CARTOGRAPHY OF INDIA'S FUTURE

N his one-paragraph fable ‘On Exactitude in Science’, Jorge Luis Borges imagines an empire whose cartographers become so obsessed with accuracy that they produce a map as large as the empire itself.

- C P SURENDRAN

N his one-paragraph fable ‘On Exactitude in Science’, Jorge Luis Borges imagines an empire whose cartographers become so obsessed with accuracy that they produce a map as large as the empire itself. It matches the territory point for point. The result is a masterpiece that nobody can use. Borges’s point is simple: every map leaves something out. When a map claims to represent everything, it stops helping us understand where we are.

In India, we now live with two such maps. One is drawn by the cartographer of dreams, Narendra Modi. The other is sketched by Rahul Gandhi, who sees in the same dreams the makings of a nightmare. These maps are laid over the same territory, and yet they do not line up. The result is a peculiar double vision: we inhabit two countries at once and are at home in neither.

Modi’s map is bright with ambition, infrastructure and civilisational purpose. He claims to have lifted India from an era of drift into an era of execution. Roads, bridges, expressways, factories, digital payments and welfare schemes all form part of a narrative in which “stability and development at an unprecedented speed and scale” have replaced the instability and “misgovernance” of earlier regimes.