comes along with hierarchy, sometimes in the most absurd ways. At many airports in the country, there is a board put up which outlines 32 kinds of dignitaries (what a delicious word) who are exempt from pre-embarkation processes, frisking in other words. Although it has changed now, in an earlier version, among the categories, one read 'Governors of states', within brackets - not Lt Governors. We would all be familiar with the massive billboards near toll booths that again outline those who are exempt from paying.

 

Strength, in such a culture, is often confused with the ability to get away with more. Whether it’s on the road, where the powerful can run over people without consequence, or on the international cricket stage, where the BCCI throws its weight around, strength becomes brutish entitlement. 

 

Strength confused with impunity explains much about contemporary India. The real task — using strength to dismantle the crumbling structures of the past — is often ignored.

 

We live by a paradox that looks like a contradiction but is in fact part of a design. We are ritually collectivist and individually anarchic. 

 

Collectivism anchors us, anarchy frees us. Ritual order reassures us that the social order is intact, while everyday disorder gives us a sense of autonomy. The two together enable a world where formal institutions can remain weak, because society supplies both the discipline and the escape. 

 

This is why much of Indian modernity feels reactive: it is less a product of vision and more an accommodation of what the world sends our way. We practice a kind of inflation-adjusted change: we accept that change is inevitable but treat it like rising prices — something to manage, absorb, and keep pace with, rather than to shape. By itself, society rarely seeks change; it is a culture waiting to be acted upon rather than acting. Change is imagined as a natural process arising elsewhere, which is then metabolised per our comfort.

 

Consider the Mandal Commission. At one level, it was perhaps the strongest action taken to reorder social hierarchy since independence. And it did change things significantly — it brought new groups into public life, redistributed opportunity, altered the texture of politics. But even Mandal, over time, was absorbed into the existing order. Its energy dissipated into the competitive arithmetic of electoral politics. The players changed, but the game remained the same. Stronger castes strive to muscle their way in to the list, making reservations an extension of the very system it was trying to resist. Mandal redistributed the access to the existing order without changing the order itself. The cast changed, the script remained the same.

 

Which is what makes society the invisible behemoth here. More powerful than religion, politics, or economics, it sets the emotional defaults, defines the terms of legitimacy, and decides what change is allowed to mean. Even religion, for all its fervour, tends to act more as a cheerleader than a regulator of society. It lends itself easily to social or political ends, deployed in defence of whatever the societal imperative of the moment might be.

 

And here lies the great tension at the heart of modern India. The political opportunity lies in using society exactly as it is. Power comes from mobilising existing identities, from deepening reciprocities, from reinforcing hierarchy rather than dismantling it. To win politically is to lean into society’s instinctive design.

But the development opportunity calls for the opposite. It demands that we overhaul these very instincts- make rules impersonal, make contracts reliable, make rights universal, make outcomes predictable. It calls for institutions that are stronger than relationships, and for a vision of equality that runs deeper than hierarchy.

This is why politics and development so often part ways. The very logic that delivers political success undermines developmental progress. Every time politics bends institutions to social logic, society wins—but the promise of systemic change recedes. And every time development is attempted, it risks colliding with society’s invisible boundaries.

 

The dilemma, of course, is that the very social structures that restrict us also provide value. What is oppressive is often also enabling. The mother-in-law may be the ogre in the domestic imagination, but she is also the one who looks after the child so that her bahu can go to work. The joint family constrains freedom, but it also spreads risk, shares resources, and gives the individual a buffer against the unpredictability of life. Caste discriminates, but it also delivers community and belonging.

This is what makes change in India so elusive. To dismantle a structure is not simply to remove a restriction; it is also to take away a support. And because every structure has this double face—both stifling and sustaining—society clings to it. Reform is never simply reform; it always feels like loss.

This paradox has consequences, not only for society but for the economy. For a while, we have been able to grow in spite of ourselves—riding on demographics, on cheap labour, on entrepreneurial energy that leaps over obstacles rather than clears them. But progress without change extracts a price.

When institutions are weak and everything is negotiable, investment becomes riskier, contracts less reliable, outcomes less predictable. It is no accident that Indian markets remain shallow; trust is scarce. Our bureaucracy, by keeping everything contingent, ensures that even economic certainty is provisional—what is cleared today might be blocked tomorrow, and only those who know how to navigate the maze can hope to succeed.

Caste and community still shape access to opportunity. Land disputes drag on for decades, and the rule of law bends to power. This creates friction everywhere. A factory takes years to build, an idea takes years to scale, and only those with the right social or political capital can move quickly. Growth happens, but it remains uneven—spectacular in some sectors, missing in others.

We are trapped between the sediment and flow. On some levels, India is unstoppable — a restless, surging flow. On others, it is immovable — weighed down by sediment that has been building for centuries. The sediment is an accumulation of habits, hierarchies, workarounds, and unwritten codes. It slows the flow, shapes its course, and ensures that movement happens without too much displacement.

 

One could argue that this is a half glass full or empty kind of a question. Do we focus on the positive which is undeniable or on the negative which is inescapable? India has definitely changed for the better in so many ways. We are a large, complex nation. Are we being too hard on ourselves?  Should we be more patient, more forgiving?

 

It isn’t as simple as that for there isn’t an equivalence between the two. The positive resides at the surface, the negative is structural. India has cracked the algorithm for shielding itself and its society from the forces of transformation. 

 

Politics, which was meant to transform society, has instead been irrevocably transformed by it.

