India's inexorable rise on the world stage is a distinct reality. It is a moment that ought to be acknowledged and celebrated in full measure. But it is also a moment to ask: What are the ideals to which India is consecrated? Has it maintained those ideals? But these questions baffle us more than they move us. Our first response is a platitude: India is a nation committed to the dignity of every human being, where poverty will be a thing of the past, democracy a vibrant force, the laws a beacon of justice, and diversity to be cherished rather than merely tolerated.

Does diversity mean a proliferation of collected narcissisms or the freedom to follow one's own path?

Our realities often fall short of these ideals. Despite growth, economic empowerment for all remains a distant dream; the institutional framework of our democracy is under great stress. Nevertheless, our ideals, like distant stars, guide us. But we are unsure what each of these ideals mean. The constitutive ambiguities that mark these ideals seem to pull us in so many different directions.

Do we claim our dignity by a raw and competitive assertion of power, or do we find possibilities of reciprocally acknowledging each other? Does the energy of our democracy only serve to disguise its significant deficits? Is representative government the same as responsive government? How do we begin to conceptualise the idea of the rule of law when we think of so many criminals wielding the reins of power? Does diversity mean a proliferation of many collective narcissisms or the freedom of each individual to make what they can and will of themselves? Our economic dynamism will have some impact on poverty, but how will we negotiate the immense challenge of economic transformation that lies before us? If we are a force for world peace, do we want to buy into a doctrine of great power exceptionalism, concerned principally with its own power?

The basic questions that confront any society are always difficult and confusing.

Can each citizen stand for anything more than themselves? Can the idea of India stand for anything more?

Yet instead of energising the debate, generating new governing ideas or lines of contention, the challenges posed by these questions are generating an almost anaemic response. To be sure, we daily experience a chaos of names, labels, programmes, assertions. Many parties and movements seem to like the banner of conflicting ideals, and some even have worthy causes attached to them. But more often than not, the public thinks all that is going on under the flag of ideals is a venal battle of conflicting interests; the truth of this perception is less consequential than the fact that this sentiment has wide currency. Some cause may energise this or that group for sporadic action, but none is able to mobilise or sustain our moral energies.

There are complex reasons for this state of affairs: the challenges we face are too complex to be captured under simple slogans, the polity we have developed is now too contentious and diverse to lend itself to easy ideological coherence. There is something liberating about this cacophony. It has punctured the false or manufactured consensus that characterised politics in the past, and it potentially opens up the space for pragmatic experimentation. But as the nation's power grows, there is also a sense of foreboding. Is the image that the nation has of itself getting blurred? For instance, for a nation defined by its commitment to freedom, is too much free expression being abridged? In the mirror of what ideals do we see our reflection?

Modern India has always had a great sense of entitlement about its place in world affairs, though that entitlement was not always matched by power or performance. The sense of entitlement has been sustained by variety of factors: by its size, by the depth of its antiquity, and by the sheer bewildering inventiveness of its culture. But the fundamental tryst with destiny that Nehru spoke of was premised on two things. That India's sense of entitlement will depend on the power of its example, not its power. An ancient civilisation would have to convert itself into a grand and unprecedented experiment in human affairs. The cornerstone of that ambition was to create a politics defined by reciprocity, so that millions of citizens, otherwise divided, could create a common public. The commonness of this public was not premised on shared attributes or benchmarks of loyalty, it was something deeper. Its commonness would come from an ability to address each other as citizens.

To some extent, that pledge has been redeemed: India's democratic record remains a great repository of hope. It has, in its own way unleashed a range of emancipatory energies. But as India's economy gains momentum, the health of its political experiment is not something that can be taken for granted. At the moment, there is no imminent crescendo to knock India off its rails. There is a series of local conflicts, ranging from Naxal violence to caste agitations, that are still quite fragmented. But these are early warning signs of the profound alienation Indian politics can still produce. A polity where the rich secede and the poor are left resentful will invite trouble.

But in some respects, the political crisis India may face is more subtle and corrosive. The terms in which politics is being conducted put the very idea of citizenship under threat. At one level, politics has descended into a series of particularisms. The raison d'etre of politics is primarily not to respond to fundamental issues impinging upon common life, but to organise power in such a manner that the state's resources and privileges can be channelled in the direction of particular groups or individuals to protect their exclusive interests. There is simply no common good, only a myriad of identities, interests and perspectives. Talk of common good is simply a shield to obscure their recognition. The danger for politics is that the de facto reality of politics has now also become the dominant intellectual tendency of our time. Can the promise of republican politics survive the corrosion of the idea of reciprocity?

India inhabits two different worlds. There is the private world, which absorbs so much of our intellectual energies and has arguably generated so much of the dynamism that has propelled India to its current state. On the other hand, there is the public world which we cynically decry or patiently endure. If we turn our attention to the public sphere, it is largely to fill it with our private concerns or those of our particular groups. The idea that the public sphere is merely instrumental to private purpose, or that private energy alone will be the source of redemption is an illusion.

The present crisis of Indian politics is, at its base, a crisis of national purpose. The drift in policy we are experiencing can be traced to many sources: an intractable political economy, bureaucratic lethargy, complicated power equations. But when all is said and done, these explanations are themselves symptoms rather than causes. These obstacles gain strength precisely because of the fact that there is very little shared understanding of the national stakes. Talk of national purpose justifiably evokes scepticism. We are an age that prides itself on jettisoning the blinkered piety of the past. Too many phony ideologues have hijacked the discourse of national purpose to their own ends, and platitudes about national purpose are more likely to provoke scepticism than excite us into action. Nevertheless, without a minimal awareness of what sort of shared future we seek, without giving the idea of India some vivid content, it is difficult to see why anyone should be moved by collective policy failures.

The other foundation of India's sense of entitlement was this. What set our national movement apart from so many others was its hope that India would be the site of an alternative universality. Its conduct and politics would be marked, not just by nationalism, but a consciousness of the higher values to which nations ought to be subordinate. In retrospect, it is astonishing the degree to which almost every nationalist leader of note harboured that ambition. These values were not just to be a check on the dangers of collective narcissism; they would give the idea of India certain legitimacy.

Many of these high ideals floundered for a variety of reasons: their sheer impracticality, the triumph of political necessity, and the occasional lack of courage to live up to them. But as India rises as a great power, the question will beckon it again. How is India going to be different from great powers of the past? Power is necessary in world affairs. But will India, like the great powers around us, escape the temptation to convert a means into an end? Will it unwittingly abet the self-fulfilling logic of power that has often made the world a dangerous place? Will it be able to create new benchmarks for right conduct in international affairs, whether it comes to nuclear weapons or dealing with the global commons? But fundamentally, the legitimacy and vibrancy of the Indian project will turn on two questions. Can each citizen stand for anything more than themselves? And can the idea of India stand for anything more than India? These are two foundational questions we are losing the capacity to even pose.