Sometimes it seems the Berlin Wall did not fall; it simply vanished without a trace. Be as it may, to fill the conceptual emptiness at the end of the cold war Samuel Huntington has proposed 'the clash of civilizations', more precisely, the battle of religions at local levels, as a paradigm for much of the contemporary world. Currently there is no dearth of evidence of such warfare around the world including, of course, India.

A religion is known to evolve through revelation, practice, experience, and interpretation; it cannot remain static in a changing world - it has its own dynamics. We learn on the authority of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan that the Rig Veda is a collection of precious hymns that the Aryans had brought with them to India from their earlier homeland, and that the Atharva Veda was composed centuries later on the soil of India. A comparison of the two Vedas, we understand, reveals an unmistakable degree of fusion of Aryan and other especially Harappan and Dravidian faiths, beliefs, cultures and customs. Then came the Upanisads, the epics, sutras, and darsanas. Hinduism has grown out of a rich accumulation of knowledge. In their own ways, so have Christianity, and presumably every other religion including, of course, Islam. The first condition that a seeker of truth must satisfy, Sankara says, is a knowledge of the distinction between the eternal and the non-eternal. We are here led by the belief that the conflicts that have surfaced at the moment among religious groups around the world, emphasized by Huntington, are essentially transitory: on this, history is on our side Today India is in a phase of heightened tension among ethnic and religious communities. The country had passed through such tests before with a good measure of success. But now global interconnections leave little room for internal dialectics to play out their parts. The situation demands deep introspection and prompt response. The Constitution of India upholds the ideal of a secular democracy with full employment of workers, and in letter and spirit it provides, we shall see, certain means so as to move the nation in that direction. We have to recognize those resourceful elements and utilize them. To be sure, no system disappears until its full potentials are realized; but it can hasten its own demise by misuse of opportunity or simply by default.

The main objective of this treatise is to identify the major issues in the polity, economy and society of India, and to find a way to reach that stated goal of secular democracy with development. Of course, such an endeavour is not unprecedented. But there are reasons to believe that the present one is fairly distinct. For it looks at the polity, economy and society in a comprehensive framework, akin to what is known in economics as general equilibrium as opposed to partial equilibrium. And it begins at the beginning, namely, with the Harappan civilization, and traces the time-line all the way up to date, with a view to sort the principal forces apart from the transitory ones. After all, the theory of path dependence says: the initial conditions matter. Or, as our grandmothers put it: morning shows the day. Oh, what a morning it was when the Aryans arrived here! Or, in the words of Partha Dasgupta: 'the past is present in the future'.

This essay is motivated by the belief that India needs a new secular democratic inspiration at political as well as social levels.

The inspiration would miss its identity if it restricts itself mostly to politics as means or ends, and underplays at any time its commitment to the pursuit of the ideal society. One gets the impression that broader social dimensions have often been either ignored by the politicians or treated as being passively concomitant with the legal landscape. Let's have political 'democracy' first, the 'social' democracy will follow as a result -this seems to be the presumption of politics in the land. It may turn out to be, as Rabindranath remarked in a different occasion, 'like creating a superstructure, while sapping the foundation'. If so, it is a big mistake at best, or an instance of opportunism on the part of vested interests at worst. Evidently the national leaders of India have overestimated and over-emphasized the polity at the cost of society. It is time that the balance is maintained. The issue has acquired urgency as meanwhile some forces are at work to take the society in the wrong direction.

In a country there are people of different faiths, beliefs, customs, traditions and aspirations. How to build a nation with due respect to all these diversities is the basic question of this treatise. More specifically we have India in our mind. We are about to undertake a journey through five thousand years of India's history, intricate issues of this young nation and a complex global atmosphere all within a few pages. It is daunting, if nothing else. All this will be sifted necessarily through this author's preconceived paradigm. It is therefore fair that at the beginning some of the basic premises are laid out; it would also help clarity. In this context four of them seem to be noteworthy. To begin with, is geography the destiny? That is, how far are human beings constrained by the given physical environment? Second, what determines the relationship among the members of a society? Especially relevant is the possible scenario where several communities form themselves within a society and operate as self-sustained discrete entities in splendid isolation of each other with their own momentum. Third, in case a nation is conceptualized in terms of three parts, namely, society, economy and polity, is there any principle that shapes their proportions? What is the optimal composition of each? Fourth, can we find any one critical factor that bears upon the course of the society, economy and polity over time? Keeping in view the purpose, only brief answer will be given. In all it will provide an outline of the conceptual framework with which the journey will be conducted. Should one be interested only in the final result of the study one may skip this introductory exercise and proceed straight to the following chapters. However, let it be said that a better appreciation may be gained by having an acquaintance with the underlying cardinal premises of this essay as narrated below.

Human beings have always been duly overwhelmed by the majesty and might of nature. Almost every ancient religious literature begins with a description of creation of the universe. Nature is seen as just, well-ordered and of course "natural. Nature has deep influence on human thoughts. The early stirrings of civilization took place ten thousand years ago with the invention of agriculture in the hills of northern Iraq where wild wheat and barley were abundant as nature's gift. In course of time ancient civilizations arose in the river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus, and the Yellow. They were based on fairly intensive cultivation with annual cropping nourished by irrigation. The regions in the north and in the south of these abodes of agrarian society had different ecological conditions, not favourable to intensive farming. They became nomadic pastoralists, the north herding cattle and horses in grasslands, the south rearing sheep and goats in the semi-desert. These pastoralists in the north and in the south, as much as the settled agricultural civilizations upon which they preyed, were an essential part of the dynamics that has created the modern world.

The material base provides the means of living and informs the philosophy. A comparison between ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia is illustrative. The rich Nile valley lies isolated and protected between empty deserts on either side. Egypt derives its prosperity from annual inundation of the Nile, which never fails to rise even if floods differ greatly in effectiveness. By contrast Mesopotamia lacks clear boundary and is periodically looted by the mountaineers on its east or the nomads on its west. For much of its grazing it depends on rainfall and on the banks of its river Tigris which is most unaccountable, turbulent and dangerous.

Both societies, Egypt and Mesopotamia, reflect the natural rhythms of the seasons in their festivals. But whereas in Mesopotamia they are imbued with a sense of anxiety, with the solemnities moving from deep gloom to exultation, in Egypt they merely reaffirm that all is well with the world. The Egyptians, ever-optimist as they are, have a static view of the universe, believing that the cosmic order has been established firmly at its creation.