 

You cannot make the developmental omelette without breaking the societal egg. But in India, we are reluctant to do so. Development is imagined as a meal that can be cooked while leaving the egg intact — the shell preserved, the hierarchy unbroken. This unwillingness to disturb the underlying structure explains why so many grand efforts end up as symbolic gestures rather than real shifts.

 

The problem is that India now faces a world moving at technological speed, while we still change at cultural speed. We will modernise, but subversively, mincing our steps as we zigzag ahead, much like autorickshaw in a crowded bazaar. 

 

The journey to being a developed country is not about roads, airports and malls. It is about the soft infrastructure of development. About an air of certainty and trust. In people, in institutions, in professions. In knowing that the police will act regardless of who is involved. In Knowing that the courts will decide impartially and quickly. That people will not drive on the wrong side of the road. That a new road will last 18 years, the average in developed countries. That one will not need a reference from someone important to get school admission. That doctors will not prescribe tests that are not needed. That the media will not concoct stories. That women will be safe being who they are. That access to healthcare and education will be widespread and of good quality. That breathing will not involve an act of courage.

 

When systems take themselves seriously, people follow. The metro works flawlessly. Airport toilets remain clean because the system expects and delivers cleanliness. Immigration lines are orderly because the system believes in order. People rise to the level of order they experience. Blaming citizens for institutional failures misses this fundamental point.

 

Can this happen? Do we see viable pathways to this change?.

 

There are a few possibilities that exist, as far as I can tell.

 

One option is clear. That we are forced into change. Perhaps by technology, which seems the likeliest candidate. Can AI create a system that overrides social mechanisms and create order? Can blockchain create trust of a new kind? 

 

It must be said that fundamental change in India has the best chance when it is imposed. Liberalisation is a great example.

 

Technology has the advantage of working invisibly. It bypasses cultural barriers. A mobile phone makes us individuals not through its ideology but through what its use enables. A touchscreen gives us a sense of personal agency by its form- it responds to every small whisper of a command. Can Ai bring about transformational change without being thwarted or tamed by society? 

 

However, it would be unwise to underestimate the social response. The same technology that empowers women has also created the world’s most powerful tool of social control- WhatsApp. Social media has helped entrenched regressive ideas more than any previous technology.

 

And AI too could well have the opposite effect- by deepening divides and creating a new set of haves and have-nots. 

 

The other possible arc of transformation is that the current political dispensation finds a way to overcome its need for revenge, and the othering of minorities searches for a truly Indian mode of thought. One that seeks to find answers in complexity, that does not think of development as a zero-sum game. One that offers an alternative to the dominant Western modes of development which are far from being perfect. One that distils the philosophical spirit of the past for use in the present rather than attempt a return to it

 

Again, this is a tenuous hope, with little evidence of it materialising into reality. If anything, we are moving in the opposite direction, by trying to create a closed version of thinking, opposed to the West on the surface while mimicking its structure. The famed Indian ability to accommodate differences is facing a challenge as we set out to literalise religion and harden boundaries.

 

Or alternatively the pot boils over. The frustration of citizens translates into a political movement that forces change. After all, democracy has been the instrument of change in so many countries. It is not fanciful to believe that the same could happen here. In a democracy, this is the most viable path for change if that what its citizens seek. 

 

But is that likely? We can have a different regime running things, but there is no promise of fundamental change. There are no political players that are invested in this kind of transformation. Everyone is playing within the implicit rules of the game. Without an alternative political imagination, change of this kind doesn’t look possible. And today, the system doesn’t seem to provide adequate incentive for the same. The process of winning todays’ elections almost guarantees that fundamental change is off the table. 

 

It is worth remembering that there are two arcs along which change can occur. 

 

The ideological arc measures outcomes — poverty reduction, gender equality, Hindu pride, minority rights. The systemic arc measures processes -- administrative freedom, insulation from consequences if one upholds the rules, separation of power from personal interest. The tragedy is that while politics obsesses about the ideological arc, the real revolution is needed in the systemic one. Unless processes themselves are reimagined and reinforced, ideological promises, however grand, collapse into rhetoric. And that is where no political formation in India today has either any vision or any incentive to move towards.

 

The responsibility shifts to the people to make this happen. To use the democratic system to demand change. Is that in the offing? Perhaps not, but one can never underestimate how quickly grassroots movements crystallise and become transformative.

 

Regardless of how the future pans out , India will not collapse. That is its superpower, It will always find its way. There is a resident wisdom at work, that is deep, even profound. But it will not transform dramatically either -- not in the way we imagine a developed nation rising. We will continue to drift forwards, between the banks of improvement and improvisation, slowly bettering our lot while getting more frustrated as our desires outpace our appetite for change.

 

As I move towards closing out this talk, I am reminded of Nietschze’s invoking of India as a mythical destination steeped in wisdom” will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering Westward, hoped to reach to reach an India- but that it was our fate to be wrecked against infinity?”

 

Here in the real, non-metaphorical India, are we looking elsewhere when we should be looking within? Perhaps, there is an elusive wisdom that India represents- one that a single lifetime is insufficient to fully grasp. 

 

Perhaps a hundred years from now, the countries that are the meteors today may have burned out- consumed in the slipstream of their own velocity. We already see Trumpian America attempting to scrawl over history in block letters with crayons. The developed world is riven by divisions that have emerged in part as a response to their development. 

 

In contrast, India’s insight might well be that while progress might move at the speed of technology, sustainable change will follow the contours of geology. Societies change far more slowly than technology or GDP numbers. 

 

Tomorrow’s India may still be moving ahead- in its own messy, conflicted way. Wobbly, but still there. Still charting its own course. Still haggling with the future.

 

Perhaps that’s the real truth about Brand India.

Not Incredible India, but Inevitable India