Complex look at an emerging giant in Asia

For three years in the late 1990s, I reported from India and traveled to most parts of an intriguing country that seems to hold a surprise around every corner. In his well-informed and well-crafted portrait of India, Patrick French takes readers to places to I never ventured and, in some cases, never imagined going. A skilled interviewer who writes with a descriptive flair, French introduces people on the unseen margins of society and searches out others who, though once in the media spotlight, have faded from public attention.

“Much current thinking about India and China is the product of old knowledge and expectation,” French observes, accurately, before updating and fleshing out what most Westerners think they know about one of the two countries that will certainly take a lead in the Asian century looming on the horizon.

“India: A Portrait” is divided into three sections with titles in Hindi and English: Rashra-Nation, Lakshmi-Wealth and Samaj-Society. The first section on the country’s democratic government and politics cites popular sources such as instructive wall charts from its early decades and recent chain e-mails, but also digitized transcripts of debates in the assembly that wrote the 1950 constitution, the equivalent of the Federalist Papers.

French makes his most valuable contribution on India’s politics by calculating just how many parliamentarians have family ties to past officeholders. Readers likely know of the Congress Party dynasty that has governed independent India most of its years: Jawaharlal Nehru; his daughter, Indira Gandhi; her son Rajiv Gandhi; and now, indirectly, Rajiv’s Italian-born widow, Sonia Gandhi.

That pattern has been replicated in the 545-member lower house of Parliament, where French finds family ties helped into office almost 40 percent of Congress Party members and 20 percent from the main opposition, a Hindu nationalist party. Nearly 70 percent of women lawmakers have hereditary connections. French warns a directly elected chamber whose Hindi name translates as “a house of the people” could become “a house of dynasty.”

He describes Indian elections as “a self-balancing ecosystem,” without offering a theory about how the world’s largest democracy achieves that balance, despite social divisions of caste, religion, language, and ethnicity. An Indian professor I once interviewed cited the multiplicity of castes, none big enough to win elections on its own, a limitation that forces coalition-building.