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Bibek Debroy Biography

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“India’s success in building a modern state that defied predictions of its demise derived from its thorough insistence on institutionalizing what was Mahatma Gandhi’s greatest bequest to the freedom movement: the construction of a new Indian nation, not by suppressing its many particularities but by incorporating them into a new composite identity that preserved in “marble-cake” fashion all its constituent diversities across ethnic, religious, and racial lines. These diversities, far from being obliterated, acquired salience depending on context but, being enmeshed and free-flowing, they erased the boundaries between the insular and national identities, congealing the latter even as they preserved the former. The modern Indian polity, therefore, emerged not as a nation-state since, given its myriad diversities, it could not be so—but rather as a nations-state. Under the rubric of “unity in diversity,” its different ethnic, religious, and racial groups combined to create a novel, multilayered political identity. However confusing that reality may be to the outside world, it is authentically and indisputably Indian.”

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Book:Getting India Back on Track: An Action Agenda for Reform
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“India’s post-independence leadership eschewed parochial nationalism in favor of civic nationalism where the rights and privileges of being Indian were conceived as arising not from some pre-existent modes of belonging—religion, race, or ethnicity—but instead from participation in a collective political endeavor.”

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Book:Getting India Back on Track: An Action Agenda for Reform
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“The affirmation that Indian democracy would be founded entirely on a shared citizenship centered on upholding liberal principles and participatory institutions rather than religion, race, or ethnicity ensured that the many particularities that might have otherwise divided India were in one fell swoop deprived of any fundamental political meaning. This did not imply that the particularities themselves ceased to exist or that they ceased to provoke contention. Rather, they simply ceased to be privileged attributes that endowed their possessors with either greater rights or natural claims on power.”

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Book:Getting India Back on Track: An Action Agenda for Reform
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“There is a being with a thousand heads, a thousand eyes and a thousand feet. He surrounds the earth from all directions, he surrounds the universe from all directions, and yet there is more of him that is left over. This being is divided into four parts. Three of these parts exist in lofty places and the fourth part is manifested on earth. This fourth part embraces the four directions on earth. All beings who have been born and all beings who will be born are manifestations of this being. Three parts of the being are immortal and exist in heaven, and the fourth part sustains all objects on earth. This being is the lord of immortality and of food grains. He is supreme; he is the one who created the earth.”

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Book:Sama Veda
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